The Fractal Hall Journal

Comics writers are fond of bringing in Z-list heroes without their own titles into their team books. There’s more than one reason for this. Dan Didio, referring to the new Teen Titans line up, is right in saying that this is a way to keep telling stories with characters that have potential, but can’t sustain their own books. Other writers continually site the difficulties with progressing character when progress is only allowed to happen in the home title, with a completely different set of editors and writers.

All true, of course. But you have to ask yourself whether your readers want to read a book about Blue Beetle, or Huntress, or fucking Geo-Force. The realities of day-to-day publishing may get in the way, but if people want to read about the Magnificent Seven then maybe that’s who should be in the JLA.

Sorry, got a bit distracted there.

The point is, the practicalities of juggling characters spread over various titles make Big Gun team books difficult to handle, making runs like Morrison’s JLA even more impressive. This isn’t a new problem, and is the main reason why Avengers isn’t really expected to be a Big Gun title in the same way Justice League is. Hawkeye and Wonder Man and whoever allow the team book writer to own some characters.

The best execution of this kind of team book has to be the X-Men. The mutants are so successful, in fact, that they’ve been able to spin off several characters that can stand on their own feet, although Wolverine’s probably the only really successful one (and more on him next week). But most of the X-Men are resolutely one-note, in both power-gimmick and character, and this is very deliberate.

Core Genre: Science Fiction, with the usual Marvel mixture of everything else.

The X-Men should be taken as a single character, a plural protagonist in the nomenclature of screenwriting. Their conflict occurs on two levels; drama between the various X-Men themselves, and the external conflict with their villains. The operatics of the X-Soap has always been the most-discussed element of the book, and it probably goes without saying by now that the psychology of the thing isn’t what I’m going to concentrate on, so as usual I’ll skip over that in favour of the mechanics of the thing.

A) A team
B) of mutant
C) students
D) with distinct powers
E) and access to advanced technology
F) defend a world that fears and hates them

Considering the complexity of its implications, that’s one of the most elegant concepts you’re going to find in comics. Stan Lee and his various colleagues really were that good.

What’s interesting here is that every element here is the root of both internal and external conflict. Hmm, it looks like I will be talking psychology after all. Well, it’s the X-Men. You just can’t avoid it. Their personal conflict stems from their powers, or their race, or their relationship with non-mutants. They argue with each other as well as the outside world. And this is mirrored in their conflict with their antagonists.

Factor A tells us their mode of interaction, a gestalt identity. B is the source of their abilities, and also the inciting element of their conflict, either with other mutants or with non-mutants. B leads to both D (how they interact with antagonists) and F (which gives context to the interaction). Personally, I could live without the advanced technology of factor E, but the jets and the danger rooms and Cerebro/Cerebra have been integral from the start, shaping how the villains are located and put into context.

And their villains are very interesting. Intolerant Homo Sapiens, and intolerant Homo Superior. Peaceful integration is the ultimate goal, even if it has to be fought for. It’s easy to cast a cynical eye over superheroes and their drive to solve problems with their fists, but I’m reminded of a quote from author (and daughter of the Fair Country) Jo Walton, as found in the sidebar of Making Light: “Peace means something different from ‘not fighting’… Peace is an active and complex thing and sometimes fighting is part of what it takes to get it.”

Factor C is the controlling element of the stories. The adventures are all centred round a school or academy, a place of learning. It gives the team its character. It’s also the thing that gives the book a sinister edge.

The idea that a trusted teacher of children sends them out to war is unavoidably creepy. It’s a concept that’s been played with many times since Claremont. I don’t know if this odd vibe was deliberate on the part of Lee and Kirby or just another oddity of 60s Marvel, but it plays to other themes present since the beginning. I’m not sure it can all be considered coincidental, though it may be subconscious rather than conscious.

Student unrest tied in with movements wanting to change the status quo is one of the primary images we have of the Sixties, not only in America but across the world. Stan Lee explicitly wrote this into Spider-man, so it wasn’t something he was oblivious too. I wonder how much this informed the structure of the X-Men. The radicalisation of the young by influential figures is a perennial concern to the Daily Mail crowd, something that can be found in modern hysteria regarding Islamic university organisations, Victorian political concerns, right back to Socrates and Plato.

I’m probably reading too much into it, but the X-Men concept does play into anti-intellectual fears of an educated populace, with university education seen as a threat. Like I say, it’s nothing new but there’s been a lot of it in recent years (and if I was feeling particularly tin-hattish, I’d say it’s yet another tactic to discourage the masses from bettering themselves and to keep education strictly for the privileged few, but that’s just crazy talk isn’t it now.)

Also, the world is run by lizards.

Conclusion: If we dig around there’s some ugly things lurking in the X-Men concept. Of course, that can only help in terms of drama, action and conflict. It shouldn’t be a surprise that, when handled properly, the books are amongst the most popular ever made.

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Of all the different kinds of guitar music I like, prog rock’s probably my least favourite. It’s a bit of a surprise that I’ve been listening to quite a bit of it over the past year, and that I’ve mentioned it a few times here.

There was a video not that long ago on YouTube of a school band doing a Yes track with Jon Anderson (I think) singing with them. I don’t have the link, and I don’t recall where I saw the video (either via Making Light or the Whatever), but it was a little piece of genius. As one commentator put it, the pomposity of prog meant it was never able to engage with the one thing it lacked; the enthusiasm of a group of teenagers thumping away at their instruments. That was probably why I ended up revisiting the world of unfeasably long album tracks.

That’s the thing that always comes up about prog. The overblown campness of it all. In the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD war of rock, punk came out on top and that was the end of that. And I can’t help feeling a little sad at that, not least because punk has long outlived its usefulness, its iconography dug up, reanimated and repackaged as just about the least offensive musical opiate ever conceived.

Regardless of the merits or otherwise of the movement they came from, Pink Floyd are inarguably a legendary band. Wish You Were Here has been on the car for ages, and it’s one of the classics. There’s a reason it always turns up in those annual Bestest Ever charts.

It’s Have A Cigar I wanted to bring up. It starts off a straightforward rock track, with a funky bass line and Dave Gilmour doing a bluesier thing than on the rest of the album. It’s not obvious from the kind of thing Pink Floyd are remembered for, but Gilmour’s a hell of a blues player, even if it is the white boy 60s English blues thing of Keith Richards, Clapton and Peter Green (probably shouldn’t lump Green in there, actually, because if BB King says he’s the real thing then that’s good enough for me).

And then we hit 0:25 with a synthy SPOING and it all gets a bit odd.

I imagine that small bit is the musical equivalent of finding out Watchmen isn’t really a formulaic murder investigation. You’re pootering along as normal and suddenly WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT FUCKING SQUID THING. Maybe Watchmen would have been better without the psychic mollusc. Maybe the Floyd track would have been better without the psychadelic assault. But I don’t think so.

Have A Cigar sums up prog to me, and a lot of rock music in a way. The SPOING of the synths is going to turn a lot of people off as being, well, silly at best. And it is deeply, deeply silly. Even so, I can’t help think that when the band first put it together, they thought it was the most edgy, sophisticated thing they could have done. Rugged, fearless experimentation that can’t have the same effect on us after the 80s showed how commonplace electronica would become. That day in the studio, I bet they were as excited as fuck.

Maybe the only people who can really appreciate it are the kids like those teenagers covering Yes, who haven’t got to the point where they only way they can enjoy something like that is in an ironic fashion. Even the irony isn’t a problem, though. Even if the only way you can enjoy it is by rolling your eyes at your dad as he warbles along to something he loved when he was young, and accepting the silliness of those crazy old hippies, than it’s all good. It doesn’t matter what path you have to take before you like something, it only matters that you’re having fun.

Because you know who else lives in that SPOING? Jack Kirby. The guy was an extraordinary talent, an artistic visionary, and deeply silly all at the same time. Something like the original OMAC is, in most ways, fucking stupid, but exactly as fucking stupid as Pink Floyd. Just about everything you could use to defend the King you could use to defend prog, via childlike enthusiasm or ironic detachment, though I suspect the most effect argument is always a matter of craft. You’d have to be an idiot to argue that Kirby didn’t have an incredible technical talent, or that the guys who wrote Shine On You Crazy Diamond weren’t exceptional musicians.

Jack Kirby Lives In The SPOING. Tell me you don’t want that on a t-shirt.

Click here for the Delineation Archive.

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Marvel’s big gun, and hugely important to both companies in that it was with Thor that Jack Kirby started to cut loose with concepts that would end up shaping both respective universes.

Core Genre: Fantasy. Very much so. There are always the SFish cosmic overtones you get with Kirby’s work, but the bottom line is he’s a magical viking.

Anyone remember the Books of Magic ongoing, the one that followed Neil Gaiman’s initial miniseries? Great little title, with a very spooky atmosphere. It managed to have a distinctive voice that wasn’t a slavish recreation of Gaiman’s style.

Tim Hunter, the main character, was a kid with great magical power who would create creatures without realising it. One of these creatures was the Wobbly, a squiggly monster with a bird’s skull, an imaginary creation that lurked in a disused plot of land and disposed of things that Tim threw away. The Wobbly’s trapped there, but when Tim needs it to take away the broken-down car that his mother died in, he gives him permission to leave. “You can always come back, you know,” says Tim. “I’d just as soon you did.”

But this isn’t possible. “To go from a small here to a greater,” says the Wobbly. “That is to be living. But to go from the great to the small? That is death.” It’s a great little bit, in a great standalone issue (#14). John Ney Rieber wrote a lot of good stuff in the course of his run, and Peter Gross after him. The minis that followed the end of the ongoing series were a little ropey, but that’s more due to DC’s need to take the character in a less than ideal direction after Harry Potter pissed in the Bespectacled Young Wizard pot than any fault on the part of the talent.

To go from the great to the small; that’s what Marvel’s Thor is all about. To be diminished, to be humiliated, to die a little. And then to learn from it.

There’s an obvious Christ metaphor here, but it’s one I’m not keen on. Partly it’s because the motivations are completely different, but also because Norse mythology doesn’t need any bed-wetting hippy shit to prop it up. We’re not talking about aspects of a single god, we’re talking about an army of the fuckers, dead-set on getting arseholed and thumping people.

Controlling factors:

A) Big hammer
B) Elemental powers (specifically storm/weather based)
C) Humbled human alter-ego (medical background preferable)
D) An accompanying pantheon

There are a few elements to this character that aren’t really common to other superheroes. Firstly, he’s probably the most popular superhero taken from pre-existing myth. I mean, there’s not a Robin Hood title that’s run for several hundred issues, and is currently bothering the top of the sales lists. The creator credit for this character’s going to be interesting when they get round to making the film, because while he’s undeniably Jack Kirby’s baby, you can’t exactly say he’s created by the King.

His special powers are self-evident. There’s probably room to define his weather abilities, but he’s meant to be an all-powerful storm god so it’s best not to get too hung up on his limits. More important is an alter-ego that humbles him, that both raises and diminishes him. With Donald Blake’s recent return, it’s probably safe to suggest it has to be him, although I have to say I liked the Jake Olson EMT identity in the early days of Dan Jurgens’ revamp, and thought it was quite an elegant modern twist. Unfortunately then it got a bit silly and a lot confusing, and I’m certain there must have been some behind the scenes shenanigans because the first 12 issues were intriguing and consistant and the ones after just seemed to contradict things that had been set-up.

Also, JR Jr’s art was gorgeous.

I think the medical background is essential. First of all, it’s a contrast to the more barbaric image we have of viking berserkers, a civilising influence. Secondly, it suggests Thor would have to have spent a long, long time in the Blake guise, learning and training in a field that is, shall we say, somewhat tricky, requiring not a small amount of sacrifice. Thirdly, it’s seen as a selfless, humanitarian vocation (to which, considering some doctors I’ve dealt with, I say ho ho). It’s a deliberate role meant to inform the thunder god’s character, to give him a reason to protect humanity instead of the more attractive pursuit of pillaging his way across the cosmos in a goat-drawn shagwagon.

I think Thor is also unique in that the context that defines him isn’t as dependent on his rogue’s gallery. Instead, the facets of his character become illuminated by his relation to the other gods that surround him. His supporting cast are largely made up from the mythical Norse pantheon, with a few invented gods thrown in for good measure. There’s scope for decent stories in his search for them when they go missing (which seems to happen a fair bit), but a Thor series with them completely absent would be unthinkable, or at least so divergent from the average that it wouldn’t really be a Marvel Comics’ Thor story anymore. It would, however, still be a Thor story, in that the character has existed for a very long time prior to Marvel’s take, and it’s worth noting here that obviously there is a distinct difference between the two.

By incorporating the mythological pantheon, a different spin is given to the usual superhero template. It makes the non-mythical rogue’s gallery less important (which is good, because that side of things tends to be weak), but gives the character a strong supporting cast, and some absolutely cracking mythological bad guys. I mean, elsewhere in comics we see a lot of myth-based evildoers, but are any of them as good as Loki? Surely Thor’s arch-enemy is up there in the list of all-time great comic book baddies. The practical result of the pantheon’s existance is that there’s less of a need for the comic to deal with Thor locating these antagonists. At the simplest level, he knows them because myth tells us he’s been engaged in battle with them for centuries. Thor didn’t need to ‘discover’ Loki, or the frost giants, and neither does the audience, because of the pre-existing literature (which isn’t to say the writer shouldn’t still define them within the context of the Marvel U, of course).

Finally, one aspect of the character that always interests me is how, considering his all-powerful nature, Thor is the Marvel character best suited to deal with the theme of death. A lot of that is inherited from the mythology, of course. Norse culture was very clear that all stories had to have an ending, and that a hero’s tale wasn’t complete without his or her death. With Ragnarok, the people of the north made it very clear that not even the gods could escape from this. What’s fascinating is how the Marvel version of the character embraces these themes. As I said at the beginning of this post, to diminish Thor from god to human is in one sense to kill him. The Marvel U not only incorporates Ragnarok, but has inflicted it on its characters several times (and not even the vikings were that cruel to their gods). Death becomes just another element of a cycle, a reflection of an overarching superheroic theme: our heroes die, but they always come back. And Thor becomes Donald Blake, yet always returns to godhood.

Click here for the Delineation Archive.

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Joe Kelly’s departure from the X-Men marks the point where I’d given up on Marvel titles. Let’s not even think about what the fuck was going on over in Spider-Man.

The bankruptcy was the best thing that happened to the company.

For a while during the early 00s, it seemed that Marvel were willing to do anything, no matter how nuts, to their characters. Daredevil was better than it had been since Miller, Priest’s Black Panther was (and still is, to this day) the most intelligent political thriller ever to be written in a superhero title; maybe one of the most sophisticated runs of any comic ever. Bendis’ Ultimate Spider-Man was just brilliant, and with Ultimate X-Men first and the Ultimates later Mark Millar was about to define what became Marvel’s house writing style for the decade.

I was a massive fan of Babylon 5, so you can imagine how much I was looking forward to the Great Maker’s Amazing Spider-Man. But hands down the craziest, and best, decision was to get Grant Morrison on New X-Men.

I’m not a Chris Claremont fan. So it’s incredibly easy for me to say that Morrison’s X-Men is head and shoulders above every other attempt to write with those characters. It seemed that he was willing to do anything with the title, an exercise in sheer imagination and possibility. Never mind Millar on Fantastic Four: Kirby’s legacy was carried forward in this title.

I’m not sure whether, from a creative standpoint, Marvel learned the right lessons from their successes. Jemas-era Marvel shows the incredible possibilities of writers left to do whatever they want. Instead, it seems that interesting elements of the Ultimates, New X-Men and Straczynski and Bendis’s work have been cherry-picked and then applied to years of interminable “events”. I can’t fault the marketing/business side of things; the sales figures say it all, and who’d have thought that the Avengers would become a brand to dominate even the mighty X, and without a film to back it up?

Like I say, I like new and fresh perspectives. It’s even important that the “industry” is more switched-on in business terms (Christ, I remember when the X-Men movie was a huge, global success, yet the comics of the time not only ignored it, but went out of their way to be hostile to any possible new readership that may have happened along). I’m not sure that the correct way to exploit this is to just overlay a style that was interesting five years ago on every fucking title that’s released.

Because what we have now, once again, is editorial-driven comics. Civil War/Secret Invasion dominates everything, and stifles the creativit of the individual titles that are meant to support it. To my mind they just aren’t enjoyable to read, or at the very least nowhere near as enjoyable as Morrison’s X-Men or JLA, or even Bendis’ first hundred Ultimate Spider-Man issues.

If I’ve got any conclusion to arrive at, it’s this: DC and Marvel have both chosen to stick to editorially mandated paths, the only difference (and the heart of why one company is doing better than the other) is that DC chose their path ten years ago rather than five, which makes it appear less “fresh”. But it’s only relative, because God knows Marvel’s approach started to look stale before World War Hulk.

Damn, I’ve gotten all pessimistic again. But one thing cheers me no-end. There’s never been a better time to be a Transformers fan.

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The first Authority paperback is still the only comic collection I’ve ever picked up on the strength of the artist alone. Although it eventually won me over to Warren Ellis’ writing, I’d bought it specifically due to an interview Bryan Hitch had done for Mark Salisbury’s book Artists on Comic Art.

Hitch’s style is incredible. He defined “widescreen” comic art, and to paraphrase from the above book: while the typical 90s style artwork would have a huge guy flying up away from the Earth filling a full page splash with the planet a small circle in the background, Hitch’s style would be to draw a the curve of the Earth filling up a double page spread, with a tiny figure flying out of it. A far more majestic way of suggesting something huge and epic.

While his Ultimates work is probably his best to date, I think I prefer the Authority stuff with Ellis, in particular the sense of scale he brought to the Shiftship invasion in the second story arc. I don’t think anyone’s ever pulled off the size of an alien armada quite so well. It’s this that makes me think his upcoming work on Fantastic Four has mind-blowing potential.

The only real weakness, I think, could be in the writing. Hitch’s time on JLA was unmemorable, but I’ve read that’s likely because he and writer Mark Waid didn’t quite mesh. I think he needs a huge idea or image to play off, something Mark Millar was able to provide in Ultimates. I don’t think a vague direction to draw something cosmic works with any artist who isn’t Jack Kirby. I hope Millar’s able to give his artist something to get his teeth into. Something we’ve never seen before. And maybe a little less of Reed Richards as an autistic supervillain.

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In the previously mentioned Story, Robert McKee’s book on (amongst other things) script writing, he notes that it’s easier to write experimental and challenging structures in ‘realistic’ settings than it is in ‘fantastical’ ones. The example he uses is The Usual Suspects, which structurally is all over the place. Fantasy and SF films are more conservatively structured because the audience needs some kind of grounding in order to identify and relate to the film, and you’ve got to do enough work as it is to suspend disbelief in your nuclear-powered gorilla robots without throwing in an arse-backwards narrative.

I think there’s a similar glitch with cosmic comic book stories (or SF generally). There’s a tension between making something relatable and going completely crazy. Also, I think many writers, given the chance to write absolutely anything at all with no limits find themselves pushed to write something either coherent or interesting. Jack Kirby was able to do it because, after all, he had an incredible amount of imagination to spare. But even then, his most successful stories (in my opinion, of course) were ones where Stan Lee was able to tether them, if only a little, to human considerations.

The original Star Trek was fortunate in that it was breaking new ground. It had pro skiffy writers on-staff, and the Enterprise was able to whip around alien worlds and concepts that had never been succesfully portreyed in that way on telly before. Even then, the ship herself was the constant, the establishing hook between scenes. The series was not able to maintain its quality further than the first two seasons.

Move forward to The Next Generation, and the patchy early series are the ones with the original-series style exploration. As TNG improved, it became more about an exploration of the familiar characters, and their interactions within the boundaries of the known, rather than with the strange new worlds of the famous intro monologue.

Deep Space 9, from a dramatic standpoint perhaps the most successful of all Treks, doesn’t bother with an exploratory mission at all, and instead features one primary location and delves deeper still into the interactions between its characters. This evolution seems deliberate, moving away from the difficulties of maintaining audience engagement while showing something completely new every week. Voyager tried to do the exploration thing again, and proved to be absolutely pants. The Star Trek franchise has turned further inwards still, now only addressing events of its own continuity’s past.

Space opera comics have never been big favourites round my way, which is a little odd considering my interest in, well, every other kind of space opera. So it’s been good fun to find a number of excellent recent cosmic comic stories: better, in fact, than most of the stuff in the Earth-bound sections of the respective universes. From DC, I thought Adam Strange by Andy Diggle, Green Lantern and GL Corps, the space sections of 52 and then Starlin’s Mystery in Space have been brilliant (I didn’t read Rann-Thanagar War due to poor word of mouth, but I’ll probably read it at some point). The success of these comics have been due to a real feeling of structure to the DC’s off-earth universe, not to mention all have a secure grounding of some kind: either the quest to find Rann, and then return to Earth, or the development of Oa, Mogo, various minor planets and, in particular, Hardcore Station, as real functioning settings that feel both alien and familiar, that appear both functional and alive.

And the same can be said of the two main Marvel space stories: Annihilation and Planet Hulk. Like the DC stories, they have both been firmly grounded either on a single planet (in the latter case) or through a single overarching storyline. Both storylines have benefitted from a strongly consistent tone and continuity, and given a long time to really establish us in their alien environments. In fact, this kind of consistency isn’t only advisable in stories set in space; it really should be standard practice in any ‘event’ or longterm story arc.

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Chris Sims of the Invincible Super-Blog has recently confronted and defeated a neferious South American content-thief. What better way to commemorate the event than with a Kirby-inspired comic book tie-in?

And while we’re riding with the King, didn’t Mike Sterling mention the possible enkirbification of Swamp Thing recently?

Why, yes. Yes he did.

This afternoon’s lightboxin’ brought to you by material cribbed from Kevin Church and Brandon Bragg’s respective sites.

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In my previous post, I mentioned that Steve Ditko’s depiction of the Astral Plane complemented Jack Kirby’s designs of an infinite cosmos. They are very much two sides of the same coin, rooted in a fantasy of a universe as incredible as we can possibly imagine.

Of the two, I think Kirby’s has fared better, with deep space photography such as the Hubble telescope images showing us breathtaking vistas that Galactus could conceivably be traversing. Mysticism, on the other hand, has become ever more discredited, more to the taste of religious obsessives and occult practitioners who demand no objective level of evidence.

There is a lot of eerie beauty to be found in Ditko’s work, as evidenced by Alan Moore and others in the recent BBC documentary on the artist. It is a realm that is as rarely used by Marvel as is the good Doctor himself. There is some crossover with Marvel’s horror titles, not just in the 70s but during the Midnight Sons series in the 90s, but these have mostly concerned themselves with depictions of hell rather than any other realm.

If anywhere, the comic to get closest to this magical sense of unreality was Grant Morrison and Ryan Sook’s Zatanna, written for DC. There was very little of this in Brian K. Vaughan’s recent Doctor Strange miniseries, though this isn’t really a criticism as story-wise there was no reason to utilise it.

DC’s 52 at one point was meant to map out the company’s shared universe, defining, for example, the cosmic setting for their Green Lantern stories, the Spectre’s magical realm, etc. I’m not sure how succesful this was, as 52’s story changed in the telling, and I understand the magical side of things was eventually defined in titles like Shadowpact, which unfortunately I don’t read. But this concept of definition would perhaps be of use in the Marvel universe.

Perhaps this is the point of the Mystic Arcana series, to focus the magic-based stories in the same way Annhilation did for the outer-space ones. Again, this is a series that I haven’t been buying, using characters that don’t really appeal to me, and a series-of-one-shots structure focusing on these character individually rather than a solid story arc, which very rarely produces work that I like.

It is an under-exploited niche for Marvel, and one that could perhaps be better addressed in the way I mentioned at the beginning of the post: instead of keeping the cosmos and the astral plane separate, a series that explores how the two realms compare and contrast to each other, the eldritch shapes and illusions of Ditko versus the energy of Kirby’s dots.

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No, not this one:

I’ve got a post brewing about Marv Wolfman’s Tomb of Dracula run, and some of Marvel’s other horror titles. I first read about many of the characters when they turned up as guests in superhero titles; Werewolf by Night in Ghost Rider, for example, and Hannibal King in Dr Strange. Werewolf by Night, incidentally, should by rights be one of my favourites, but it really isn’t. I like the concept, and of the horror genre’s Big Three I tend to prefer wolves to bats or the walking dead. For now I’ll just note I can’t get past the awful pun used for the character’s secret ID.

Some years ago, I picked up some second hand Dr Strange comics from Hay-on-Wye, Wales’ foremost repository of knowledge, second-hand books and dust. Paper is cheap, while food is expensive. A good place to be if you want obscure hardbacks, old Justice League issues, or if you’re a goat. My enduring love of pre-supervillain Tony Stark comes from a copy of the Armour Wars I found there when I was 9.

One Dr Strange cover, from what I remember, had a warthog version of the main character. I’m really going to have to dig that one up. The other one was one of the middle parts of “The Montescu Formula”. It’s the first time I read any horror-related stuff, and it stuck in my subconscious. I never realised it was a fairly significant storyline, or at least as significant as you can get in the niche-within-a-niche of Marvel’s magic-based titles, and I never thought I’d ever find out how it finished. I hadn’t thought about it in years, when the collected edition turned up at my local comics emporium.

It was this, plus Brian K. Vaughan’s incredible Doctor Strange miniseries that brought the good Doctor back to my attention. I can understand completely why many writers find the character difficult, not least because of his near-omnipotence and the inconsistant nature of his powers.

These difficulties are brought to the forefront in crossover stories that emphasise Marvel’s shared-world. These events invite you to compare the power levels of, for example, Spider-man villians to other heroes, the disparaties becoming painfully obvious. After all, how long, exactly, would it take for Thor to knock Kraven the Hunter out? To the nearest second? It was stated explicitly in Civil War that Strange could have ended the whole thing with a wave of his hand; excuses need to be thought up to preclude the involvement of characters as powerful as that, to the detriment of these characters and the underlying meaning of the work.

But on their own, in their own titles, characters like these can be emersed in limitless unreality, free to explore underworlds and outer realms if imagination, a mystical reflection to complement Jack Kirby’s pseudo-scientific cosmos. If Doctor Strange needs anything, it’s less a grounding in a grim, realistic world than a Grant Morrison style journey into the extraordinary. And extraordinary is one thing a Doctor Strange title needs to be.

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