I had quite a weekend.

I recently started training in a Tibetan martial arts system called "Tetsudo." The national championships were this weekend. I have never competed before, as the other arts I have studied were non-competitive.

I was encouraged to take part in the Senior Freestyle event. Freestyle involves training with a partner to develop coordination, speed and timing, with freestyle sparring. In the competition, you and your partner have one-and-a-half minutes to demonstrate all the above qualities, you can't choreograph anything, both partners have to support the other in expressing themselves while showing a full ranges of techniques during the sparring session.

There were 85 pairs of partners competing in the event. I was the only ungraded competitor. All other competitors were senior grades, just below black belt.

I was also the only disabled competitor.


I was pleased enough that my partner (Justin) and myself, made it through the preliminaries, but was completely gob-smacked when we won the national championship!

Even more when I was presented with the Erick Hayreh award, for the most inspirational practitioner!


I don't know of any other system in the UK, that would allow a disabled person to compete on an equal basis with able-bodied competitors, no age, weight, or gender discrimination either in terms of competition categories.

As I said, quite a weekend indeed!

Your objections about Adam Strange's hair led me to review the original comic books, most of which I have buried in my collection. What you thought was "wrong" coloring was, in fact, the original coloring from 1958-1960!

That's right--Adam's hair color was NOT originally blonde, but that red-orange color in the Archives. Well, when I say it was not originally blonde, that is not wholly accurate. In the first story in SHOWCASE #17 - "Secret of the Eternal City" - Adam's hair color alternates from page to page as blonde and red-orange. There was no consistency at all; the re-colored version actually corrects the errors of the original appearance...except in the very last panel, where the blonde slips through--and it was blonde in that panel in the original appearance as well.

Thereafter, Adam's hair was red-orange for quite a while, although some blonde snuck in here and there. In MYSTERY IN SPACE #60, they forgot to color his hair on page 2, so it was white...and this was also corrected in the Archives reprint.

It doesn't appear the red-orange vanished for good and Adam was able to prove blondes have more fun until MIS #72. Starting with that issue, Adam was always blonde, at least in the stories I checked.

About the same time, Adam's origin was reprinted in the first and greatest SECRET ORIGINS. In that, he was officially blonde. Since that was probably my first exposure to Adam, the blonde is what I recalled also, but he wasn't always such!

The brother of a friend of mine had a treasure trove of "old" comics when I was a kid and SHOWCASE #17 was one of them. So I got to read "The Planet and the Pendulum," which did not see light of day again for many years until Adam's stories were reprinted in STRANGE ADVENTURES after Deadman vacated the book. I also got to read some early Silver Age Flash and other Schwartz-edited books. What a treat!

Of course, "old" is relative. The comics were only a year or two old. But, to me, at the ripe young age of nine or ten, they were ancient.

As for other inconsistencies in the coloring you mentioned, I can tell you that's how it was! Alanna's hair was colored brown at least twice, just as it appears on the reprint of the cover to SHOWCASE #19.

As for the multiple colors to Alanna's clothes, well, she is a woman! She can't wear the same things all the time! Here, too, the coloring is accurate to the original. The familiar blue and yellow outfit does not appear at all in the Showcase issues, except on the cover of and within the second story of SHOWCASE #19, and only for those handful of panels in the story, just as it appears in the Archives.

As far as I could tell, other than correcting Adam's hair, the color scheme in the Archives is identical to the original, just more vivid and eye-popping, but the same shades and tones that the original unknown colorists came up with.

I do have to agree with you on the sloppy credits. No fewer than seven covers are misidentified as to penciler. MIS #53 and 54 are credited to Carmine Infantino, though Gil Kane penciled them. MIS #61-65 are credited to Kane, even though Infantino penciled those. How could they be so wrong?

The only thing missing from your review was noting Murphy Anderson's contribution to the strip. Although the other inkers did a good job, it was when Anderson inked Infantino that the strip became extraordinary. They were an incredible team throughout the 1960s, but it only on Adam Strange did they do significant interior work together. Anderson beautifully complimented Infantino despite their disparate styles.

While the stories in the first ADAM STRANGE ARCHIVES are good, writer Gardner Fox was clearly cramped for space in the short eight or nine pages he had to work with. Once the strip expanded to the "double-length" size of 15 pages - Take that, you current writers who can't tell a complete story in under a trillion pages - Fox was able to gave his stories room to breathe. He never developed a large cast of supporting characters - except for repeat villains, the only recurring characters were Adam, Alanna, and Alanna's dad, Sardath - but he was always innovative and could put new twists on the standard Zeta Beam formula.

The next volume of ADAM STRANGE ARCHIVES, which will hopefully be published soon, shows Adam at his finest...including the Justice League of America's first guest-star role.