As ash falls on my home city from a fire publicly declared a state of emergency, I find my thought less on the possible need to evacuate my little cabin in the hills and the air quality and more on where Doctor Strange is in the world.

There’s been a subtle but noticeable shift in popular culture between science fiction and fantasy; one could even say that the rise of Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter and the decline of Star Trek could show a clear geekdom curve, which always makes me wonder why the Master of Mysticism isn’t doing more.  Sure, he’s a member of the Illuminati and Sorcerer Supreme of Marvel Universe, not to mention now on the New Avengers, but no solo book.  His appearances have been rather desparate as of late, mainlining an evil potion to take on the Hulk, unable to save his fellow teammates from something as simple as a plane crash or the rather obvious traitor in their midst;  he even sat out the entirety of Civil War.  It’s almost as if he’s suffering from The Sentry Syndrome, where the House of Ideas knows they have a colossally powerful character that looks great on the page, working his mojo and fighting the good fight, but simply have no where to put him where the challenge is high enough.  As if the plots are too thin to
support such a heavyweight.

Are they right?

I got a chance to preview the directed-to-DVD animated Doctor Strange movie while at Comic Con with my Distinguished Colleague, Tom Bondurant and my fairly comic critical best bud, Rich;  these were two people I had some solid confidence in as new perspectives on a character I was pretty much guaranteed to like.  How can you not enjoy something as universal as a Sorcerer Supreme?  Living in a Sanctum Sanctorum with his faithful manservant Wong, fighting things mere mortals couldn’t possibly understand by wits and the mystic arts, maybe even a little fisticuffs from time to time… it’s a style of adventure that can really bloom in this day and age.  And, let’s face it, I’m a Marvel Junkie and proud of it, this movie could do no wrong.

Or maybe it was the fact that I was wrong.  Really wrong.  From the rather unusual changes to the origin (losing his unusually close sister from a brain tumor he seemed to specifically go to medical school to cure?) to the ham-handed characterizations of the young Dr. Strange being a callous young doctor (he’s specifically looking for the more flashy cases that he can write papers on to make himself and the hospital he works for rich, but he won’t treat a ward full of children who have all fallen under the same coma?) to strange addition of more characters to a fairly uncluttered and elegant origin story (so the Ancient One had a multi-cultural squad of men and women to protect the Sanctum Sanctorum?) to the downright nit-picky of me (Wong has hair?  BLASPHEMY!), the movie was nothing that I expected.  Rather like JMS’s mini-series from a few years back, Strange, the animated movie tries to reinvent the wheel for a younger, hipper audience.

And I think that’s why Marvel isn’t using Doctor Strange to the character’s fullest extent.  Someone in the chain of command thinks a man with a mustashe talking about the Winds of Watoomb and the Hoary Hosts of Hoggoth is a silly idea and that Doctor Strange needs to be “x-treme”.  You’d think that after the 90’s this sort of thinking would have died out but it’s alive and well and making sure that the Ultimates come across as loud explosions littered amongst pop culture references.  Don’t get me wrong, the Ultimate books have been a godsend to Marvel and a revolutionary idea that still brings new readers in hook, line and sinker, but the most popular of the line, Ultimate Spider-Man, started with the very same simple ideas that brought his character to life years ago.

When asked about how the movies have influenced the all-new, all-different writers coming aboard to Amazing Spider-Man, Bob Gale spoke brilliant words when he said that the movies should follow comics, not comics following the movies.  There’s no need for updating characters when the heart of the story is still there.  And we’re not talking Rocket Racer or the Aquarian, we’re talking heroes that have stood the test of time and embedded themselves into the comic book readers’ consciousness.  There is no need to worry about Doctor Strange being too powerful or too heavyweight for a book when we come to see the man behind the hero more than we look for the window dressing.

Brian K. Vaughan wrote a fantastic little mini-series called Doctor Strange: the Oath in which he was not only challenged magically, but morally as well.    And there’s the heavyweight; there is no need to dumb down Doctor Strange, give him hip new threads, or find resons for him not to be involved in the greater plots.  Just give him a challenge not only to his power, but to himself as a person.

It worked for Spider-Man.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 8th, 2007 at 1:00 pm and is filed under Marvel, Movies, News & Views, The Fifth Color, Version 1.0 Blog@. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.