25
Apr
Doctor Doom plays a different role in any potential Doctor Strange comic than he does just about anywhere else.
In an issue of Fantastic Four, if Doom shows up, he is inevitably the antagonist. In an issue of Spider-Man, he is almost always the antagonist. In Avengers, antagonist. If he ever shows up in an X-Men comic – antagonist. When he’s not the antagonist, his presence is just about always a MacGuffin instead. And this is fine and good. Doom is a bad guy. He should be the antagonist.
But in Doctor Strange’s world, Doom isn’t necessarily the antagonist. He can be, but the thing about Doctor Strange is that, when it comes down to magic, he’s inevitably superior to Doom. Doom’s not bad by any means – really, he’s impressively powerful in a magical sense – but his desire to master both science and magic means that his magic will always be weaker than Strange’s. (But it doesn’t necessarily mean that his science will always be weaker than Reed Richards’ science. This is one of the ways magic is slightly different from science.) Doom’s entire character makes him often unsuited to be an antagonist for Strange, because in a battle between the two, Doom is almost always attacking at a disadvantage, and Doctor Doom doesn’t do that when it’s possible.
Plus, Doom doesn’t really have any reason to be an antagonist for Strange. Most of the time, anyway. Certainly Doom’s ever-present power lust is always going to be cause for potential strife. But he doesn’t dislike Stephen Strange particularly, not like he hates the Fantastic Four or doesn’t understand the motivations of Captain America. Stephen Strange makes perfect sense to Doom: a man who sought mystical power and got it, and who protects his home turf from outward threats. Of course, there’s more to Strange than that, but it doesn’t matter because what Doom sees, Doom understands. Everything else is just window dressing.
This means that Doom is a relative rarity in Doctor Strange stories; he’s a true wild card. Not like Baron Mordo, who on their rare team-up occasions inevitably would turn on Stephen the moment it seemed convenient. If Doom throws in with Strange, he will (mostly) throw in with Strange for real. But there’s no guarantee that he will throw in with Strange, because it’s entirely possible that Strange’s goals will stand in sharp relief to Doom’s.
Which means that when Doctor Doom shows up in a Stephen Strange story, you get a novel experience not normally associated with Doctor Doom: you don’t necessarily know why he’s there or what he’s going to do. And that’s valuable.
Top comment: Just looking at the artwork MGK chose for this post makes me wonder: When did Doctor Strange sport a “Meathead” mustache, and why isn’t Doom mocking him for it? — ps238principal
24
Apr
A lot of the interblogowoobs have been rhapsodizing of late over the Espresso Book Machine, which can print and bind a book in about five minutes while you wait, and therefore can access a range of titles far surpassing any regular bookshop. And it’s owned by Blackwell’s, which is primarily an academic book chain. People should be rhapsodizing about this. Right?
Well, no. Not really. Here are some issues I’ve got.
1.) Blackwell’s plans to price Espresso books at about the same cost as… regular books. I dunno, maybe they’ll get cheaper over time, but generally I find when private manufacturers establish a price point they’re not eager to drop it unless competition forces them to do so, and here we’re talking about a good that A) everybody produces more expensively and B) Blackwell controls the methods to produce more cheaply. Which is a nice way of saying “it’s unlikely that they will lower their prices.” And if instant-on-the-spot produced books which avoid the necessities of large print runs aren’t going to get produced more cheaply, a lot of the Espresso’s appeal drops away immediately. It can’t make academic books cheaper either because those are already printed at such small print runs that the savings generated by the Espresso are minimal at best.
2.) The books the Espresso makes – I’ve seen one – aren’t really that nice looking. Presumably this will improve as the technology improves. But really, they aren’t replacements for proper bound books. (Certainly not at the same price.) And if you’re not buying a book because you love the very bookishness of books, why not just get a Kindle or something?
3.) If I was looking for a good way to just kill independent bookstores, this would be it. You set up an Espresso kiosk in a mall somewhere – congratulations, you now have a bookstore that can outmatch the selection of any bookstore ever. You could probably fit an Espresso “store” in that little stall in your local neighborhood that currently houses a Kernels (which only sells popcorn so all they need is shelves and a popper or two). Sure, maybe they’ll offset their costs by adding knowledgeable staff, and – HA HA HA HA no I’m just kidding because that’s not going to happen. More likely is that you’ll see entirely automated kiosks. Stick in your credit card, get your book.1
In short: sure, it’s promising technology. But it’s still promising technology in the hands of a corporation seeking to derive maximum profit from it, which is not the same as maximum facility to its potential customer/user base.
24
Apr
(NOTE: Brad Reed originally submitted this idea to me a couple weeks back, and I liked it so much that I removed one of mine to make room for it, because it’s nifty. I tweaked it a bit, but this is still mostly Brad’s.)
The reasoning is simple: you all know about ley lines, right? And how in popular fiction where there is magic, there are inevitably places where lots of these ley lines meet up, and that’s where magic becomes more powerful and spells have more oomph and faeries still walk the Earth and occasionally go to McDonald’s (redcaps love Big Macs for some reason) and children born in the area become Mystic Defenders or the like?
Well, it follows that if there are supermagical places where the ley lines converge, then there must also be submagical places where the ley lines are way the hell off on the horizon. These are the Boring Places, where magic is mostly absent. Children born here grow up to become accountants, chiefs of human resources and the boring kind of scientist who sniffs at MythBusters because they make jokes and such. In these areas, magic is especially hard to do. Not impossible – but difficult, because you’re martialling the energy of the universe at a distance. It’s like you’re used to broadband and suddenly you’re back using 24K dialup.
The most boring of all places – the single least magical place on Earth – is a small town in New Jersey, twenty minutes from of Newark. And the least magical place within that town is Herbert’s Taco Hut, which if it were not for its location would be your standard “Mexican restaurant run by white people who have never seen a chili pepper in their lives” joint. It should have had the lifespan of any other mediocre restaurant in the middle of nowhere (IE, short). But Herbert’s does very good business indeed, for one simple reason:
It’s where sorcerers and mages come to do business. Because it’s safe. Herbert’s is the magical equivalent of an old Wild West township, where you have to check your six-guns with the sheriff when you enter. Most sorcerers can muster a simple teleportation spell for a quick escape from it if necessary (and those that can’t can prepare something similar in advance) but not much else. SHIELD and HYDRA and everybody else all know about it, but nobody ever tries to fuck with Herbert’s because having a neutral ground (which happens to serve mediocre burritos) is inherently a useful thing to have at one’s disposition.
And because of this, it’s not only a place to do business, but a place to network, to chat, to simply unwind and shoot the shit with one’s fellow magical practitioners. After all, the food isn’t that bad, and they let you bring your own booze for a small surcharge (and you’ll want to, because their beer selection is terrible), and how is anybody going to know that you just stole the fabled Red Ruby of Un’nx if you don’t have someplace to show it off? Plus, it offers the best grounds on the planet for picking up within the profession. (There is no guarantee that the person you take home won’t try to sacrifice you to a demon prince – but come on, you think magicians are going to give up sex?)
And yes, Stephen Strange goes there occasionally. Because he has to make appearances, keep tabs on goings-on, keep his ear to the ground – and because it’s nice, every once in a while, to take off the mantle of “world’s most powerful sorcerer” for an hour or two and just tuck into some nachos.
Top comment: While we’re mentioning ley lines, can we get a story where Dr. Strange investigates Disney World to see if it truly is ‘the most magical place on Earth’?
I’m partly interested to see the mysterious origin of Walt Disney’s occult practices, but I mostly just wanna see Dr. Strange ride the tea cups. — RobotKeaton
23
Apr
The setup is simple: Something Bad Happens. Something that is so bad, Dr. Strange heeds an impulse he normally ignores: to call in backup.
Now, his instincts say “call in the Defenders.” The Hulk, the Silver Surfer and the Sub-Mariner aren’t his friends, not really. And they’re barely even a team. So he heeds his better judgement as well, and relies upon the visions provided to him by Hoary Hoggoth himself to pierce the mists of time. Time is, after all, only an illusion sentient beings create in order to keep from experiencing everything at once, and possibly exploding in the process. Magic is quite useful at navigating time. At least to a certain extent.
Unfortunately, Dr. Strange is a bit rushed in his casting of the spell, because, you know, Something Bad Is Happening (Right Now). So he doesn’t try to determine specific outcomes, because that would take multiple castings of a very complex temporal rite and he doesn’t have that kind of time. (Plus casting the spell needs a tincture of Skryian chmrr-venom, and he doesn’t have a lot of that lying around.) All he really has time to ask is one question:
“Which of the Defenders will I need assisting me in order to prevent this devastation?”
Of course, he asks the question because he wants to make sure that calling in the Defenders is the right thing to do – and yes, he probably should have considered asking about the Avengers or the X-Men or the Initiative or the Guardians of the Galaxy or whoever while he was at it, but come on, he’s not perfect and sometimes when you’re in a hurry you get a tiny bit sloppy. And in fairness, he at least knows now that calling in the Defenders will work. Somehow, there is the potential for it to work.
But here’s the thing. There have been a lot of Defenders. And although he was probably thinking of the Hulk, Namor and Surfer…
…maybe he gets Deadpool, Gargoyle, Sleepwalker and Tagak the Leopard Lord.
…maybe he gets Deadpool, Blazing Skull, Charlie-27 and Captain Ultra.
…maybe he gets all villains, from the shortlived villainous incarnation of the Defenders: Batroc, Blob, Whirlwind and Electro. (And Deadpool.)
…maybe he gets Devil-Slayer and Daimon Hellstrom, who immediately try to kill each other while Deadpool provides commentary.
…maybe he gets a team that’s entirely dead: Thunderstrike, Porcupine, Torpedo and Jack of Hearts. And I mean “dead,” not “reanimated to come save the world.” He casts the spell and finds out everybody he needs to save the world is deader than Elvis. Also he gets Deadpool, who is not dead, although after about ten minutes Dr. Strange will probably wish Deadpool was dead.
…maybe he gets Luke Cage, Spider-Man, Iron Fist and Hawkeye (Clint Barton, not Bullseye), and has to explain what he’s actually doing when he’s not supposed to be the Sorcerer Supreme any more. Which is harder than it looks when you’ve got Deadpool hanging around asking all sorts of inappropriate questions.
…maybe he gets Daredevil, Hellcat, Paladin and Nighthawk (and Deadpool), and has to figure out how a bunch of people who don’t have any powers are going to help him save the world. Well, sure, you can shoot Deadpool a lot and he’ll live, but that’s not exactly proactive, you know?
Really, it could be anybody. The only certainty is you know that Deadpool will be involved somehow, because that’s just too good a chance to pass up. And maybe, just possibly, at some point the Hulk, Namor and Silver Surfer will show up anyway. (“Seriously, Strange. What possessed you to go fetch Joe the Gorilla but ignore the Avenging Son? Not that I don’t appreciate you respecting my privacy, but surely you must have gone insane at some – SOMEBODY SILENCE THIS NATTERING IDIOT IN THE BODY-STOCKING!”)
Top comment: A bunch of awesome-but-underused characters join forces to kick ass while their conflicting personalities provide humorous dialog? THIS IS SUCH A NOVEL IDEA! — NCallahan
22
Apr
At his essence, Dr. Strange is a reactive hero. There is nothing wrong with this. Sometimes comic writers get tired of “reactive” and want to write heroes who proactively take on super-evil and what have you, and it can work for a little while if you set it up properly (Abnett and Lanning are doing a good job with the premise in Guardians of the Galaxy by having the heroes’ “proactiveness” actually be an extended mission in disguise). But reactivity is generally to the good because our system of justice is ultimately reactive as well. Reactively, we maintain order. Strange preserves order in this sense.
Dr. Strange’s major villains, though, aren’t really opposite forces of order, not in that sense. Dormammu and Nightmare want to conquer, but they would remove our system of order and replace it with their own version (which might not be nice, but it’s still generally orderly). Mephisto wants to use our system to feed his own ends. Baron Mordo just wanted to become powerful and important. All of these guys fundamentally weren’t villains who were trying to tear things down.
Which brings me to Nyarlathotep1 and his opposition to Strange. Nyarlathotep isn’t like Dormmamu or Nightmare; he doesn’t want to conquer. (He might occasionally conquer a place, but he doesn’t really care.) He’s not like Mephisto; he doesn’t want greater power. (He has plenty.) Nyarlathotep is just a sadist, pure and simple: he gets his pleasure from driving people mad and causing pain and suffering (preferably emotional pain and suffering). He’s a psychopathic god who doesn’t get cocky and make mistakes, except when he wants to make mistakes. After all, what fun is it if you can’t at least offer Strange the opportunity to stop you?
Nyarlathotep is much like a gambler in this respect; he gets his kicks from the thrill ride, from the chance that maybe his schemes won’t work. (It’s no fun going fishing if the fish just jump into the boat, after all. You want them to fight you on the line.) And the Sorcerers Supreme of Earth have very frequently proven tough enough opposition that Nyarlathotep has been forced to up his game significantly, which means he just has to go out and do the psychopathic god-equivalent of buying a really good fishing pole. He plans his schemes out years in advance now, and when it’s about to drop everything into the crapper, that’s when he knocks on Stephen Strange’s door, grins his youthful grin that any unknowing onlooker would call “full of zest for life,” and sits back to watch.
Of course, Nyarlathotep’s downfall is that he has a bit of an ego. He never really considers that the Sorcerers Supreme started predicting his manipulations centuries ago, or that they’ve gotten better at doing it over time. And he’s never really considered that just maybe, one of their long-term projects has been figuring out how to destroy him…
Top comment: That looks exactly like my high school yearbook photo.
Creepy. — Rian Fike
21
Apr
Science tells us that the earth is six billion years old, formed from a clump of dust which coalesced into a solid planetoid where water eventually formed and amino acids and electricity created the spark of life. An old shaman will tell you that the world was created when Turtle pushed some dirt onto his back to cool down, then splashed some water on it by accident. And the Sorcerer Supreme will tell you that the key to understanding magic is that these two stories are both true, despite their obvious contradictory nature.
They had names for them in the old days: “leviathan,” “aspidochelone,” “tarrasque,” jasconius,” “turisas,” “yacomama,” the Rainbow Fish, the Jormungandr and the Hydra. There were of course other monsters who had those names, but the fastitocoloni were mistaken for all of them at one point or another. When the great beasts of the sea had back-itches, they would rub up against undersea cliffs and push them upwards, creating hills and mountains where there was previously only flat land. When they played with one another in the ocean, they created tsunami. One time, when a lunatic human successfully hunted one of them, the corpse floated out to a part of the ocean that was empty, and it eventually became Greenland.
Eventually they all disappeared and life grew a little duller. People invented interesting things that made the world a smaller place – tall ships, telegraphs, digital watches, the Internet, that sort of thing. The hidden corners of the world grew fewer and fewer, and certainly there were no places remaining where the legendary sea monsters might still lurk.
Which is why it’s awfully surprising when a group of five fastitocoloni surface near Okinawa for a few minutes – causing a tidal wave that causes billions of dollars in damages to a good chunk of the Pacific Rim. They’re even larger than they were in olden times – the smallest one is the size of Manhattan Island! – and when it becomes clear that they’re real everybody starts to panic. Especially when it becomes clear they’re headed for major fish populations, and it looks like these big boys’ idea of a light snack would probably drive more than a few major species of fish to extinction. The world’s gotten too small for the leviathans.
Killing them is difficult enough (as many armed forces soon discover), but would Doctor Strange want to kill them if he could herd them offworld instead? After all, they’re not trying to hurt anybody. Really, they’re quite peaceful as giant sea monsters go. Surely if they left Earth once, they could do it again, right?
Of course, that in turn begs the question: where did they go? And where did they come back from? Was it the same place? And how did they get here? And was it just a fluke, an accident, or did somebody do this on purpose? And how do you get them to leave?
Top comment: Well, from the art you used on this entry, I say Dr. Strange taps one blue for an Unsummon spell. — malakim2099
20
Apr
My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.
20
Apr
Something that has been cropping up in the comments every so often is the observation that most of these posts are, thus far, “dude-centric,” and there are no female characters being mentioned and so on and so forth. And the thing of it is that when I think about how to write Doctor Strange, this is far from the case.1 It’s just that once again the pre-arranged nature of these posts means that sometimes I’m not anticipating potential reader needs (even as regards what’s essentially just a series of loosely constructed, unfinished pitches) as well as I would like.
But rest assured that out of all the ideas I’ve put forward so far, this is my favorite – the last of Strange’s three “interns,” and I personally think it’s the strongest. Sir Humphrey and Creaky are entertaining and interesting, and that’s valuable for supporting cast members, but I think this has more meat on the bone, so to speak.
First off, before we go any further: Baron Karl Amadeus Mordo is dead. He is dead. Conslusively so. After a long, mostly bad life, he died trying to atone for his sins, both in the general sense and specifically those he committed against Stephen Strange, a man who once his great friend. Astrid Mordo, his daughter, is also (very probably) dead. And Astrid, who was crazy as sin and evil as the Devil, killed everybody else on the planet with Mordo blood in their veins, so determined was she to become the sole remaining Mordo in the world.
Well. Almost everybody.
See, Karl Mordo had many personal failings, and one of them was a tendency to dog the ladies as much as possible. Luckily, out of all the potential bastard offspring he ever could have had, in the end he sired only two – Astrid, and Indrani, his daughter by a Dalit prostitute in Chennai. From a very early age, Indrani knew two things: she was in a very bad position, lifewise, and that she could do real magic. The Brahmin sorcerer-circles in India – steeped in tradition and privilege – frowned upon the lower castes doing magic, to say the least, so she could not find a teacher. Not that this was her primary worry at the time, for her mother died when she was six, stabbed by one of her clients, and Indrani found herself on the streets – and young girls usually don’t last long on the streets.
But Indrani survived, partially because of her nascent magical abilities and partially because she was in many ways the human personification of “no, fuck you,” and she taught herself whatever she could whenever she could. She stole money and food, learned English and eventually went abroad, where she found out that every other mage on the planet was just as unwilling to deal with her as the mystics in India were. Of course, this had nothing to do with caste; it had everything to do with her being a Mordo.
Karl spent a lifetime ruining his reputation in Earth’s mystical community, and Astrid’s short but utterly psychotic career destroyed whatever remaining goodwill might have existed towards the name in the first place. (Most of the other Mordos Astrid killed weren’t really prizewinners either. Karl Mordo did not come from a particularly humane or idealistic family, which explains a lot about him.) And Indrani’s noteworthy temper didn’t help her overcome that reputation, to say the least. Nobody was willing to risk teaching “another goddamned Mordo” one single thing about magic.
Nobody, that is, except for Stephen Strange.
Stephen looked at Indrani and saw the raw talent, of course, and he saw the driving ambition and fierce pride that were both hallmarks of Karl Mordo’s personality. But he also saw Indrani’s capability for compassion, the sort that a lifetime of hardship can provide like little else. He wanted to preserve that, to nurture it. And there’s something else, not that he’d ever admit it or even realize it.
See, Stephen Strange is a man who found himself comparatively late in life, thanks primarily to the Ancient One knocking a lot of sense into him. He grew into adulthood believing that children were a bother, that he didn’t want children, that he didn’t want to be a father – and of course part of this was his firm belief that he would make a poor parent, a facet of his deep self-loathing. It comes as a bit of a shock, then, in your late forties when you’re pretty much a confirmed bachelor, to suddenly realize that you would have liked to be a father. And by that point it was too late – not just because it’s a bit late in the game to start thinking about a family, but by then he knew he was on track to become Earth’s next mystic defender, and having children would be a callously irresponsible act given the threats to their safety and the possibility – no, make that likelihood – that he might orphan them.
So he mostly put that idle wish of how things could have been aside and forgot about it. And that was fine. But along comes this walking bottle of spit and vinegar, the daughter of a man he once called brother. (Good heavens, she’s practically his niece!) It would be irresponsible not to make sure she learned what she needed to know – and after grasping her mystic potential, that becomes all the more important, because Indrani’s native ability is definitely on the high end of the scals (much like her father’s – and Stephen’s, for that matter). So it’s clearly necessary.
Right?
Top comment: If I complain that there aren’t enough kittens in your ideas, will that get me a kitten story? Because you are completely (and chauvinistically? eh? eh?) lacking a kitten point of view here, buddy. — Cookie McCool
19
Apr
There are Sorcerers Supreme in every parallel universe. Sooner or later, one of them would eventually decide that contacting other universes for advice or information would prove useful. That’s what the Supremenet is for.
Of course, calling it the “Supremenet” conjures up the expectations that come with all things internetty, which is why most Sorcerers Supreme – including the 616 version of Doctor Strange – will strongly try to discourage anybody from calling it that. This isn’t email or instant-messaging or a chatroom. Magic doesn’t quite work that way, especially when it’s trying to bridge dimensional barriers. The closest analogue is the “party line” back in the early days of the telephone, when all the ladies in town would share a single phone line and gossip, but sometimes your connection to that line would be shaky or staticky and sometimes you’d get connected somewhere else. Combine that with difficulties of magical communication that are Olympian in scale and – well, it’s not Google.
The Supremenet rituals were created by a Stephen Strange – not ours, but the Stephen Strange of universe-82432, the universe that was utterly destroyed by that reality’s Korvac. That Stephen Strange, along with his reality’s Silver Surfer and Jean Grey, were exiled from it by Korvac before he condemned everything else in that universe to oblivion, and that Strange determined that this could not be allowed to happen again. He maintains the Supremenet with the assistance of Jean’s telepathic abilities (her connection to the Phoenix Force lost forever with the death of her reality) and the Surfer’s Power Cosmic. That it works at all is testament to their skill.
Unfortunately, he can’t monitor how the various Sorcerers Supreme use it. This is problematic, because as noted previously, not all Sorcerers Supreme are good guys. Some are bastards. Some are dimensional pirates. Some fancy themselves multiversal conquerors. And of course there’s the problem of the Marvel Zombies zombie virus, which isn’t transmissible through the Supremenet, but you never know if the Sorcerer Supreme on the other end is one of the handful of Sorcerers Supreme who have been infected. (Thankfully, most outbreaks of the Zombie virus tend to be resolved quickly, if brutally. Earth-2149 is one of the rare exceptions where the perfect storm of unlikely, horrible events took place. And undead Sorcerers Supreme really aren’t Supreme any more – but they can still be wily.)
But even when the other party isn’t maliciously plotting your downfall, there’s always the question of whether or not they’ll give the right advice and whether the listener can accept it. It’s hard enough to take advice from Croctor Strange (of Earth-8311, aka “Earth-Spider-Ham”), but consider Stephen Strange trying to not read into the suggestions of Karl Mordo of Earth-9091 or Cyrus Black of Earth-22238. Issues such as these, combined with all the others, are why Supremenet is primarily useful for warning Sorcerers Supreme about interdimensional incursions (such as the expansion of the Devil Papacy of Earth-2793) – and as a desperate last attempt when every other source of a potential solution has come up dry.
Of course, Sorcerers Supreme get desperate more often than you would think.
Top comment: It sounds exactly like trying to get community support for Linux. — NCallahan
18
Apr
18
Apr
Not an “intern” this time, but something else that needs to be addressed – namely, the need to fill out the magical world of Earth-616, which is dreadfully undermanned at present.
In the old time Baiame the Sky Hero, the first wise man, made the world and all people and taught the Aborigines the magic of the Dream. In the old time Bunjil the Eagle made the world and men (and possibly women, although some credit his wife Bat for the idea) and taught them all the skills they would need to know. In the old time the Rainbow Serpent made the mountains and the waterholes and fought the Sun to create the rain.
All of these stories are true, and resolving the contradictions (well, not actually resolving, but…) of the hundreds and hundreds of Aboriginal creation myths and magic stories – all of which are simultaneously true thanks to the heart of the Dream – is the source of deep, old magic, as old as the Earth itself. Magic that old invites many a person to come along and misuse it – be they white, black, brown, yellow or any other colour (including cyan – it’s a long story). More troubling yet are those who come to exploit Uluru, which is the universe’s Bridge to the World of Waking Dream.
(Some whitefellas call it “the Nexus of all Unrealities,” but that’s only because they called the place in Florida something like that and like names to sound like other names. The two spots really don’t have much to do with one another at all. Well, except when they do, but that’s not often.)
The shamans of the Dreaming People are powerful, but not inclined to combat such things. But there are always a few sorts who aren’t going to be shamans or wizards, and are too clever and observant in the ways of the wider world to be wasted as mere hunters. These men (and very occasionally women) become the hunters-of-sorcerers – those who can travel and manipulate the Dream itself. It’s not magic. Calling it magic is like calling a duck magic because it swims. It’s just something they can do.
Jampamarri is the title of the current man filling this role, a half-Warlpiri in his early thirties. (Or at least he appears to be that old, because that’s how many years ago he was born as we count them. He doesn’t age on his trips into the Dream unless he wants to.) Unlike most of his predecessors, he has a bit of a reputation within the wider world. Well, practically nobody knows him outside of Australia, but at least the non-indigenous peoples know him. He stopped a very bad man one time from doing unpleasant things to a young girl that man had kidnapped, and all Australia called him a superhero (they were very pleased to finally have one), and thanks to a newspaper interviewer not really understanding much of anything he became known as “Talisman,” which didn’t make much sense but he decided it was easier just to let them call him that.
And that’s how it goes for him. He knows the realms of the spirits (like everyone else to do his job, he loves to explore the unreal worlds) like the back of his hand, and knows most of the important political developments in those worlds as well – who’s angry at who, who’s made peace with who, who’s planning to invade Earth, that sort of thing. When Doctor Strange needs advice about traveling into the wider pandimensional realm – the bleeding realms of thought alone which mankind can barely conceive, let alone survive – Jampamarri is always his first stop. And when he needs advice about a foretelling-dream he just had, well, maybe he’ll stop by and ask Jampamarri about that as well.
Because working relationships? Are good things to have.
Top comment: Sorry Blackmage, but my personal canon explanation for why Australia has few superheroes goes like this: Animals with deadly poison. — HittheTargets
17
Apr
There is always a Sorcerer Supreme, and for very nearly as long as there have been Sorcerer Supremes, there have been Wongs.
“Wong” isn’t really a name per se. It’s a title that the bearer takes in place of his name (which is why it doesn’t really relate back to any actual culture – “Wong” is a poor Romanization of either “Huang” or “Wang”). The current Wong is the first in his family line to take the name – and his family have been serving Sorcerer Supremes faithfully and skillfully for ten generations, so you get an idea of how seriously the Sorcerer Supremes take the naming of Wongs. You have to be the most deeply trustworthy sort and utterly devoted to the mission of the Sorcerer Supreme to become Wong.
Nobody remembers Wong’s previous name before he was Wong. That’s part of the magic of the name. Once you become Wong, you have in a sense always been Wong, just as the previous Wong was always Wong even before he became Wong, and so on and so forth. This is all part of the duty of the Wongs – you sacrifice the idea of yourself, in a way, to continue the tradition. Wongs are a source of pride in every family line in Kamar-Taj.
Except for the seventeenth Wong. He is not spoken of. Ever.
The seventeenth Wong had the misfortune to serve a Sorcerer Supreme who was particularly malicious, cruel, arrogant and selfish. As has been said before: Sorcerer Supremes are tasked with protecting their reality. There’s no rule that they have to be nice about it, or even that they have to be particularly careful of preserving life in this universe. Some Sorcerer Supremes have been utter bastards, and this one was one of the worst. Even so, the seventeenth Wong gritted his teeth and did his duty faithfully, serving this Sorcerer Supreme to the best of his abilities –
– until that Sorcerer Supreme took notice of the seventeenth Wong’s wife.
After her funeral, the seventeenth Wong walked away from his service, cursing the Sorcerer Supreme, the Vishanti, the whole damn system. And here was the problem: they couldn’t just replace him and bring out the eighteenth Wong, because what very very few people knew was that “Wong” was in fact not a name nor a title but a sort of magical equivalent of an acronymic word of power, the capstone of a very powerful spell of imprisonment. That’s why there’s always a Wong, why the people of Kamar-Taj make sure that a new Wong is brought forth within hours of the death of his predecessor.
The ruling council of Kamar-Taj sent out thief-chasers and bounty hunters to capture the seventeenth Wong, but like all Wongs, the seventeenth Wong was a master of martial arts, fluent in dozens of languages and cultural norms, and exceptionally intelligent – exactly the worst sort of person you want to have evading your attempts at capture. Five years passed, and eventually the council appealed to the Sorcerer Supreme, who took matters into his own hands. However, the Sorcerer Supreme discovered that the seventeenth Wong had anticipated his intervention, and all his spells of seeking and searching were useless. The seventeenth Wong had prepared exactly the right magical countermeasures.
Of course, the Sorcerer Supreme was extremely smart – and not burdened by morals – and it only took about half a dozen massacres, maybe four thousand deaths all told, for the seventeenth Wong to give himself up so that the Sorcerer Supreme would stop killing innocent people. But by this point, the Sorcerer Supreme was infuriated, both at having to deal with this insect personally, and that the insect had thwarted his spells so judiciously. So instead of simply killing the seventeenth Wong, the Sorcerer Supreme created a torture bubble hanging just outside the universe, stuck the seventeenth Wong in it, and called the matter solved.
But the problem is this: the spell which is completed by the existence of a Wong would start to unravel were there ever two Wongs around at the same time. And if the seventeenth Wong ever managed to escape that bubble realm, thousands of years later, a decent and good man only very tenuously sane after millennia of horrors man was not meant to endure – he would not be inclined to care…
Top comment: Zifnab’s just over-compensating for the fact that he didn’t get to do the “Two Wongs Don’t Make a Right” thing first… and we all feel it.
Its as if MGK set up the “shave and a hair cut” and now the rest of us are forever silenced because someone already said “two bits”. Its maddening. — Zenrage
"[O]ne of the funniest bloggers on the planet... I only wish he updated more."
-- Popcrunch.com
"By MightyGodKing, we mean sexiest blog in western civilization."
-- Jenn