From Rann to Earth and Back Again

 

The thing about Adam Strange was that he wanted to live on the planet Rann with his wife, but would be forced to regularly return to Earth. While on Earth, he would get zapped by a teleportation beam called the Zeta Ray. That would bring him to Rann. But when the Zeta radiation wore off, he would be zapped back to Earth. 

I always wondered why he didn't just get to Rann by another method--he lives in a Comic Book Universe where this is a real possibility--and then be able to just stay there permanently.

That's because I never happened to have read Mystery in Space #75 (May 1962), in which writer Gardner Fox and artist Carmine Infantino explain just why this is. 

In the previous issue, Adam had returned to Rann via a teleport machine he'd captured from invading aliens. Now he can stay as long as he want.

But space pirate Kanjar Ro has escaped from the planet on which the Justice League had imprisoned him. (Which was apparently done without any judicial process, but there you go.) He wants revenge on the JLA. His plan is to find a planet with three suns that has a lighter gravity than his home planet. Then he can figure out a method to gain Superman-like powers. Remember that the Man of Steel gets his powers from our yellow sun plus Earth's lower gravity when compared to Krypton. By replicating this on a planet with three suns, Kanjar will have three times Superman's power. Comic Book Science at its best!

The action now jumps back to Rann, where Adam and his wife Alanna enounter a barbarian tribe that now has a bell-like weapon that allows them to gain physical control over others. Adam and Alanna have a narrow escape, then wear earplugs to allow them to infiltrate the barbarian camp by mingling with prisoners. Here they discover that Kanjar Ro has set up camp. He has a Gamma Gong that he intends to use to control the entire planet AND he's having those he has enslaved build the devise necessary to bombard him with solar radiation from the three suns, giving him Superman Powers x 3.

Gardner Fox was a great writer and I largely enjoy this story, but he tended to occasionally over-write and over-explain. This happens here, slowing the story and obscuring Infantino's magnificent art with too many word balloons and boxes of expository narration. 

In fact, I'm not going to try to explain the rest of the story in detail, because that would bog down this blog post even more than it probably already is. Suffice to say that stopping Kanjar Ro involves stealing the bad guy's Cosmic Ship, sailing to Earth as a clue for the JLA, taking a Zeta Beam back to Rann and eventually confronting Kanjar with the Justice League as allies. It's actually a cool plot, following sound Comic Book Logic from start to finish. Adam come up with legitimate clever ideas for countering the villain throughout the tale. It just needs an excessive amount of exposition to get there. 

By now, though, Kanjar has completed his solar radiation bath and is easily kicking JLA butt. But Adam deduces that metal from Kanjar's home planet would work on him the way Kryptonite works on Superman. This allows him to save the day.

But Adam got zapped by Kanjar Ro before the battle ended. This leaves him with a perculiar condition--if he stays on Rann for more than short visits, he'll get sick. So the short Zeta Beam visits are now his only option.

Despite my criticisms of the story, it really is a fun Silver-Age romp. And I'm happy to learn that what I always thought was a plot hole was actually explained. You see? The Silver Age all made sense! It did! It really did!

Next week, we'll jump back in time to land on the beaches of Normandy with a particular Allied soldier on D-Day. Or try to land, anyways.