One Coin Reads 27: Doctor Strange: Herald, by Mark Waid and Barry Kitson

Doctor Strange: Herald, by Mark Waid and Barry Kitson

2019

Marvel pumps out over 50 comics a month. A couple of them are pretty good, the rest are folks paying rent. Which is this?

The cover looks epic

I generally won't touch monthly Marvel and DC books anymore because they are so editorially driven. The books must exist to fill up space on the shelf, so they find some people to work on it. That's not a recipe for good books. Good books happen in spite of this system, not because of it.

I think Doctor Strange is a neat character, though I've never been deep into any of his books. This collection was marked down to ¥315 (less than the price of a single issue of this new!), so I figured it would be a chance to read some Doctor Strange and see what the state of Marvel's monthly books are like at the same time. Mark Waid is generally a reliable super-hero writer, but I haven't read much of his work in the past twenty years.

The art is competent yet bland for most of the book

Doctor Strange is pretty well-known at this point, as a B-list comic and movie character. Here, Waid wants to cross him over with Marvel's cosmic side for a fresh spin on the character. In the first issue of the five in this book, Galactus is transported to the realm of magic, where the realm begins transforming Galactus and putting the entirety of reality at risk. Doctor Strange must serve as the herald of Galactus!

Are you really the herald if Galactus doesn't proclaim it?

That was the first problem: you can't put reality at risk all the time, Marvel. Whether it's the M'kraan Crystal, the House of M, the Age of Ultron, whatever, after sixty years of this stuff, it's nearly impossible to establish convincing stakes at that level in a Marvel comic anymore. Four times a year, all of reality in the Marvel universe is put at risk. It isn't an epic situation in and of itself.  Make no mistake: not a single Doctor Strange reader hasn't seen the whole of existence threatened before (in a comic). This is nobody's first comic anymore.

The only time I liked the art was when Kitson was directly channeling Kirby

The second problem was that it was done in a five issue story which tells the danger of Galactus but doesn't show it at all. This story probably should have been done in two arcs, spaced out. Do a five issue story getting Galactus to the magical realm and solving a related issue. Let him putter around in the background in the next two arcs, and then have it out of control in a final arc, which would let it feel epic, like something that had built up. This story was just Doctor Strange saying Galactus can't handle the magic energy, then someone else saying it, then another person saying it. It was very tell-don't-show stuff. 

The third problem is that none of it is really exciting. Galactus is taken over by Dormammu for 12 pages, Dormammu monologues, then Galactus absorbs him. There are no stakes, nothing is really explored. Just a bunch of stuff happening without consequence. Before decompressed storytelling took over the mainstream, I think you could make a five-issue epic, but this story simply doesn't have the space to examine the ramifications of anything.

Kitson could draw any crazy shit he wanted to, and this was what he went with

I read all of this, as that's part of the challenge for me this year, to read everything, but it was bland. The art really didn't help. This is the first time I've ever read Kitson's work to my memory, but there was no joy in it. It really seemed like a guy drawing what he was paid to draw, and little else. There were some pictures of Galactus going power-crazy which had some passion, but it was hard to find elsewhere in the comic. I don't know his work, so it's hard to say if inker Scott Koblish helped or hindered it. At different points he draws dozens of Marvel characters, and I'm taken back to the days of Secret Wars II, where the best compliment I could make was that the characters were all on-model.

"Ah, yeah..."

The biggest disappointment with this was the lack of character. The book was so concerned with dishing out plot that there wasn't really space for Waid to make any of the featured characters people. That's probably the thing that I enjoy most when reading mainstream comics, the chance for characters to really take on a personality. When comics are being published at such a high frequency, we should really get to know the characters well, and I didn't get that here. It was focused on plot, and not a very interesting one.

The main value in reading this was so that when I go back to saying mainstream comics aren't worth sorting through on a monthly basis, I have a recent concrete example to back that statement up with, it's not just a blind statement.

Hey Marvel and DC, you want me to buy new books? Make something good and get it Eisner nominated.