Dr Strange and the Inhumans, the first real content

( A quick note, the above image is NOT the original Dr. Strange cover! It is part of a series of wonderful reproductions by Howard Hallis. Check out his work here.)

It was some time ago that I was asked by the legendary Neilalien to take an email discussion we'd had and turn it into a blog that he might link to his page. Now that I have a new forum, here it is.

The issue at hand is the removal of the title of Sorcerer Supreme from Marvel's character Dr. Strange, his replacement in that role by Brother Voodoo, and the percieved nutering of the good Doctor. Neil is essentially THE voice of the Dr. Strange fan community, and a top authority of his heroic exploits. This replacement follows a series of events over a three or four year cycle that have essentially neutered Dr. Strange and, many argue, creating a waste of his character.

If you don't know who he is, check here. Really, he's a pretty fascinating read in the right hands, his early arcs are especially enchanting.

From the writers' standpoint, the problem has been that Dr. Strange is simply too powerful. Magic, in the Marvel Universe, is something that has no clear definition, and no certain limits. In the past 40+ years, Doc has been seen doing so many things with magic, that it seems there's nothing he can't accomplish with the flick of his wrist. Of course, perhaps the same could be said of his magical nemeses, and when they battle, mystical colored bolts dart across every panel. But Doc doesn't have his own book currently, and so the issue for the writers is the way that Dr Strange's powers work on typical superhero problems.

Because Doc has been seen warping reality in so many ways by this point, he has either two functions in a story. Either he 1: Acts as Deus Ex Machina, stepping in and quickly whisking away the problem with barely a thought and a twitch of his excellent moustache or 2: The probelm somehow is immune to magic, and Doc seems totally inept.

An interesting side note: for a character that all modern Marvel writers complain about writing for (except for, perhaps, my hero Brian K Vaughn) Strange has gotten a lot of prominent coverage these last couple years, just in very unflattering ways. As a young collector, I rarely saw Strange in any book other than his own. Now, as an orphan, he appears in every other title to, well, here's some examples...

In the highly publicized Civil War story arc, Dr Strange did a pretty cool trick where he masks the anti-registration team from detection, a trick he will continue to use for a long time in New Avengers, but when the chips are down, and they could really use Strange to teleport some bad guys, or shoot some energy blasts... his powers mysteriously leave him. Again in World War Hulk, Strange has been seen teleporting Hulk off of Earth in order to stop him from rampaging through New York, yet now that Hulk is threating to smash all of the world to assuage his fury, Strange seems suddenly powerless... because to have him use that power would abruptly end a major story arc. Rather than take the time to write in a moral delimma where Doc feels it wrong to simply banish Hulk again, the writers felt the need to cut off his powers again. A mystical castration, if you will.

Has Dr Strange gotten too powerful for writers to handle? The same question has been plaguing Superman for years: how do you write about a seemingly omnipotent character and make him seem to be in enough peril to excite your audience? Brian K Vaughn proved in his The Oath story that you can imperil Strange; his story featured Doc getting shot by an assassin with a cursed gun. But Doc is still ridiculously quick when it comes to disposing of evil doers. He can blast them, teleport them away, erase their mind, whatever, and most characters in the Marvel U are almost completely helpless against magic.

And there's what I think the problem to be. Its not the writers, its not that Doc is too powerful, its that he's being written as a part of the Marvel Universe. As a superhero. Now don't get me wrong, I love to see Doc come out and help Spider-Man once in a while. Interconnectivity has been a strong point of the Marvel Universe for...well, its kinda not now, but it once was one of the greatest things about Marvel. The heroes were friends. What happened in one book really effected the next. But with Doc, the challenges that face Superheroes are simply not his challenges. And if the writers can't get around how his powers erase that problem then he simply should not be there. Its not so hard.

Really, think about the position Doc's mythology puts him in. He's the Sorcerer Supreme, the one magic dude among all magic dudes who defends our dimension from darkness and the tyranny of other magic dimensions. That means that Mephisto and Dormammu and every demon ever, as well as every magic user that might be a bad guy, Doc has to keep tabs on and battle. Daily.

Has Marvel's editorial staff ever stopped to consider how large of a task this is? The entire dimension. One guy. And yet they have him living in New York helping fight off something as insignifigant as a political dispute between Iron Man and Captain America. He defends the entire cosmos. So, if some demon tries to break in through a crack in the universe in a solar system 3 million light years away, guess who has to teleport out there and fight it. Yeah, Doc. Why are all the evil sorcerers we've seen from Earth? There are hundreds of established alien races in Marvel's universe. Why hasn't Doc ever had to go fight a Brood sorcerer? Sure, Doc has floated into alien dimensions to get relics befrore, but how often do we really see the scope of him having to defend every world that ever was in our universe from obliteration? If ever there should have been a cosmic hero, it is Doc.

Moreso, even, than a lack of scope on the point of the writers is a complete misapplication of tone. Doc Strange is an odd addition to a world where men dress in masks and tights and get in fist fights with bank robbers. That's not Doc's world. Doc is a man who uses ancient energies beyond understanding to battle beings made of anti-matter who would suck the brains out of the heads of all humans if they got their tentacled booties through the gateway. Yet, these spandex-wearing heroes are the contemporary of Doc, and so writers keep trying to have him don tights and join the battle against common crooks. Docs mission makes Earth crime irrelevant. His mission is horrifying in concept. Most writers are just unable to apply the feeling of awe these alien worlds should generate, the feeling of total terror these God-defying creatures he battles should truly inspire. Ditko and other early influences on Doc in the trippy 60's seemed to have the right idea, when huge story arcs would be spent off world engaged with alien intelligences, but over time, most writers seem to have simply missed the point.

Look at DC for an appropriate use of magic in story-telling. While their Vertigo line has faded from prominence now, in its heyday, magic-based stories centered around Swamp Thing, Constantine, Preacher, and of course Sandman were lighting up sales racks with their imaginative and adult oriented story-telling. Constantine (Hellblazer Comics) may be the best analog here, as he's one normal human, versed in the ways of sorcery and magic, trying to keep the forces of darkness away from Earth. Now, Constantine's character is quite different from the Doc, and the scope of his mission is more focused, but here you have a character that exists in a superhero universe and has interacted with the likes of Batman that has never lost focus of the themes of his story. In Constantine's mythos, he sees a side of the world someone like Batman would be totally helpless against, a piece of the world that no one else can see; its horrific, and he's in it to protect the light, albeit in a somewhat selfish manner. Now, Constantine's power levels are more manageable than Dr Strange's, but the real rub that had kept him in print so long is that at no point has he tried to use his powers to fight The Penguin or other mundane criminals. Constantine deals with magic, a concept that is, even to most people in our own everday life, a concept that is frightening and alien. Bunnies from hats and Mindfreaks aside, if you pull out a book of Magick in our world, even one so far removed from superstition, most will stare, many will move away from you in abhorration, and I've found from personal experience that your parents will chuck them out the window. Constantine's writers never lost focus of the idea that Magic is a frightening thing to most people, dealing with concepts and cosmic-scopes that should never fail to amaze and revolt us at the same time. Vertigo's magic series' creative teams packed every issue with images both beautiful and grotesque to great results.

Marvel tried to capture this same series with their Spirits of Vengeance, Darkhold, Ghost Rider and other occult-based stories, but those went down in flames just the same as Doc's books. Even the movie marketed Blade can't maintain an ongoing series. And it seems that its because all of those 'occult' books still boil down to the same thing: guys in costumes, fighting other guys in costumes. Villain of the week stuff. I mean, what did the Darkhold, a group of paranormal investigators, do? Fight Modred the Mystic? Even their attempts to introduce concepts such as Lillith into Marvel degenerated to a chick with a funny head in purple spandex; their magic expressed as energy bolts no different those generated by the mutant powers of Cyclops.

I sympathise with Neilalien on the matter, as I think a similar problem persists for my favorite series of Marvel Characters, The Inhumans. Orignally introduced in 1966 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby as Fantastic Four supporting characters, The Inhumans immediately became popular, and were regularly occuring guest stars in that title, among others. The FF were constantly brought in to ally themselves with Black Bolt against the forces of his tyrannical brother Maximus in their battle for the throne. Human Torch's love affair with Crystal of the Inhuman tribe assured that they would appear at least once a year for the duration of the Kirby/Lee cycle.

But when given their own title, the Inhumans flopped, cancelled after only one year. Marvel kept trying with new Mini-series and regular stings in the back of What Ifs and Marvel Comics Presents, but the Inhumans never really picked up until the late 90's when Paul Jenkins and Jae Lee seemed to come across a solution to the Inhuman publication problem.

You see, the Fantastic Four, in their Golden Era, were not just superheroes but explorers. Jack Kirby was a pretty high-concept creator, and the FF fought not only superpowered bank heisters and Megalomaniacal scientists, but they also sought out and explored new dimensions, new alien worlds, new societies, and Mr. Fantastic's superior intellect is often what allowed the team to adapt to and survive interaction with these new peoples. (Reed's ability to intelligently converse with people and socialize seems to have vanished over the last 40 years) And this is what the Inhumans were in those books, a new and interesting society.

New artists tried to take the Inhumans into their own book, they didn't look at the concept, they saw a bunch of super-powered guys in crazy costumes; they saw superheroes. And so the Inhumans, generally isolated from the rest of the world, would somehow always be plagued with giant robots or snow monsters, or something ridiculous like that, to fight every month. Why did that happen? The creators would just shrug. Don't overthink it.

But they failed to look at the concept of the Inhumans as a whole. The Inhumans are an isolated species of genetically advanced humans. Their leader, Black Bolt, is supposedly the 'perfect man', a leader without flaw. Theirs is an elitest society, too good to mingle with our own, that practices eugenics and has a slave-race made of their own people who were deemed genetic dead-ends. Eugenics and slavery? Last I checked, these were pretty abhorrent ideas in our own culture, and yet, here they are, presented as part of the 'perfect society'. Jae Lee and Paul Jenkins looked at this concept, and realized the probelm. The Inhumans are not superheroes. They might call the FF friends, but they are not the same ilk. These guys aren't going to stop bank-robbers or fight Dr. Doom. Why would they? Human squabbles don't come near their Himlayan home, and they are a soveriegn nation unto themselves. The story of the Inhumans is that of a society. Its the story of a group of people led by a perfect man, whose moral beliefs and far-sighted visions for his people are far beyond our own. Its the story about an alien society trapped in a world run by lesser beings while political struggles generated by Maximus threaten the throne. Its the story of a family awash in political intrigue and failed attempts at diplomacy.

Since Jenkins, a few writers have picked up on this theme and used it to great success. The Son of M and Silent War stories are probably the best examples of how the Inhumans should interact with the rest of the Marvel Universe. The recent War of Kings story takes them into the Cosmic Pantheon and makes fair use as well.

The trick is that Marvel, and comics in general, seem to be so super-hero based that most writers don't know how to write for anything but. Where once there were hundred of comics of different genres, war, western, horror, mystery, romance, there's now just thousands of guys in tights, duking it out. So now, when you get a new concept that is a little more literary, such as a man who uses occult powers to battle Lovecraftian demons or a society that practices Eugenics defending themselves from a world that doesn't understand... how do writers apply those concepts to the same world where Spider-Man is webbing up bankrobbers? It seems too daunting a task for some.

Personally, I don't lament for Dr Strange's current plight. In the world of Marvel Comics, no change is permanent. Oh, sure, there were changes back when Lee was writing, but everything established by the original creative teams cycles back over time. Serial characters have to keep the status quo. Given another year or three, I imagine Dr Strange will regain his title of Sorcerer Supreme with great fanfare, and he'll be deemed 'Better than EVER!' I know that I had once submitted a story to Marvel's proposed and failed EPIC line that involved Doc dying and eventually being resurrected by a boy who would become his apprentice (and seriously, shouldn't he have one? If Doc dies, Dormammu pretty much has a free shot at our dimension). It seems that sometimes you do have to tear a character down before people are paying enough attention to build him back up. Kind of a 'don't know what you've got till its gone' thing.

But Marvel is an infinitely resetting machine. Doc's return is already written in stone. We can only hope that upon his next relaunch, his new writers are paying attention to what works. The last few years are surely filled with enough examples of what NOT to do.