2 out of 5

Time travel stories are almost always uneven, and Moore’s ABC Universe of characters thrive on snappy infusions of classic pulp tropes like time travel, but for the second volume of alternate-universe Tom Strongians, the synergy doesn’t quite click, creating an uneven story with surprisingly uneven art that’s never quite fun or poppy enough.

The fine line with the ABC Universe is in Moore’s (and crew’s – Peter Hogan doing the scripting with Moore as co-plotter here) balance over celebrating comics, poking fun at the genre, and creating an interesting world of characters without making the reader feel too foolish for still buying Superman and without falling prey to all the flashy problems and gimmicks of modern comics.  Promethea sidesteps this by focusing very much on the ethereal, Top 10 goes procedural, and one-shotty things like Tomorrow Stories are just full-on short pulps, so it works.  Tom Strong had the toughest job, as he’s definitely the hero proxy for the universe, and the assortment of villains and alternate worlds and crazy gadgets he interacts with merit one of those goofy smiles – we know Moore is as into this stuff as us, and we know it’s sort of silly, but Strong pulls it off with a sort of accept-it-all shrug and it makes us feel at home while reading.  At some point he ran into an alternate version of Earth with an alternate version of himself (Tom Strange) and flips of all the Earth heroes.  And this crew got its own mini with Terra Obscura Vol. 1, which was just more opportunity to flesh out some side characters, but it did so through a pretty fun supernatural tale that maintained the balance of the Strong books.

But the mix is off in vol. 2 for some reason.  It starts fun, with time going awry and heroes and villains from different eras showing up and disappearing, causing confusion or alarm, but there’s a sense of… hm, importance to events here that pushes it into regular comic territory.  There are cliffhangers, and over-emotional responses to things, and it just doesn’t have that friendly feel anymore.  Which would be fine if you still want to see what happens, but whereas Strong is very reader friendly, pick it up at any time and get the gist, all of the time shifts are treated like you should know who and what you’re looking at.  Which you won’t (you can’t), and so you find yourself flipping pages without much connection.  Plus the balance between the threats that just show up and disappear and the ones that are, apparently, actually threatening seems to be out of whack, such that nothing really seems like a problem.  Lastly, Yanick Paquette’s art is that consistent, Dodson-esque style to it that’s worked up to this point, but Karl Story’s inks are madly inconsistent starting with the third issue, making some panels appear, honestly, downright ugly.  I wonder if there was something up, because a couple inkers step in to assist in the final issue.

It’s readable, it’s got some fun ideas, but this reads more like a true “average” comic than almost all the ABC output.