Tom Strong: Alan Moore's Overlooked Superman, 27 Years Later

Screen Rant looks at Alan Moore's Tom Strong, the writer's most straightforwardly heroic creation. It's an interesting piece of history: Moore, famous for deconstructing superheroes in *Watchmen* and *The Killing Joke*, spent the late 1990s and early 2000s building a superhero who actually believes in the job.

Tom Strong debuted in spring 1999 with an issue called "How Tom Strong Got Started." Moore wrote the first 22 issues, through late 2003, before handing it over to a roster that included Geoff Johns, Brian K. Vaughan, and Ed Brubaker. The series ran 36 issues total.

What Makes Tom Strong Different

Strong is Moore's version of Superman, a hero from Millennium City raised to be superior physically, mentally, and morally. The key difference: Tom Strong stories are less cynical than Moore's more famous work. They lean into fantasy and adventure, not grit and realism. Moore had to know the genre inside and out before he could deconstruct it, Screen Rant argues, and Tom Strong shows he knew it just fine.

The series also leaned hard on the Multiverse as a storytelling device, years before Marvel and DC fully embraced their own alternate universes. That timing is the point: Moore was writing where superhero comics were going, not where they were.

The Verdict

Screen Rant calls Tom Strong "a classic, if short-lived superhero series" that modern readers overlook. It's worth noting the timing. Moore's run ended in 2003, right before the current wave of superhero multiverse stories really took off. The piece suggests that's the whole trick with Moore: he gets there first.

• Alan Moore
• comic books
• DC Comics
• Screen Rant
• Superman
• Tom Strong