The Crimson Circuit is Complete (Tom Strong #3)

My god, Todd Klein must have spent so much time on this lettering. - cover art by Chris Sprouse, Al Gordon, and Tad Ehrilich

Aztec and Mayan imagery has been a symbol of hidden ancient knowledge in science fiction since the release of Chariots of the Gods, if not longer. I wonder if that will fade the further we get from the much hyped Mayan Apocalypse of 2012 (which in case you hadn't realized, never came). I wonder if the long term association with the History Channel's Ancient Aliens will one day transform the white guy truth seekers who appropriated that imagery, into symbols of early twenty first century kitsch. I suppose Action Bronson turning that show into MST3K material is a start.

Supposedly an ancient depiction of a spaceship's cockpit. Looks uncomfortable as hell to me.

There was a time I'd have identified myself with that sort of behavior. I've been a UFO buff since I was a kid so I totally went through a Von Däniken phase but I found the archaeological evidence a bit lacking and got over it pretty fast. Plus, thinking that aliens built the pyramids made it all feel like less of an achievement and as a human being myself I wanted to take part in the victorious afterglow. Humans are horrible for a million different reasons but it's pretty cool that we built the pyramids, right? Let us have something!

Even though I only believed in ancient alien visitations for a brief period of time the imagery of lost Mesoamerican technology is something I have been immersed in with a relative amount of consistency. Just trying to read about UFOs casually you can't avoid the subject coming up. As a science fiction fan I kept noticing this imagery showing up in the movies, books, and even the comics I'd been reading. Jack Kirby did it best in The Eternals which I would have read the summer of my seventeenth year after having bought the omnibus with graduation money. When the old gods returned they were titanic, like you'd expect Kirby monsters to be. Maybe even more than that.

The "Aztech" Empire in Tom Strong handles that in a different way. They come from an alternate universe where their knowledge was never lost. Instead, they conquered America, Europe, and then the rest of the world. They turned their Earth into an advanced civilization then traveled sideways, conquering every Earth they encountered throughout the multiverse. They eventually attack Millenium City where they appear in golden ziggurats. When Tom Strong is captured and meets the old gods they turn out to be a computer program.

It's far less grand than Kirby's Celestials marching across the Earth but I guess it's unfair to compare the two. That said, the Modular Man's reformation in the previous issue also felt like a bigger deal. The Aztechs and Quetzalcoatl-3 just amount to another villain of the month.

The major setpiece of this issue is a series of pages that occur during Tom Strong's escape. They're structured similarly to the Gasoline Alley Sundays where the page depicts a single setting with the characters appearing in different positions throughout that setting. The pages succeed to varying degrees. The best page features Tom Strong stealing some sort of vehicle from his captors and moves through the space with a Kirby like momentum. The other pages are a bit more bland and I can't help but think that employing an obvious grid like Gasoline Alley's Frank King would have done a better job of guiding the reader's eye.

Art by Chris Sprouse, Al Gordon, Tad Ehrlich, and Todd Klein

The other stylistic tic that I noticed in this issue is the inner monologue of Tom Strong spread across the issue in red caption boxes. I can't think of any other issue using a first person narration like this one. It's weird seeing so much text in this comic because Alan Moore's writing was so much more lean during this era as opposed to the wordy but occasionally overwrought passages of his runs on Miracleman and Swamp Thing. That prose mixed with Tesla talking about her father serve to introduce the idea that as Tom Strong enters his hundredth year, his mortality may become more apparent. It's an interesting message to send to the reader but by hiding it in such a forgettable issue it's made into little more than a pleasing piece of furniture in an otherwise dull waiting room.

***

The third issue of Tom Strong is also the first one with a letters column and it contains this intriguing letter:

I was aware of the idea that Tom Strong's mother Susan could be attracted to Tomas, the sailor that died while bringing her and her husband to Attabar Teru. That's mainly because of how that factors into the alternate reality driven "Tom Stone" stories that appear in later issues. However, I didn't read that into their brief interactions in the actual first issue. Susan is depicted as broken up about the death of Tomas and Sinclair coldly notes that she had been fond of him. That doesn't really translate into sexual attraction to me because, well, I have plenty of people who I like without wanting to fuck them. Perhaps there are other social cues that I'm not picking up on here because this idea is echoed in a few letters in future issues.

Now if Tom Strong can be read as a mixed race character I still don't think that makes the questions surrounding noble savages and magical black people from his origin story go away, particularly because he passes as white. His daughter Tesla on the other hand is actually of mixed race. Her representation throughout the series is certainly one of it's finer points. She is one of the most well defined members of the cast and probably my favorite, especially when she's griping about her parents. As a kid I identified with her and I didn't find a lot of depictions of women in comics I could relate to back then.

Tom Strong #3 (August 1999) was written by Alan Moore with art by Chris Sprouse, Al Gordon, and Tad Ehrlich as well as lettering by Todd Klein

Strongmen of America - Revisiting Tom Strong 

More on race in Tom Strong: 
Tom Strong #1 and race in pulp narratives