So you’ve gone to the Strange side with the good Doctor and his amazing new origin movie starring Benedict Cumberbatch (click here for my review), and you’re looking to the comics for vintage strange. Well, there’s good news and bad: the good is that this is a great time to hop on board a classic run in the making with Jason Aaron’s take on Strange. The bad news is that, though the character has decades of appearances in his own magazine and with both the Defenders (in the comics the Defenders aren’t the Netflix heroes of Hell’s Kitchen but an ad hoc team featuring Strange, Hulk, Hercules, and others) and the Avengers, there are very few CLASSIC Dr. Strange runs. Over the years, Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, Gene Colan, Roger Stern, and mor recently Brian K. Vaughn and Jason Aaron have put together great runs with The Sorcerer Supreme, but it’s definitely harder to find a great Strange graphic novel than, say, an easy hop-on point with Spider-Man. For that reason, I have weighed my top 5 with the two most recent entries, one is the first collection in Strange’s current run, and the other is a fantastic standalone story that really captured everything great about the character.
1. Dr Strange Vol. 1: The Way of the Weird by Jason Aaron
2. Dr. Strange: The Oath by Brian K. Vaughn
3. Dr. Strange & Dr. Doom: Triumph & Torment by Roger Stern
4. Dr. Strange: Don’t Pay the Ferryman by Roy Thomas
5. Dr. Strange: Sorcerer Supreme by Roy Thomas & Gene Colan
It will be interesting to see if this movie causes a surge of interest in this character. Actually, I wonder if the sudden insane popularity of superheroes has led to an uptick in comic book sales in general? By which I mean those Marvel comic books that Disney has turned into movies (all the other comic book movies are probably making the general public stay very far away from the original material).
I know there are a lot of people out there who enjoy these films who would never pick up an actual comic book. I actually think that Guardians, as a highly obscure property, was helped by the fact that it didn’t look like a superhero movie so much as a quirky space opera. And Doctor Strange’s strangeness was ameliorated by the fact that it sort of came across as a Harry Potter/Inception-Matrix mashup.
My sense from talking to people is that they think the movies are great, but that the comics are still way too geeky. Obviously something like Maus is perfectly respectable, but Doctor Strange is not. Even when it comes to the movies, people turn their brains off. I thought the film beautifully explained how the Eye worked, but people were confused.
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A huge influx of women readers into comics is going on, which is both good and irritating because Marvel, in particular, has pandered to them by changing the mantles to female characters. Of the original movie Avengers, only Cap is still wearing his mantle in the comics. The rest are all worn by female characters, who would be better served by iconic characters of their own being written for them.
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Oh, I agree with you 100%. And this sort of thing is not just hapening in comics, but across all mediums. I have no problem with inclusiveness, what I cannot take is revisionism, trying to force past characters and stories into a modern mold. It does a disservice to the characters AND the modern molds. Better to invent new things.
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