Alanna Strange
35 years ago - Alanna is born on Rann, the daughter of Sardath, the greatest inventor on the planet.
20 years ago - 15-year-old Alanna becomes her father's apprentice, using his inventions to try to protect the people of Rann from it's strange mutated environments.
13 years ago - 22-year-old Alanna explores the return of a Zeta Beam, and saves Adam Strange from a predator on the great planes of Rann. She takes him to her father Sardath, and while he is temporarily stranded he helps her defend Rann until the effects of the Zeta Beam wear off, returning him to Earth. She eagerly awaits his return with each new Zeta Beam.
4 years ago - 31-year-old Alanna marries Adam Strange when Sardath is able to stabilize his Zeta Beam effect, letting him stay on Rann. Soon their daughter Aleea Strange is born.
3 years ago - 32-year-old Alanna Strange saves Adam Strange when he is captured & held prisoner by Komand'r's pirate fleet as they raid Rann. Together they lead their people to defeat the pirates, imprisoning Komand'r on Rann.
2 years ago - 33-year-old Alanna is left alone when Sardath activates his Zeta Defense system to protect Rann from the Starbreaker, inadvertently sending Adam Strange back to Earth while phasing the planet out of sync with normal space. She is reunited with Adam when he successfully defeats the Starbreaker.
Adam Strange is really a character from another era of adventure storytelling entirely. He did change over time to be more of a traditional comic book hero in the vein of the superheroes that dominated the market, but he began as a character right out of a vintage form of entertainment. He's DC's take on the classic Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials of the 30s, and in the same way Flash had Dale Arden and Buck had Wilma Deering, Adam Strange's whole story turned completely on his relationship with his love interest, Alanna.
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Alanna Strange's Comic HistoryAlanna appeared for the first time in Showcase #17 in 1958, the same issue where Adam Strange debuted. While it's really not uncommon for a hero's love interest to debut in the same issue, in the case of Adam Strange and Alanna it's practically a foregone conclusion, as Alanna is the driving force behind Adam's entire narrative.
Adam is an archeologist who is zapped to an alien planet, where he meets the beautiful daughter of the scientist responsible for bringing him there. Each time he finishes an adventure on Rann, he fades back to Earth, where he has to scour the globe to be in the right place to meet the next Zeta Ray. Why is he doing it? Because of Alanna. He is head over heels for this girl and will spend his entire life doing everything he can to get zapped to her planet just to spend MOMENTS with her between crisis that he has to stop, because he's in love. It's right out of Princess of Mars. Alanna is a contemporary of other classic love interests, like Iris West, Carol Ferris, and the Silver Age version of Lois Lane. While she did operate as the framing device for most of Adam's adventures, she was also much more likely to be right in it with him, flying into adventure at his side, so much so that I would fully consider her as much a sidekick as she is a love interest. |
Our Alanna's StoryThe really cool thing about Adam Strange's story is it's adventure serial roots. We want to preserve that at all costs, which means that we really want to preserve the pedigree of Alanna's role in those stories.
Of course, there's a reason a lot of those old stories can sometimes make you cringe when you watch them now, the roles of the women in them is often kind of ridiculous. Thankfully it's easy to just make sure Alanna is an equal participant in Adam's adventures. She's Sardath's daughter and apprentice, after all, she's actually the one saving the day on Rann, Adam is just along for the adventure because he's in love with her. The funny thing is, once you establish that? then almost every other trope of these classic stories can happen without any sort of problem at all. |
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Alanna's LookI haven't struggled this much to find the right art for a page in a while, and I've spend some time wondering why that is. even though she was a far more active participant in Adams adventures that some other Silver Age love interests, it's still far easier to find images of her that are deliberately cheesecake-y, or depicting her fawning over Adam.
Modern depictions of Alanna are almost all very clever redesigns. In the Young Justice animated series the people of Rann are more visibly alien, which is clever, but not really in keeping with the visuals of a classic scifi adventure serial. Tom King's Strange Adventures miniseries is much more accurate to her classic look, but the book changes some fundamental dynamics of the characters, and it's very subtly evident in almost all the art you might try to use. Perhaps the most interesting redesign comes from the Jeff Lemire Justice League United, where she wears a costume based on Adam's redesign for the series, and is also depicted as a short-haired woman of indigenous descent. It's a very cool look, but I do think that if I had my pick I would want her to retain her classic Silver Age Dale Arden look, as that's pretty core to what makes the character who she is. |
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