Comics THORsday: Doctor Strange, the Way of the Weird

We’re going to explore Doctor Strange, the Way of the Weird. It’s a comic for those who are open minded and eager to get shocked by great art. I’m not going to lie to you: I loved every single page of this volume. It’s creepy at times, funny, alluring and intoxicating. Doctor Strange is going to be portrayed by Cumberbatch this fall. Thus, it’s not astonishing to find him within the pages of many different comics across Marvel titles this year. Yes: you can spot Doctor Strange with Cumberbatch’s face in several pages. However, not so much in this volume. Doctor Strange was born back in July 1963 from the hands of Steve Ditko. He first appeared in Strange Tales #110. Doctor Strange was especially popular on College campuses. Ditko’s trippy and surrealistic illustrations through magical dimensions looked a lot like what the youth of the 1960s was experiencing with psychedelic drugs. When Ditko left drawing Doctor Strange, Marie Severin became a regular penciler. Doctor Strange had entered the Popular Culture stream along with Spider-Man, so when Esquire magazine asked for a feature to Marvel, it sounded weird. None of the male artists at Marvel took it seriously, and so the job to provide five pages of Doctor Strange’s weirdness went to Severin. It might sound like a small thing, but in a time where there were only two women working in mainstream comics, this is huge news! (Only Ramona Fradon and Marie Severin, working for DC and Marvel respectively, were in the comics industry at the time!!)

But, who is Doctor Strange?

The first page of this volume explains who Doctor Strange is. In fact, he is the one telling us his story. On the background, we have art from the old comics so that we can see and compare some of the artwork styles. (It’s cool, by the way.) Doctor Stephen Vincent Strange, aka Doctor Strange, was a neurosurgeon. He had it all: money, women, and fame. He didn’t care much about fellow humans, but when he suffered an accident that let his hands useless for practicing medicine, he embarked on a quest to find a cure. And in doing so, he became the Sorcerer Supreme, the primary protector of Earth against all mystical and strange threats.

He is a weird dude. When he was a surgeon, he would flirt with women and have fun. I suppose in the way Iron Man did. However, since he became the Sorcerer Supreme, he is making out with all sorts of female entities from other dimensions. Some things, never change, or so it seems. In fact, we meet him trying to save Earth from weird soul eaters who are threatening a kid, only to find him making out with the sexy one. Coff, coff.

Pages in this volume show us how people see the world, and how Doctor Strange sees it. Reality bends, expands and contracts all around him. Mouths appear on faces, parasitinges on people’s backs and heads, and books dare to die. Yes, you read it correctly: one of the tragedies here is that a book can die.

Stephen is confronting weird entities that are in the wrong place: soul eaters that would never appear on Earth, or other bugs who would never inhabit a human. Why entites from other realms who wouldn’t dream of going to our plane come here in desperate need? Because, as we read through the pages of the comic, we find out that some of these entities have no choice but to flee!

Doctor Strange is rather odd. He walks the streets and might even stop for a while. While he is engaged in a fierce battle, other people will just see a weird dude doing some strange movements. He can see what others can’t: an alternate reality.

Haven’t you thought about what our eyes are incapable of processing that could be out there? Scientists use different expectrums of light to take a look at the sun from a different perspective. We don’t pay much attention to it because it’s labeled as “science”. But that only proves how much there is to the world that our eyes cannot grasp!

Despite loving science a lot, I must admit that I love the occult in same amounts. I always wonder what might be out there that my human senses don’t let me process. Most of the information our body takes is rejected by our brains. So, the question is: how much of the reality around us are we able to see? Our brains function like this so that we aren’t overwhelmed with tons of information.

Some brains are more plastic than others. In fact, scientists seem to have proved that we are more or less open minded depending on our wiring and the capacity of our brains to process certain changes. The less plastic, the more reticent to let in changes that shock the foundations of the patterns that we learned as kids. And so, you have people who are close minded and eager to impose their views on others.

This is what Doctor Strange is going to fight on a multidimensional level: assholes! These closed minded foes are called Empirikul, and they’re waving a massive attack on magic. They are pure technology. In fact, they’re using technology to kill all things magic. If it that doesn’t sound scary enough, the Empirikul are waving an Inquisition-like war on anyone that uses anything magical. This means that they torture people and kill them to purify them. The Inquisition has been particularly nasty in Spain where massive amounts of innocents were purified. It got so bad that some people used it to get rid of other people. Have a neighbor you don’t like? Call the Inquisition and tell them to purify that one!

The clash here is between close minded folks using technology to get rid of open-minded folks who use magic. Many people have defined magic as “unknown science,” also in the Marvel Universe. So, it’s a little bit sarcastic that science is used to destroy science-to-be-discovered, aka magic.

In all this mess, one young client of Doctor Strange is discovering a whole new world. She is a librarian who got herself infected with bugs from another dimension. Zelma Staton of the Bronx goes to Doctor Strange because she is desperate. She’s visited regular doctors, and they all learn. So, she goes to the last place standing: magic. She is not sure of asking for the services of Doctor Strange because she doesn’t want to be seen as a weirdo.

I love the Tarot, I collect them and read them too. My favorite one is the DruidCraft Tarot. It has a problem: there’s some nudity depicted on it. So, if I use the cards in public, in a coffee shop, for example, I need to make sure there aren’t kids nearby. Reason? The moms would freak out. Some art depicted on the cards could easily be misinterpreted. I like to read the Tarot, but I don’t want to spook people around. In that sense, I’m more like Doctor Strange and less like Zelma. But I get all her feelings.

Zelma is going to put in order Stephen’s library. Well, or at least she will try to do so. In fact, she discovers something hideous: books in the library are dying! Some of the books that Doctor Strange has are pretty cool: they have magic, and they show that off with colorful ways. But when you find them without colors and on the floor with a sick aura, then, they’re dead.

In the comic, we find dualities at war: science and magic, open-minded folks and closed-minded folks, imposing ideas and letting people be. But we also find out about the dangers of opening other people’s fridges. This might sound like a funny episode, but Doctor Strange isn’t the only one having strange things in the fridge. It comes to no surprise, then, to acknowledge that Cumberbatch portrais on screen two of the owners of the weirdest fridges in history: Sherlock and Doctor Strange.

But why did the fridge and diet of Stephen made me giggle? I still remember opening the fridge of a friend years ago. I still regret it. I don’t know if the artists of the comic have also friends with funky fridges to use as inspiration for Stephen’s fridge contents and diet. But it looks like there must be some reality involved in this.

This volume is excellent, and it makes you think a lot:

• What is science? What is magic? Many of the things that we call science today were considered magic in the past. So, how does our point of view change over time as an evolving species?
• We’ve been at wars because of closed-minded people trying to impose their views on open-minded people. This goes from trolling on the internet, to unleashing Inquisitions. Are we ever going to learn? Are we doomed? Or, can we use science to show up how the brain works? Or is that still magic for us?
• Can books die? If a book is never read, that book is pretty much dead. But, can we consider it dead if it’s just dusty? Are we killing books by ignoring or refusing them the oportunity to be read?
• What can be considered a normal and healthy diet? Food customs change across cultures. So, what we see as yummy or disgusting is heavily related to our culture. Do you think Western countries are imposing their diet habits around the world? (Think about exporting McDonald’s) From our point of view, may fridges around the word are kind of weird, aren’t they?
• Doctor Strange is a former surgeon with unusual habits. However, do the unusual habits of someone make him/her a weirdo? If so, how much of our imposed views on someone affect their identity? If we take the issue from another point of view, how does our identity and the imposed identity mingle or act with each other? Said in other words, how does your view of yourself and the view the others have of you collide?

I could keep going, but I will leave that to you. Give Doctor Strange, the Way of the Weird a try!

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