I did a bunch of these a few months ago, but other than this one, the others all eventually coalesced around a single theme. So I’m tossing this one out on its own, like an orphan.
(Yes, yes, I know, old meme. Nyah nyah nyah it’s fun.)
30
Apr
Pretty much from the start, emails and comments have appeared to the tune of “well this is all well and good but Dr. Strange isn’t the Sorcerer Supreme any more so everything you’re doing is meaningless.” And, as amusing as it is that people’s chief reason for dubbing this “meaningless” is that it does not necessarily follow current canon rather than the more pressing issue of it being unlikely that I will get paid moneys to write the comic any time soon, it’s still wrong. I mean, people, come on. You know I’m a continuity dork by now. I only mock Geoff Johns because he is so very like me in that he likes everything to fit when it’s possible to make things fit. And in this case the fix is really quite easy.
Pretty much from the first one of these things, I have been trying to gradually instill the idea that the chief plot point of the series is “majorly bad shit is coming down the pike.” And when I say bad shit, I mean seriously baaaaaaad shit, man. Shit that is bad enough that it scares Stephen Strange, who is very pointedly somebody who doesn’t get scared and doesn’t panic about much of anything.
(Additionally: I can sum up the reason for said bad shit coming down the pike in exactly three words.)
And when Strange saw what was coming, he knew what he had to do. He needs to work unfettered, without the constraints and day-to-day issues of the mortal world distracting him, but more importantly even than that, he needs to make sure said bad shit isn’t coming at him. The nice thing about being the Sorcerer Supreme is that you’re always the Sorcerer Supreme, until you’re not – but most people don’t understand that the job is attained in such a holistic manner. They think it’s a title of rank, or a privilege. They think it’s about having the Eye of Agamotto, the Cloak of Levitation and all the other trappings. (Which are nice, sure, but they don’t make you the Sorcerer Supreme.)
And he’s been preparing this for a long time, making sure that it was believable to any superhero who might think about investigating. (“Not being able” to use his magic to do simple things like save the New Avengers from a lousy crashing plane, for example.) He started downplaying his abilities more and more, making it seem more and more difficult – because the New Avengers, decent and brave as they might be, would be cannon fodder in what was coming, and he needed to make sure when it did in fact arrive that they were nowhere near the scene of the real fight.
And then he crowned all of this with his masterstroke – choosing a “new” Sorcerer Supreme.
Which actually worked something like this:
continue reading "“It isn’t calm before the storm. Stuff happens.”"
29
Apr
(People just kept mentioning them and mentioning them over and over again, and I kept thinking, “man when I get to #29 they are going to accuse me of pandering or plagiarism or something like that.”)
The Dire Wraiths hate you. It’s not personal. They hate everybody. But it also is personal because if they knew you, they’d hate you just because you’re you. The Dire Wraiths are not very nice people.
But they don’t hate you blindly. They have reasons for hating you. You’re a human, and humans – along with ROM – are of course the reason the Dire Wraiths went from being one of the most feared races in the galaxy to a collection of suicidal prisoners in Limbo. Most of the Dire Wraith population is dead because of humans (and ROM). The Dire Wraiths don’t want to conquer the humans; they want to exterminate them and make them suffer. And they want to do it before they go to Galador, because the Dire Wraiths want to keep enough humans alive as hostages that the Galadorians won’t try to pre-emptively annihilate them.
And here’s the thing: the Dire Wraiths are much, much smarter than their Skrull cousins. They know how to pull off an actual secret invasion. They’ve done it before, you see. And unlike the Skrulls they don’t need to take out and replace superhumans. The Dire Wraiths know that messing with superheroes in any amount just tips them off. The Dire Wraiths are once again just doing what they do best – they’ve infiltrated a small town in middle America that’s nothing special – except for a few key elements it happens to be near. Chief among these are a high-tech research facility specializing in solar energy transformation technologies and a weatherbeaten steppe with inherent mystical properties…
…because the Dire Wraiths, this time, are led by a prodigy Dire Wraith, verily the Dr. Doom of Dire Wraiths in that, unlike the rest of his species, she possessed both incredible skill with Dire Wraith super-science and Dire Wraith sorcery.
“But wait,” some continuity nerd out there says, “the Dire Wraiths lost their magic abilities when ROM transported Wraithworld into Limbo.” And this is true. However, this fugitive Dire Wraith, one of the scant few dozen to escape ROM’s massive neutralizer attack on Wraithworld and only a child at the time, applied her scientific mind to the Wraiths’ lack of magical power source and came up with a very simple solution: hire out.
Someone – something – has given the Dire Wraiths magic again. And frankly, it’s more powerful by far than the podunk, pedestrian sorcery they worked before; now, Dire Wraith sorcery is powerful enough that when they use it, someone like Dr. Strange notices. (It is, after all, his job.) And they’ve got a direct line to whomever’s providing them with mojo; the magics they wield are so powerful that they are literally burning out their own bodies when they use them. But they’ve got enough magic now that they can pull Wraiths out of Limbo, and more Wraiths join their numbers every day, and they don’t care how many of them die –
– because if they can convert Earth’s sun into the new dark sun of the Wraiths, with science and sorcery, they win. Even if every Dire Wraith was immediately afterwards killed (which would be entirely possible because nobody likes the Dire Wraiths), they would forever have left their mark once more on the universe.
All of this begs two major questions. Firstly – who’s powering the Wraiths? For my money, I’d guess that it’s someone who somehow gains power from their magic-fueled deaths, which means it’s probably someone really bad. Cthon? Mephisto? Satannish? (You just know that whatever the answer is, it’s not going to be good.)
And second – given that Marvel Comics can’t show ROM in his armor, how is ROM going to get involved in this, anyway? Because you totally know he will.
Top comment: Like Naked Snake and Naked Jehuty before him, Naked Rom shall be a powerful, yet wholly unstable force to be reckoned with. — Doctor Hal
28
Apr
He also likes nachos.
Published in Comics, I Should Write Dr. Strange
THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT DOCTOR STRANGE.
1.) He is polite. Not just because he routinely deals with impossibly powerful forces whom he does not want to offend (although that is certainly part of it); Stephen Strange is polite because at his core he is a man who has been humbled. He was an arrogant misanthrope who realized exactly what he was and decided he didn’t like that, and did his best to change. Someone like that is polite because not being polite is exactly the opposite of the person they want to be.
2.) But he’s still a doctor. He tends to think he knows best. This is because usually (although not always, not by any stretch) he does know best, and he gets irritated when people don’t do as he tells them to do (which is often). Because he’s polite, he tries not to get angry about it. Usually he succeeds. But none of this changes the fact that he decides courses of action based on knowledge and observation first and foremost, and he doesn’t like being contradicted or shown up, and he’s really, really quick to issue orders whenever he needs something done. He might apologize later, but he’ll issue them.
3.) He likes people. He didn’t always, but nowadays meeting somebody new is always a pleasant experience for him, especially when they are not trying to blow up his face with magic. He genuinely enjoys the experience of a new personality, because people are the only things in this universe that are still capable of surprising him on a regular basis, and because Sorcerer Supremes, for all that they are guardians of stability and order, like to be surprised. It makes the job a lot more bearable.
4.) But he’s not really comfortable with them. How could he be? He can stop somebody’s heart just by thinking hard, for crissake; he’s a step above most of humanity (or, really, a few flights of stairs above) and he knows it. He’s not comfortable with that fact, not in the least; he doesn’t like the idea that he’s not just a normal man, especially after the Ancient One only really got him to start learning by forcing him to accept that he was precisely that very thing. His power is vast enough that he’s on par with most demigods; it’s hard to look people in the eye when you realize that fact and aren’t quite happy with it.
5.) He’s urbane and blase. Not in the way of a jaded hipster, but – not a whole lot surprises or shocks him. He’s been exposed to so many alien cultures (dimensionally alien, spatially alien, or any other sort of alien) that dealing with a species of incestuous cannibals wouldn’t faze him in the least. (Or, if you prefer: everybody is a bastard in their own way.) Tack on the combat with otherworldly horrors, and you have a very cool customer. When other superheroes wince or gag at a brutal murder, Doc is looking over it calmly and utterly unfazed. He’s what writers wish Wolverine actually was, except Doc has to deal with the actual alienating consequences of being that sort of person.
6.) He’s a bit eccentric. He puts peanut butter on his spaghetti because that’s how they do it on Earth-2991 and when he visited he got used to it. He prefers to read crosslegged sitting on the ceiling because “you don’t get that glare you get sitting on the floor in the sun, I hate that.” He asks seemingly rhetorical questions without answering them (something that annoys the hell out of Wong, not that Wong would ever complain). He enjoys listening to reggae as performed on the harpsichord. The downside of thinking as everything as “usual” is that everything else you might like is likely not that usual.
7.) He looks at the bigger picture. Sure, he doesn’t want Earth to be conquered by Skrulls, but if it’s a choice between Skrulls and Dormammu – Skrulls. If it’s a choice between Skrulls and Nightmare – Skrulls. He knows it’s important to keep humanity alive and healthy for a number of very important reasons, but “alive and healthy” doesn’t mean “dominant civilization on the planet.” Most other superheroes get angry over this. That’s fine – most other superheroes only have to fight idiots wearing tights who rob the occasional bank, as opposed to, say, an organ-eating Prince of the Frankensteins from an alternate Earth seeking to conquer under the guise of a trading mission. Strange’s enemies are, on the whole, a lot more competent and a lot more dangerous than average. So he has to consider his duties from that standpoint first.
Top comment: At first I winced at Peanut-Butter spaghetti but upon thinking, if it was a peanut sauce then it wouldn’t be *too* far from Thai peanut sauce, which all the universe loves, and it’s an easy step to grill chicken in it and then put it over cooked noodles, which would be very tasty.
I think MGK just created a new fusion dish. — The Whelk
27
Apr
Homer made up a lot of stuff, mostly because he worked from unreliable sources.
Odysseus’ journey home, from the smoking ruins of Troy to Ithaca, did indeed last ten years. Or seventeen, depending on how you count it. See, if you just count from the time he left Troy to the time he arrived in Ithaca, it was ten years. But if you count the time as Odysseus experienced it, it’s seventeen years, because what Homer doesn’t mention is that Poseidon wasn’t the only god Odysseus managed to piss off.
Odysseus counselled the Argives to slaughter Hector’s young son, so that the child could not grow up to avenge his father and his city. This greatly angered Khronos, the god of time and destiny, who had written out the life of that young boy in advance and who greatly resented Odysseus for using free will to avert what would have become known as the Second Trojan War. Khronos was extremely irritated, but decided not to intervene on the course of Odysseus’ life.
When Odysseus set out from Troy, after he met up with the Lotus Eaters and the one-eyed giant Polyphemus, he stayed briefly with Aeolus, the man gifted with the power to control the winds, and left with a bag of wind that would blow him anywhere except home. Poseidon would not stop complaining about how this annoying mortal was thwarting all the challenges put before him, and Khronos explained to his fellow god that – if Poseidon owed him a favour – he might be able to help. Odysseus was destined to return home, ten years after the end of the Trojan War, and Khronos wanted to be sure that happened…
And so, Odysseus told the poets and storytellers that his crew stole the bag and blew his fleet off course. But that never happened. What happened was this: Khronos transported Odysseus’ entire fleet to a watery planet of carnivorous aliens called the Laestri. Odysseus immediately understood that they were in a different sea (by the stars, you see), and his crews insisted on putting in at port as soon as possible. He ordered his crew to hang back, which was a good idea because the Laestri weren’t particularly picky about what they ate and they devoured the rest of the fleet pretty quickly, seeing as how they were a starfaring race with all the technological prowess that implies.
But this wasn’t any regular old boat captain marooned on an alien world – this was Odysseus, one of the most cunning and wily men to ever live in any time period. He snuck aboard land, hid in ventilation ducts, and taught himself Laestrian over about three weeks. He didn’t understand all the technical specifics, of course, but he found out where the Laestrians kept their theoretical physics experiment installation was easily enough when he figured out the words for “time” and “travel.” (It never occurred to him that he wasn’t on Earth; he figured it was a far future where the Lamia had conquered the world.) As he sailed his remaining ship to that point, Khronos appeared and transported it to another strange sea on another world.
And so it went; whenever Odysseus got to a point where it seemed likely that he would thwart Khronos’ wiles, the God of Time would send him elsewhere. And it was always possible that Odysseus could get home from where he was, because Khronos has his own set of rules, and one of them is that he likes things to go a Certain Way. It just never happened, because Khronos wanted to punish Odysseus for his insolence – and, ultimately, for possessing free will. Khronos was determined to make sure that Odysseus would only arrive at Ithaca when he wanted Odysseus to arrive there. Odysseus’ crew are all long since dead; he sails his ship alone, with a thousand stolen technologies he only partially understands (but partially is enough).
But Khronos made one mistake. One time, to really, really get under Odysseus’ skin, he transported Odysseus to Ithaca – thirty years after he made it there, so that Odysseus could arrive to visit Penelope’s grave. And Odysseus saw it, and Khronos gloated at his captive’s pain, then turned his attentions elsewhere –
– and Odysseus was waiting for just that moment. Not the Odysseus weeping before his wife’s grave. The other Odysseus, the one who had already made it home after all the torments of a seventeen year journey, the one who had lived with his beloved Penelope another twenty-seven years before her passing. The older Odysseus had been waiting decades for this (and lying to anybody who would listen about Circe and Calypso and the Sirens and all the other hot women he totally could have bagged if he wanted to, but he didn’t because he loved his lady), because he already knew it would happen – and he told his younger self how to get home.
And now – a couple of dozen or hundred pit-stops later – Odysseus arrives in the modern day. (Somewhere off Cape Horn, actually.) He knows exactly what to do. He makes a beeline for New York City, where the Sorcerer Supreme makes his abode. Because only Dr. Strange can end his journey, and send him back to Ancient Greece where he belongs, for once and for all. He needs the really good magic to get home.
Top comment: I like the idea that Odysseus is still pulling the Trojan Horse bit. Like, he’s been to countless exotic worlds but they’ve pretty much all bought it so he thinks it’s like the be-all end-all infiltration tactic.
Especially if he has time to go on a couple adventures with Strange before he leaves.
“How shall we effect entry into Doom’s castle? It’s magically warded and patrolled by robots with killsaws for hands and murderguns for eyes!”
“Let’s build a giant wooden -”
“No.”
Double points when Strange realizes that Doom would absolutely not turn down a giant wooden statue of himself. — Five Eyes
26
Apr
A while back, somebody asked when I was going to talk about Clea. And my response was “they’re over.” Because Clea, although she is most certainly Stephen Strange’s most notable and notorious love affair, belongs in Strange’s past (at least romantically – she’s still a powerful sorceress and good friend). They were good for one another at the time, but there’s too much water under the bridge now to get back together, regardless of how sexy a platinum blonde she might be. The “bring back Clea” crowd is one motivated by little more than nostalgia, and I think by now people know what I think about nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. (HINT: I am not fond of it.)
However, there’s no reason Strange shouldn’t have a lady friend. He’s an urbane, dapper sort of fellow, the sort who in times past would be called a “real gent.” Men like that (when they are straight) can do quite well with a certain sort of woman who likes her men smart and talented (in more ways than one). And luckily, Brian K. Vaughan was good enough to kickstart a relationship between Dr. Strange and Night Nurse (who, as we all know, should properly be called “Night General Practitioner And Surgeon” but that was too long and didn’t fit on the business cards).
And it works. Night Nurse is tough and intelligent, and definitely older than the average Marvel Comics Girlfriend ™ and she can use a bobby pin to pick a lock and cut a bullet out of someone’s shoulder and all of this is just great. She is a class act who fits Strange well – they’ve both been around the block a bit and are both ready for that easier, simpler sort of relationship one only gets in one’s forties or later, the type where nobody has any patience for drama so nobody wants to create some.
Similarly, from a storytelling perspective, Night Nurse is a great fit because she is a classic explanatory/exposition target. If a writer needs to explain why magic can’t do something Strange needs to do, Night Nurse is right there – she’s smart but unlike most people in Strange’s world she’s not familiar with all the rules. And apart from being a storytelling tool, it can also be a plot hook –
– because sometimes, in the right situation, ignorance of the kind that Night Nurse has is actually the greatest protection you can have against the Eldritch Horrors From Wherever. Not being privy to the secrets of the occult world means that the secrets of the occult world will tend to overlook you. Not having to pay attention to the ebbs and flows of magical tides means that you get the chance to pay attention to that strange man in the nondescript Honda parked down the block who’s been staring at your friends for twenty minutes.
(And yes, most of this also applies to Wong – but come on, was there ever more natural a teamup than Wong and Night Nurse? I think not.)
Top comment: Someone should follow Matt Murdock around saying to every woman he meets “Do not date this man. You will end up insane or, more likely, end up in a pine box.” — Lister Sage
