So I pick up the first issue of “The Return of Adam Strange” at the comic shop today. Written by Andy Diggle, art by Pascal Ferry. Last time I saw Adam was a guest appearance in JLA maybe two years ago, and I’m curious to see what they’re going to do with the character. The first plot point is a biggie: Adam finally has a means to remain on Rann permanently, without the Zeta beam snapping him back to Earth. However, six months ago, just as he was planning to relocate, the Zeta beam stopped coming. Adam calls in some favors in the superhero community and gets Superman to fly over and investigate. Supes returns with the bad news: Rann’s primary star has unexpectedly gone supernova, and vaporized the entire planetary system.
The story goes on to quickly establish that in fact Rann may not have been destroyed after all, and that the supernova was merely a cover for the mysterious relocation of the planet to parts unknown. Fair enough; by the end of the issue Adam has acquired a jet pack and some laser pistols and heads out to kick some alien exoskeleton. But something about the storyline nagged at me, and finally I realized what it was: the planet Rann orbited the star system of Alpha Centauri, which is the closest star to our own solar system (4 light years or so if memory serves). I reviewed some information on the phenomenon of supernovas, and sure enough, were one to occur within this distance to Earth, it would be A Bad Thing. I deduce this from the assertion from one of my sources that such an occurrence “would immediately kill virtually all life on Earth.”
Now, I grant that this is comics, and a certain suspension of disbelief is probably called for in a medium that lets people push planets around. And I would further grant that even if we accept that Alpha Centauri could be somehow induced to supernova, the heroes of Earth would still have four years and change in which to do something about it. Still and all, this seems like a fairly large and conspicuous oversight, what with an apocalyptic death wave of hard radiation streaming toward Earth and all. Adam and Superman seem pretty choked up about the possibility of Rann’s destruction, but nobody seems to be too concerned about the fact that Earth is now sentenced to have its atmosphere ripped away and its oceans boiled before the next Summer Olympics rolls around. So my question is this: does this event tie into something else, some sort of crossover that happened six months ago in comics time in some other title, and which I somehow missed? Should I be looking for a trade paperback to clear this up?