Code Blue for Dr. Strange

A Trout in the Milk is one of my favorite comics blogs, and a recent post got me thinking about an incredibly dorky topic:   how to “save” Marvel’s Stephen Strange (or whether you need to).

 

He makes the point that Strange has always been a very popular “second string” character, and that many of his supposed flaws (high power levels, no clear definition of abilities, seeming ability to bail out any team) have actually been really successful in the hands of the right writers.  I think that’s about right — he hasn’t been well served by Brian Michael Bendis specifically because Bendis is just way better at telling street-level stories about complicated and underpowered characters.  That’s part of the reason that New Avengers is just so much more interesting and fun than Mighty Avengers.  But Dr. Strange is an odd fit in a team that’s way more comfortable taking on Hammerhead than Thanos.

I’ve always thought Dr. Strange’s “function” in the Marvel Universe was to be the character who united all the different magical characters.  It’s weird how disjointed and chaotic Marvel’s magical side is despite the long history of characters deriving from fantasy, mythology, and the occult.  Thor and Namor are two of Marvel’s OG’s, for example.  The company’s occult fixation in the 70’s (and it’s renewal in the 90’s) produced a string of “magical” characters including Ghost Rider and Blade, as well as a set of totally awesome, underused characters like the Werewolf by Night and The Zombie.  But there’s never been a John Constantine-type character in the Marvel Universe who could connect these all into a unified “magic universe” similar to the one that DC/Vertigo has.  And Marvel’s recent Mystic Arcana series didn’t really help that.

Strange should totally be that character.  Just like Constantine brings a specifically British, understated attitude to DC’s wide magic catalog, Strange should be the instrumentalist, pragmatic American dealing with the mystic world.  He should be the guy who connects, say, Asgard to K’un-Lun.  I mean even the phrase “Earth’s Sorcerer Supreme” suggests two strong story engines: Earth’s other sorcerers AND magic types from other realms (what does the Skrull Sorcerer Supreme look like, for example).  In a time in comics that’s seen some pretty hokey concepts like Iron Fist, Power Man get retooled into respectability, there’s no reason why Dr. Strange shouldn’t.