Tom Strong, Part One

There seems to be a resurgence of interest in Tom Strong, one of Alan Moore's lesser known franchises. So I thought I would take a spin at analyzing the literary elements. Although none of the YouTube videos I have watched on this topic have been wrong, I think many of them are missing the connection to Alan Quartermain and his creator H. Rider Haggard. The most obvious reference is the use of the addictive root that grants extraordinary power. Strong, unlike The League of Extraordinary Gentleman's Quartermain, appears to suffers no detrimental effects from consumption of his magic power root. But the key to unlocking the rest lies in Solomon, the enhanced gorilla companion of Tom Strong, whose full name is King Solomon. This is a reference to Haggard's book King Solomon's Mines. A gorilla companion of our very white hero recalls Quartermain's black companion Umbopa. As with much of Strong's story, implicit and explicit race is present in the narrative, not to be ignored, but rather interrogated. Quartermain's companion Umbopa is a warrior for whom he had great respect and whom he defends against the stronger racist comments within his own adventures. H. Rider Haggard's relationship with everyone's favorite colonial  baron, Cecil Rhodes, will have to wait for another day. 

To continue: Tom Strong has one parent, Susan Strong, who actually loves him and one, Sinclair, who sees him as a grand experiment. He loses both in an earthquake, which serves as the destruction of his old home and the initial call to adventure. Although his father Sinclair has a conversation with his mother, Susan, as they are crushed and dying, it is Susan who reaches out with love. This is similar to the ending of King Solomon's Mines, where Foulata, the Kukuana princess whose skin forbids a sustained romance with the subtly named Captain Good is stabbed to death before the evil witch Gagool is crushed. In this case it is not merely her blackness, but her origin in the magical hidden kingdom. From Sinclair's point of view, the normal compassion of Susan is the witchcraft that must be eliminated to produce the desired ending. Susan's whiteness is an inversion of the Kukuana's women's blackness, but necessary for the journey that her son Tom must undertake. The collapse of the cave in Tom Strong's tale occurs as he is about to enter the hidden magical kingdom rather than as Quartermain leaves it.

and, in particular, of Sinclair who views people as things. In the case of 

The Birth of the Cessative (An Encomium)

 It is long-established in the development of color that the first third way to emerge from the binary of black and white, light and dark, is red. From this point, all other colors flow. In the same way aspect begins as a binary: perfective and imperfective. The first views an event as that which is completed, while the second views an event as that which is ongoing. Aspect is decoupled from absolute time, but within this binary there is relative time: the imperfective is not yet perfective. Yet the only ground from which a new aspect can arise to form a trinity is the imperfective. The boundary, the borderlands where the imperfective and perfective touch, is not at the beginning, but the end of imperfective spectrum: it is meet, therefore, that a language with three core aspects would add the cessative rather than the inchoative. The cessative indicates 'to stop doing', an imperfective range on the marches of the perfective, which binds the binary aspects to a more temporal mode. Once the imperfective has borne the cessative, more aspects may come; but it is ironic that the aspect that begins a multiplicity of others should be the one associated with ceasing!

On the Nose ...

 Creole languages are often stereotyped as simpler than the languages from which they are derived (not simpler than the pidgin from which they evolved not the language which the audience happens to speak), but this does not rule out the retention or development of individual complexities. In the case of Haitian Creole, this complexity was attention to the nasality or orality of consonants or entire words. The Creole word janmen 'never' is transparently the French word jamais in which neither vowel is nasal but there is a nasal consonant. I am still not certain from what origin the verb renmen 'to like' possesses. This contrast of orality and nasality is particularly conspicuous in the definite article, whose nasality or orality depends on the commensurate nature of the syllables in the noun. There are five possible articles - a, la, an, lan, and the apparently rare nan, postposed rather than preposed. Examples are mesye a 'the gentleman', liv la 'the book', tifi a 'the girl', tigason an 'the boy', nant lan 'the watch', and dam nan 'the lady'. I do not yet fully understand the parameters of the fourfold (and occassionally fivefold) distinction, but there is no denying that it is more complex than the binary distinction of Continental French.