Rating: 
Summary: Another Alan Moore Classic!
Review: Alan Moore - what else do you need to hear? I hate to say this but I was never a fan of his Watchmen. This, however, is great stuff. This is one of the best things I've read in a while. It has everything. The origin is clearly defined along with a smashing story line. It has one of the best intros I've ever read. I was literally drooling before I got to the 1st story. Chapters 4-7 have a fantastic story that revolves around a group of modern Nazi superwomen that are gorgeous as well as evil. I can't begin to recommend this enough. This is also a Multi-Eisner award winner. In simple terms - it's just great fun - Enjoy!
Rating:
Summary: Alan Moore's male archetype
Review: Alan Moore is, and deserves to be, a highly regarded author of what we should still call comic books (other names seem largely a reflex action hide embarrassment - which makes me annoyed to see them referred to as "the graphic story medium" in this book). He has in more recent years created a line of comics under the imprint "America's Best Comics", of which Tom Strong is one of those titles. This volume reprints the first seven issues of that comic.'Tom Strong' is an attempt to render the male super hero in an archetypical form. This book has a strong science and family theme, with the male lead cast in a paternal role: Tom is a husband and a father, and has other family members around him, and he is also the leader of a society called the Strongmen of America, ordinary people who takes Tom's life as an inspiration. This book looks over the 100 years that Tom has lived to date, and throughout it he derives benefits from his family/ies and passes them on to the next generation. What's good: Tom represents all those things we have enjoyed about many characters in the past. You'll spot echoes of Tarzan, Doc Savage, Superman, Tom Swift and many more as you read. Alan Moore has built an impressive back-story, which reveals itself slowly as the book unfolds, and everything fits together very well. Tom is also a thinker, rather than just a brawler - he overcome problems with his brain more than his fists. Tom's wife, Dhalua, and daughter, Tesla, are also fabulous characters. What's not so good: I gave it 5 stars, so not much. My main complaint is that that many of the villains are overly stereotypical for me. With a little more effort, they could have been more rounded people. I could also have lived without the comical sidekicks, talking ape King Solomon and robot Pneuman. Lots of thumbs up, and also check out Alan Moore's female archetype in 'Promethea'.
Rating: 
Summary: The Pre-Caped Crusader Archetype - I liked It!
Review: Borrowing heavily from the pre-caped crusader archetype, most notably Tarzan and Doc Savage, Alan Moore once again "does his thing" - making something new and original out of the familiar. Tom Strong is man at his physical, mental and virtuous best (not unlike a little less super-powered Superman)who not only is a role model, crimefighter and all around do-gooder, but a mentor as well. He initiates so many young men into his fan club that Iron John himself would be envious. The story is not as tightly plotted as Moore's "Watchmen", and I believe deliberately so. It loosely revolves around his adventures, beginning with Strong's life stroy, followed by a slew of villians including: a sentient, self-replicating Modular Man, a hyper-imperialistic high-tech Aztec civilization from an alternate reality, a similiarly super-powered Nazi uber-wench, a sentient, prehistoric slime-mold, and Strong's evil arch-nemesis, Dr. Saveen. But beyond the adventure story at its surface 'Tom Strong' is an optimistic tale. Written at the height of Y2K fear and paranoia in the late 1990s, Moore has Tom Strong (born at the literal dawn of the 20th century) not only surviving New Year's 1999, but still going strong and kicking butt at 100. This says more about Alan Moore's intentions with this character - as a symbol of hope and optimism in an especially fearful and cynical time. Outstanding! Also try Moore's "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen", "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow"; Kurt Busiek's 'Astro City" and Warren Ellis' "Planetary".
Rating:
Summary: More than meets the eye
Review: Don't let the talking monkey fool you. Ditto the robot butler. Tom Strong is a smart book. Written by hirsute prodigy Alan Moore, this is a book about growing up. More to the point, it's a book about how Western pop culture grew up. Tracking the 20th Century as witnessed by Strong and his family (wife Dhalua, daughter Tesla, robot butler Pneumann and simian aide-de-camp King Solomon), the first collection chronicles their pulp-inspired adventures protecting the world from enemies like the Modular Man and invading forces from the Aztech Empire at the dawn of the 21st. But don't be fooled. There's a heck of a lot more going on here.
Tom Strong is self-aware right off the bat: The first chapter tells the story of Timmy Turbo, a preteen who buys the first issue of a comic called - you guessed it - Tom Strong. As it turns out, Strong's adventures are chronicled in a series of comic books, which Moore uses as s storytelling device to clue the reader in on the family's adventures earlier in the century.
Many of the stories involve Tom Strong battling some enemy from his past, the introductions of which are chronicled in the "Untold Tales" of Tom Strong - comics-within-a-comic written and drawn in the styles of comics from decades past. The format gives the book a chance to showcase different artists, though all, I think, have well-established résumés; Dave Gibbons, Moore's partner in crime in the well-known Watchmen, makes an appearance. But, as I said, it's not all about the pulp. There's a more profound message in Tom Strong one about how we imagine our heroes, and how that could have gone wrong, and where it didn't.
Strong is a Western pop hero in the classic sense of the word: tall, rippling biceps, Caucasian, nigh-invulnerable. But other aspects of his story aren't so typical. His wife, Dhalua, is black, and the two have a biracial daughter. His arch-enemy is Ingrid Weiss, a genetically engineered Nazi superwoman, who represents all of the evil things that Strong could have been created to be. In this way, Strong is almost an antidote to critics who understandably charge that Western popular culture is white-centric and paternalistic. Strong may be the titular superhero as well as husband and father, but he is in no way patriarchal. On at least one occasion, it is Dhalua and Tesla who come to Tom's rescue at the hands of something far more sinister than he ever could have become. Both women are strong characters, operating as part of a family unit, but at the same time fiercely independent. I can't say much more without giving away the ending. But in the end, all of the Strongs must do battle with the worst that humankind has to offer, and the evil that Tom could have become had he - and the people who canonized him a hero - made a few different choices.
Rating:
Summary: Holy Socks!
Review: How can one man have so many ideas? Alan Moore is most famous for his deconstruction of super-hero genre comic books in the 1980s, but now he's reconstructed the idea and showing us what he's learned. Tom Strong is a "science-hero", born in 1900, raised in the jungle and living in Millennium City. To the more literary-minded, he's a metaphor for the history of the modern comic book- as his adventures are shown to us in flashbacks that use different comic styles and conventions- but even the most superficial elements of Tom Strong are enjoyable. He has neat-o adventures, uses gee-whiz gadgets, and engages in the most dashing of derring-do. He's a good guy, Tom, and you wish you could live in his world. Alan Moore throws so many ideas at you in the course of the 7 chapters (the first 7 issues of the comic book series) that it's a pity there wasn't more time devoted to each one, but this is Tom Strong, and he doesn't plod through concepts that other comic character would spend pages and pages puzzling out- he's a genius who works out solutions just as fast as the problems arise. Moore is aided by several artists, including a reunion with Dave Gibbons, his collaborator on the justly acclaimed Watchmen series. But Gibbons is only a guest artist, drawing a mere 8 pages. The bulk of the art is drawn by Chris Sprouse, whose style is clean and captures the essence of Tom's character. In the year 2000 Tom Strong is 100 years old and as fit as ever. Can the same be said of American comics? With Alan Moore to create them it can.
Rating: 
Summary: Attenuated Moore
Review: I'm a huge fan of Moore's earlier works; anyone would be. But, due to the expectations formed by this work, I was enormously disappointed by the latest. I should have been warned by the reviews here -- many of them point out that it isn't his best work. I didn't realize, however, that it was FAR from his better pieces. Essentially, the stories are brief, and have little texture. One example of this problem is that our man of science never engages in any scientific activity -- so far as I can tell, his right hook is the only tool he uses to dispatch enemies. The plots, moreover, are dismal, and only serve to highlight the gulf between this work and previous graphic novels by Moore. And leave off with the pedantry! We already know, for example, that nazis are bad (boo, hiss). So are evil scientists with no other motivation than destruction (yes, the villians are this thin). And oh yes, cooperation is good -- this was learned in the "evil aztec who sacrifice nice people" chapter. Sigh. I'll look elsewhere. Hopefully, Moore will return in a better, purer, form in future offerings.
Rating: 
Summary: TOM WEAK
Review: Let me start by saying that I am a HUGE Alan Moore fan, that I've been a reader of his for over ten solid years now and that I count some of his work (WATCHMEN, SWAMP THING and FROM HELL) as the best comic art ever produced. That said, I have to tell you that this collection was almost a PAINFUL read for me. As much as I hate to admit it, Moore has lost his edge. There is nothing new or exciting in the tales presented here. The charcters are flat and one deminsional; the dialogue is strained at times; and, worst of all, I felt no emotional involvement in the stories whatsoever. Simply put, these are comics for kids. If you're over the age of 12, you'll find Tom Strong's adventures pretty weak indeed.
Rating:
Summary: Today's Age-Old Hero
Review: Moore has shaped Tom's mythology out of the strong fabric that preceded the Superhero Golden Age: the American pulp and serial hero. Tarzan, Doc Savage, etc. Like them, Tom has a unique origin, being born and raised outside of society by his scientifically inclined mother and father on the lost island of Attabar Teru. Forged in science & nature, Tom returns to his parents' Western world and become the force for Reason & Good that he was invariably designed to be. Moore wants to give modern readers a similar return with Tom Strong, rebuilding the empire of comics darkened by Watchmen with a modern variation on the archetypes from before the superhero genre's rise. Today's comic companies must repeatedly reinvent their heroes to meet society's shifts; Tom is born whole, the product, not just of science and nature, but of innocence and intellect. Who will save these heroes from obsolescence, who will rally and guide the muscle-bound masks and costumes? Tom Strong, the product of the lost pulp/serial heroes and modernity's yen for realism, could just be the right man for the job.
Rating:
Summary: Today's Age-Old Hero
Review: Moore has shaped Tom's mythology out of the strong fabric that preceded the Superhero Golden Age: the American pulp and serial hero. Tarzan, Doc Savage, etc. Like them, Tom has a unique origin, being born and raised outside of society by his scientifically inclined mother and father on the lost island of Attabar Teru. Forged in science & nature, Tom returns to his parents' Western world and become the force for Reason & Good that he was invariably designed to be. Moore wants to give modern readers a similar return with Tom Strong, rebuilding the empire of comics darkened by Watchmen with a modern variation on the archetypes from before the superhero genre's rise. Today's comic companies must repeatedly reinvent their heroes to meet society's shifts; Tom is born whole, the product, not just of science and nature, but of innocence and intellect. Who will save these heroes from obsolescence, who will rally and guide the muscle-bound masks and costumes? Tom Strong, the product of the lost pulp/serial heroes and modernity's yen for realism, could just be the right man for the job.
Rating:
Summary: Fun read...
Review: This collection contains the first seven issues of the ongoing 'Tom Strong' series. In creating Tom Strong, Alan Moore has combined many of the archetypal characteristics of the heroes from pulp magazines (especially Doc Savage), but at the same time updated the concept for the 21st century, providing readers with the enthralling adventures of the premier science hero of Millenium City. Worth mentioning is the fact that Moore avoids the typical flaws of the superhero genre with his use of accurate characterisation, fantastic settings, cunning villains and even a plot twist or two, which in the end make reading this book a truly fun experience. With Tom Strong Alan Moore evokes the energy of the classic Jack Kirby run on Fantastic Four. This work truly helps revitalize the comic book medium.
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