MOTW 6/25/14: Stephen Strange.....you are a debtor. Insolvent
New Avengers #20, Strange has a roadblock, so detours down an even darker road.
New Warriors #6 the Avengers as usual try and jerk around these brave new heroes who don't share the same name. It's a shame the book is probably cancelled before it ever got off the ground. It's fun! Look!
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And it makes me think that a story where Tim Hunter stole the Helmet of Fate and joined the Justice League would be pretty cool.
Plenty, seemingly. When he was dead one of the many times he's been dead, it was just sitting in some crater in New Mexico and hundreds of people were lining up to lift it - it was like the first movie, except everyone in the comics knew what'd happen if you could do it. Hell, Doom showed up to try it.
Awesome
This is how Mara interrogates captured terrorists.
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That was my first thought too.
I initially thought of it as a nod to Shazam.
It's also where J.K. Rowling stole all her ideas. Harry Potter is eeriely similar to Neil Gaiman's Timothy Hunter.
Or it could have been a fluke and they're totally similar on accident if she never read the work. But man. Two British boys of the same age, who discover they're magical messiahs, who wear the same glasses, have a pet owl, and look exactly fucking alike.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_influences_and_analogues
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Well there's also the magic school stuff from A Wizard of Earthsea.
Neil Gaiman is almost always the guy at the table who is cool with everybody all the time. I almost wonder what it would be like for someone to get on his bad side...
You get sued and lose the rights to Angela*?
*=very simplistic and inaccurate recap of events as they actually happened, but for bad jokes brevity is best.
Whereas the Books of Magic... well
it isn't about that
No quite the opposite, they're guys you actually want to see win. They're the Illuminati's last chance to look in the mirror and see a monster looking back.
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He summons Alan Moore.
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I'm bored with it, to be honest. The Illuminati thing was fun for the first mini (even if the Beyonder mutant Inhuman bit was a "bwah?" moment), but ever since then every single subsequent iteration has been crappier, and Marvel's partial multiversal collapse isn't doing it for me.
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I mean it's kind of neat at some parts and is certainly high stakes but also nah I don't think Dr. Stephen Strange sold his soul to Cthulu so he could eat Earth. That seems beneath a Sorcerer Supreme.
If he does nothing here, then not only do the 7 billion people on his Earth die, and the 7 billion people on the Great Society's Earth die, but also the trillions or quadrillions of life in BOTH universes die.
If your choice is "Everything dies" or "only some people die" Strange is going to choose the latter eventually.
Also because Marvel doesn't know what the fuck they want to do with their concept of Sorcerer Supreme.
The stuff in New Avengers is basically him fulfilling his role as a defender of Earth from otherworldly threats.
It always stacks on top of itself with atrocious bargains he may have made if anyone feels like following up on them, and it's always kind of tepid and uninteresting.
I'm much happier when he's a complete and reasonable individual whose job is hard to do than someone who's constantly turning to ridiculously dangerous magical shortcuts because of narrative tension.
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Looking at the different takes on him over the years, he can be cold and clinical, but he enjoys some human comforts and can be a bit goofy (like when he treats the completely otherworldly as entirely mundane). He'd be like the chair of a Ph.D. committee, an engaged mentor to the apprentices but absolutely demanding in his requirements.
And when the situation called for it, he'd be the most ice-cold motherfucker on the planet.
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A Mystic version of House?
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Clea was a member of the Fearless Defenders (but Strange was terribly written in that series).
I quite liked the Strange/Clea relationship back in the 90s. By that time Clea herself was Sorceress Supreme of the Dark Dimension, so they were more equals (with Clea actually being more powerful of the two.)
As for power levels, I never saw the need to depower Strange (some of the best comics have been with incredibly powerful characters.), but if a writer needs Strange depowered with magic you can do that easily for a story or two. Anything ranging from "the stars are right" to "Cyttorak says "No"." could influence the power Strange has.
Well, Strange was a surgeon...
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Twice; he also personally murdered his mentor, The Ancient One, to save the world from Shuma-Gorath. Strange having to decide if he should sacrifice the few to save the many has been a recurring theme of his comics for decades.
Anyway, the thing Marvel is foolishly missing is that Strange isn't House: He's Doctor Who. He's immortal, his home is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, he can go anywhere in time and space, and he always carries along a gaggle of less informed companions who he can exposit to. Seriously, look at how popular Dr. Who is these days. He and Strange have extremely similar setups, to the point that making his book work should be a no brainer.
Instead we get all this "turning to the dark side" business which has been going on ever since World War Hulk (or since the Peter Gillis run, if you want to get technical). I'm starting to suspect it's Marvel's way of keeping Strange's power in check so that he can hang out with the other heroes without overshadowing them all the time.
I think the issue for a lot of people isn't necessarily how powerful Strange is but how fuzzy the rules are. After all, most of the threats he faces are as powerful if not more powerful than he is. But what can he or can't he do in a given situation? It often seems like the writer pulls this out of his/her ass. Still, if you look at Strange's comics over the years there's a general consistency to what he can and can't do. It's just the edges that are fuzzy. That and his limits might not be readily apparent to a new reader unless the writer spells it out for them.
this was in May of last year, and they hinted at it a bit more in Young Avengers with Billy as the person that is supposed to rewrite the rules at some point to come
I don't see any big magic-centric events on the horizon, so I doubt it will happen before a new Strange ongoing. It would be kind of neat to see a Strange book where he has to re-learn everything because the rules have changed.