I was browsing through a magazine shop when I came across Dark Horse’s new Conan the Legend #0, written by Kurt Busiek and drawn by Cary Nord. I handed it to the cashier, who pored over the cover for long moments, trying to find the price. This is a bad sign for comics sales, I thought, if people don’t even know where the price is listed, and I pointed to the box in the left hand corner of the front cover. The cashier exclaimed in disbelief, “25 cents!?” Then he shouted to the manager, asking if it were possible that this was actually going for only 25 cents. I was startled, too. I hadn’t actually looked at the price myself, and fully expected to pay the usual exorbitant price for 21st century single issue comics. Like the 99 cent Batman comic of a while back, this is such a welcome gimmick for introducing a series to new readers – if they even notice the amazingly low price.
Back when I was working on the coffee table book Marvel Universe for the publisher Harry N. Abrams, I was informed that one of the proofreaders had asked why Conan had been left out of the book. Well, I explained, Marvel did not actually own Conan, but had licensed the comic book rights from the estate of his creator, the late Robert E. Howard, who had written the original Conan stories for pulp magazines in the 1930s.
But the proofreader had a point: Marvel had been publishing comics about Conan for over two decades by that point, and it was likely that, before the first Conan movie, more people knew about the character from the comics version than from the original prose stories. Marvel may not have owned Conan, but people associated Conan with Marvel.
(I also suspect that Conan had an unrecognized impact on Marvel’s superhero books. Conan was, after all, the first hero of “The Marvel Age of Comics” who was not only allowed to break the law, by being a thief, but even got away with killing his enemies. Hence, Conan paved the way for Wolverine, the Punisher, and the grim and gritty heroes who were to start springing up in 1970s superhero comics. Perhaps, then, Conan’s comics debut is another signpost of the end of comics’ Silver Age.)
So what a surprise it was that in the course of the shifts in Marvel’s ownership in the 1990s, at some point Marvel apparently decided to let the rights to Conan go. I remember being asked by The Comics Journal what I thought would happen to Conan, and I predicted that Dark Horse would pick up the rights.
And, lo and behold, the prophecy is fulfilled, and now Dark Horse not only has started reprinting reprints of classic Marvel Conan stories (in The Conan Chronicles series), but is launching a brand new series of Conan comics as well.
In Conan the Legend #0, a prince of some distant past era comes across the ruins of a statue of a monarch of an even more ancient time, King Conan of Aquilonia. Through this device, Kurt Busiek dramatically reintroduces Conan as a man who became more than an ordinary man by rising to the status of a legend, a heroic figure about whom stories are told long after his death. (There is a similar device going on in the framing sequence for Brother Bear, as noted in a previous column, and even in The Triplets of Belleville). Though the Prince’s aide, the Wazir, disparages Conan as probably a bloody-minded local chieftain, the Prince clearly is awed simply by the noble visage of the statue and what its inscription tells him of the devotion of Conan’s subjects. To this Prince, Conan is a heroic figure, perhaps a role model whom he wishes he could be like. The inscription states that Conan will return in the time of his people’s needs. The Prince would not know this, but this prophecy should remind us of the legend that King Arthur is not dead, but will return when Britain needs him (a legend that inspired the 1980s comic series Camelot 3000). So thus, interestingly, Busiek links Conan to Arthur, according him a similar stature.
The Prince orders the Wazir to compile as much historical information about Conan as he can. When the Wazir begins his report, starting “Know, O Prince. . . .” longtime Conan readers will recognize that this is the narrative, derived from Howard’s work, that in condensed form was repeatedly used by Marvel to introduce its Conan stories: “Hither came Conan the Cimmerian,. . .a thief, a reaver, a slayer. . . with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth. . . .”
Busiek here is following a strategy reminiscent of Roy Thomas’s memorable work as the writer of Conan’s adventures for the first ten years that Marvel published Conan comics. Thomas was highly attentive to the literary aspects of Howard’s body of work. Although Howard died young, he clearly had an overall plan for Conan’s life story, which took him into various lands in his fictional Hyborian Age and various occupations, finally leading to his ascension to the throne of Aquilonia. Following Howard’s death, other writers, notably the team of L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter, wrote additional canonical prose stories filling in the gaps between the Howard stories and after them, leading up to Conan of the Isles, which concludes the saga by literally sending the king sailing off into the sunset.
In Marvel’s comics version, Roy Thomas took the method even further, not only adapting Howard’s Conan prose stories into comics form, but devising new stories and multi-issue arcs that led up to Howard’s original tales or even incorporated them into ongoing storylines.
If, according to the official Conan canon, Conan spent a few years as a pirate in Africa under the name Amra the Lion, then Thomas would set the Conan comic there for the same length of time: Conan’s life actually advanced in “real time” in the comics. By following the established outline of Conan’s life, Thomas could move him from one exotic setting to another, change his role in society from thief to mercenary soldier to pirate, bring recurring characters, most notably Red Sonja, in and out of the saga, and involve Conan in longrunning storylines like the siege of Turan, early on in the comic. This lent the series continually changing variety, and also allowed for character development, as Conan slowly matured and gained greater skill at coping with the civilized world.
The success of the Conan the Barbarian comic enabled Thomas to expand the scope of his survey of Conan’s life. The color comic had begun with the outset of Conan’s career, as he left his native Cimmeria as a teen to venture into the “civilized” world beyond, and moved chronologically through his life, year by year. In the black and white magazine Savage Sword of Conan, Thomas ranged forward in time, setting stories in later decades of Conan’s life, and crafting superb adaptations not only of Howard’s original tales, set in Conan’s thirties, but also, eventually, of the DeCamp-Carter stories as well. In the quarterly Giant-Size Conan, Thomas dealt with a middle-aged and wiser Conan’s early exploits as king of Aquilonia, and the King Conan series presented a still later Conan, now truly regal but still a formidable warrior, and father and mentor to his teenage heir Conn.
Thomas turned various Howard stories set in other time periods into Conan stories: Thomas based the swordswoman Red Sonja, for example, on two characters from Howard stories set in historical times. Thomas would even construct new Conan stories around fragments of unfinished Howard stories or even his poems (like “The Mirrors of Tulan Thune,” if I correctly recall the title). So for Busiek to build a whole comics story around the familiar “Know, O Prince” narration, finally showing us who that prince and the speaker are, is very much in Thomas’s classic Conan tradition.
One might think that Thomas’s approach to Conan was clear to everyone, especially after all the stories he wrote for an entire decade. But Marvel seems to have missed the point, and once Thomas left the Conan books, continuity went out the window. Conan ceased to advance in time, his personality remained both fixed and shallow, his adventures were interchangeable, and his stories turned into rote exercises in meaningless sex and violence. One of Marvel’s great series of the 1970s had suffered a quick descent into lifelessness, and not even Thomas’s eventual return to the series could quite restore it to its former heights.
Conan the Legend gives me hope that Conan comics may be back on the right track. There’s the fact that Busiek cares enough about the Conan canon to craft a story around that familiar narration. There’s also Cary Nord’s interest and skill in creating different looks for the costumes and architecture of the different nations of Conan’s time, on display not only in the story but in the sketchbook at the back of this issue.
So, after a long and glorious career as an adventurer, Conan in middle-age overthrows (and beheads) the unpopular king of Aquilonia and took his place. This year the actor who played Conan in the movies, and went on to a long and glorious career in adventure movies, overthrew (and totally recalled) the unpopular governor of California and took his place. And you all thought the Terminator was Arnold Schwarzenegger’s signature role.
STAR WARS: EPISODE TWO AND A HALF
At this year’s San Diego Comic Con panel promoting Cartoon Network’s Star Wars: Clone Wars, we were informed that most of the actors from Star Wars: Episode II had declined to supply the voices for their characters in this new animated “micro-series.” Why not, I wondered. Did they want more money? Were they condescending to animation? After all, the idea behind Clone Wars – a continuing series of three-minute installments depicting events leading up to the next Star Wars feature film – seemed like such a promising idea.
But in execution Clone Wars seems to me a considerable disappointment, at least in the initial ten installments telecast in November. The principal reason is a familiar one: it’s all action and no characterization. When familiar characters show up, they hit one shallow note – Obi-Wan is brave, Count Dooku is nasty – and that’s it. The characters barely speak, and what little they have said adds nothing to our understanding of their personalities..
The principal concern of the series’ makers is in staging big action sequences, but to me it all comes off as purposeless noise and tumult.
There is a certain degree of visual inventiveness – knight-like warriors with lances that can trip through metal, a wannabe Sith with a lightsaber in each hand – but it’s not innovative or visually appealing enough.
Looking in on HBO’s recent telecasts of Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones, one can see how George Lucas and company design their great action set-pieces, like the arena scene, with escalating levels of peril, the rapid pacing, continual intercutting among different characters facing danger, and the repeated introduction of new antagonists into the fray. None of this happens in Clone Wars, perhaps understandably, since each chapter is so short. But most importantly, in the Star Wars feature films, Lucas creates suspense by sending characters the audience cares about through the rapid-fire twists and turns of danger. In Clone Wars the characters’ personalities register so minimally that emotional identification is severely reduced.
Maybe that’s why most of the Episode II actors wouldn’t do voices for Clone Wars. Maybe they all realized that, in these first ten chapters at least, there was nothing substantive for them to play.
CHABON IN COMICS
Issue 7 of DC’s JSA All-Stars series features the original Mr. Terrific, a superhero who belonged to the Justice Society of America of the 1940s, and his contemporary counterpart, the new Mr. Terrific, Michael Holt.
The present day Mr. Terrific is the focus of the book’s lead story, Fair Enough, written by Geoff Johns and David S. Goyer and drawn by Dave Ross. There is a fight scene, but the center of the story is a meeting between Mr. Terrific and the skull-headed Mr. Bones, formerly of Roy Thomas’s Infinity, Inc. series, who now works for a government agency that monitors superhumans. Superhero stories derive much of their drama from metaphorically portraying the clash of opposing viewpoints through physical battles. I can’t say I’m happy if this story, centering on what is effectively a business meeting between two guys in costume, represents a new trend in the genre.
In any event, Holt, the new Mr. Terrific, has been mourning the death of his wife. Now Mr. Bones informs him that his wife was pregnant when she died. And this actually makes Holt end up feeling better about his wife’s death. If there’s an afterlife, Holt says, then at least his dead wife will have her unborn child to keep her company.
What?! If you do believe in an afterlife, loneliness is not going to be a problem, since your deceased friends and relatives are already in the hereafter waiting for you. But even the deeply religious feel pain at the loss of a loved one. I simply do not find it credible that Holt, learning that he lost not only a wife but a child, would find emotional closure instead of feeling far, far worse than he already had!
The real reason I sought out JSA All-Stars #7, though, was that it features a backup story by Michael Chabon, whose novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, celebrates the comics creators of the 1930s and 1940s, the kinds of superheroes they portrayed, and the superhero genre and comics medium overall. His story in this comic, The Strange Case of Mr. Terrific and Doctor Nil, illustrated by Michael Lark, deals with Terry Sloane, the original Mr. Terrific of the 1940s comics, and fastens on an aspect of the character that was ignored by comics writers from the 1960s until recently. Bruce Wayne, his origin story tells us, trained himself physically and mentally for years to become Batman. The original Mr. Terrific seems to have taken this concept further: he was both a consummate genius, an expert in allegedly every realm of knowledge, and a master in every field of athletics. He was, in a sense, a self-made Superman: he did not have literal super-powers but was the perfect man. In fact, feeling he had run out of challenges, Sloane fell into despair and intended to commit suicide. Instead, he found a new set of challenges by becoming a costumed crimefighter, Mr. Terrific, “The Man of a Thousand Talents.” As if he were a character in a medieval allegory, Mr. Terrific put the words “Fair Play” on his costume, suggesting that this mentally and physically perfect individual was morally perfect as well.
But Chabon’s story is not about Terry Sloane so much as it is about his brother, Neddy Sloane, a decidedly imperfect man living in the shadow of his perennially successful brother. This isn’t a new theme in comics, though usually it serves to provide a motivation for villainy: hence, Loki envies and hates his noble foster brother Thor, as Maximus of the Inhumans despises his own perfect brother Black Bolt.
John Byrne treated a similar situation in his first Generations series, shifting from sibling rivalry to the relationship between father and son. In the alternate reality of Generations, Superman becomes concerned about the psychological effect it will have on his non-super-powered son if he grows up thinking he has to live up to the standards set by his superhumanly heroic father.
Chabon’s story even reminds me of Carl Barks’ stories about Donald Duck’s continual exasperation at the unending luck of his cousin Gladstone Gander, who effortlessly goes from one success to the next.
Another recurring theme in superhero comics is that of the evil twin or evil opposite of the hero. As one might expect in a superhero story, the embittered Ned Sloane takes on a costumed identity as his heroic brother’s opposite. But rather than turn to melodramatic super-villainy, Ned engages in an unusual sort of passive aggressive behavior. He turns up at Terry’s costume party wearing a version of Mr. Terrific’s costume that replaces the insignia “Fair play” with “Who Cares.” Ned calls himself not Mr. Terrific but Doctor Nil: presumably he is the human incarnation of lack of talent and utter moral indifference, and hence a reproach to his wildly successful brother.
At the party Ned encounters another costumed figure who proves to be his own evil twin of sorts. A compulsive gambler like Ned, this man, costumed as a pirate, significantly with a death’s-head symbol, was fired by Terry Sloane and now threatens to kill him.
There is a pattern in fantasy stories in which a character effectively exorcises himself of his own evil, his own Shadow self, when it takes a form apart from himself. So Ned’s negative feelings towards terry have metaphorically taken the form of this vengeful “pirate.” Seeing and listening to the “pirate” appears to shock Ned free of his own resentment of Terry. Ned manages to defuse the threat of “the sad little pirate” by telling him he understands how he feels, and making the “pirate” metaphorically look into a mirror at his own character flaws. There follows a reconciliation between Terry and Ned, and even a version of the archetypal “recognition of the hero” scene, in which Terry publicly declares that Ned is better than he is at empathizing with others.
There are a lot of good things in this story, but I still find it a disappointment. Just how did Ned end up on his self-destructive path, continually losing jobs, and drinking and gambling to excess? Has Terry tried to help him in the past by doing more than giving him money? Is it credible that Terry, who as a superhero, continually risks his life to help others, is not good at empathizing with or helping people, especially his brother? Is it really credible that Ned, just on meeting that disgruntled “pirate,” would suddenly free himself from what seems his lifelong downward spiral into bitterness and defeat? Is it believable that the “pirate” would really overcome his murderous anger just because Ned told him to shape up or, uh, ship out? Chabon even toys with, and abandons, an intriguing idea when Ned wonders if he has a negative “super-power” that continually gives him bad luck. Yes, Ned is self-destructive, but what about people who really do run into stretches of misfortune despite their best efforts. And if Ned behaves self-destructively, can we draw any connection to Terry’s past suicidal urges?
TRIPLE THREAT
It was Thanksgiving afternoon, and I found myself starting to drift off to sleep. This is to be expected on Thanksgiving, you will say. It’s that chemical – tryptophan, isn’t it? – in turkey that induces drowsiness.
Ah, but I hadn’t eaten any turkey yet that day. No, I was watching a new French feature-length animated film, The Triplets of Belleville, now playing in New York City and Los Angeles.
Several New York film critics have raved enthusiastically about this film: J. Hoberman wrote in the Nov. 26-Dec. 2 Village Voice that “Finding Nemo and Looney Tunes: Back in Action notwithstanding, the year’s most ingenious and original animated feature is the gloriously retro The Triplets of Belleville.” I can’t share this warmth for the film, though there are many things about Triplets that I admired and liked.
Written and directed by Sylvain Chomet, and distributed in the United States by Sony Pictures Classics, The Triplets of Belleville is a traditionally drawn animated film. That is something to applaud in itself in a time when the popularity of computer animated films has led parties at certain American studios to consign hand-drawn features to extinction.
Triplets opens with a wonderful recreation of the style of Max Fleischer’s early 1930s musical cartoons, with Betty Boop’s role taken over by the eponymous Triplets, three young female singers. In time the Fleischer-style cartoon is revealed to playing on a TV set: to judge from the tiny size of the screen on the large TV, the film now appears to be set in the France of the 1950s.
The look of the film now shifts to what I presume is Chomet’s normal style, with realistically drawn settings and characters drawn with a certain appealing grotesquerie. There aren’t any pretty people in this movie: even a young female singer has an appallingly toothy smile. Characters look down huge noses, or can be excruciatingly thin or bulbously fat. Some of the most distinctive figures in the film are the gangster villains, who are literally square-shouldered. The caricatures may be extreme, but they are always graphically interesting and amusingly whimsical.
My favorite character in the film is the dog, Bruno (who, despite its male name, has a full set of canine female nipples). In interviews Chomet praises Disney animation of the 1950s and 1960s, singling out the animated 101 Dalmatians, and I can see the influence in the drawing of Bruno, once one gets past the dog’s obesity. What’s remarkable about Bruno, though, is that, unlike Disney’s Dalmatians, there is no anthropomorphization here. Bruno behaves very much like a real dog, his life bounded by dinnertime and his territorial urge to defend the household by barking at each noisily passing train (to the bewilderment of the passengers). Chomet even gives us glimpses of the dog’s dreams, and they seem reasonably credible for a dog to have.
Bruno, though, is very much a supporting character. The central character is Madame Souza, a short, wizened woman. Here’s an example of Chomet’s odd physical portraits, unusual in animated features: Madame Souza wears a large orthopedic shoe to compensate for the fact that one of her legs is shorter than the other. Madame Souza is raising her grandson, Champion, whose parents are apparently dead and who seems lost in his loneliness. Madame Souza buys him a puppy, Bruno, only to find that the boy and dog end up sitting together, sharing in their moroseness. Champion’s life is finally brightened when his grandmother presents him with a bicycle.
Years pass, Bruno grows obese, Madame Souza’s hair goes gray, and Champion has grown into an interestingly ghastly specimen of athletic prowess. Champion has seemingly devoted his life single-mindedly to bicycle racing, and as a result he has turned into an impossibly scrawny youth with bulging eyes, an enormous nose, and disproportionately large, muscular thighs. For her part, Madame Souza’ seems to be devoting her life to acting as Champion’s trainer, blowing expressionlessly on a whistle as encouragement.
And here is a big problem in the film: these two seem to have no life apart from their obsession with bicycle racing. Moreover, Champion seems to take no pleasure in his continual practice. He just stares blankly ahead, pumping the pedals, as if he were one of the worker drones in Metropolis rather than someone driven by a competitive spirit.
In the course of the Tour de France, Champion, along with other stragglers in the race, are abducted by the aforementioned square-shouldered Mafioso and taken off by ship. This, of course, upsets Madame Sousa, although she never really registers more than mild concern. She hires a small boat from the local Threshold Guardian , and somehow she and Bruno makes it across the sea to the film’s “enchanted realm,” Belleville, which, like Gotham City, proves to a fictionalized cartoon version of Manhattan. (Belleville even has its own roundly obese version of the Statue of Liberty.)
Here Madame Souza meets the allies who will help her save Champion: the Triplets of Belleville, from the first portion of the film. They’re elderly now, and clearly not as successful as they once were, but they still perform in public. They treat Madame Souza what appears to be one of their typical meals. One of the Triplets goes out to a pond and sets off explosives, killing (or at least stunning) large bunches of frogs, which she carts back home. Though dead frogs look unappetizing, and the ones who prove to be still alive even less so, Madame Souza forces herself to eat some of the frogs. Perhaps this is an initiation ritual of sorts, for afterwards the Triplets help her rescue Champion from the Mafioso, who are forcing him to ride a bicycle in their private indoor races. And Champion really doesn’t seem unhappy about it; he just wears the same staring, oblivious expression as usual.
Now, what are we to make of the Triplets? Well, groups of three women can have mythic connotations, and these three have aged from being like the Three Graces into an elderly trio, possibly suggesting the Three Fates, who are now on Madame Souza’s side. The Triplets’ age, their destructive side (blowing up frogs!), and weirdly carnivorous tastes suggest they are kinds of Shadow figures. By bonding with them and even eating their food, Madame Souza has incorporated lesser Shadow forces in order to best the greater Shadow, the Mafiosi. As singers, whose passion for music is unquenched by age, the Triplets also may embody a life force; they are certainly livelier than Madame Souza and her grandson. And the fact that we originally see the Triplets as their youthful former selves in the film within a film suggests that they have become figures of legend, real people memorialized by art.
But are the Triplets believable characters? No. They’re whimsical conceits, but they hardly seem like people. The Mafiosi are amusingly ominous, but they lack any personality, and hence fail at being truly sinister. Madame Souza never seems deeply distressed, and Champion seems downright inhuman. Forced by the Mafiosi to work in their private bicycle races, Champion wears the same, weary, fixed expression as usual, as if there is no more to life than pumping his pedals.
There is very little dialogue in the film, and critics have attributed its success outside France to this fact. It is a pleasure to see an animated film that conveys its story almost entirely through pictures and not dialogue. But dialogue can also be the audience’s key to understanding characters’ thoughts and emotions, and Chomet’s visual portrayals of the characters do not compensate for this lack. People’s emotions are expressed minimally or not at all. The only major character whose emotions fully come across are Bruno’s. (Lack of dialogue, as noted above, also handicaps the Clone Wars micro-series.)
So how does Triplets really match up against Finding Nemo? Nemo also deals with a parental figure’s quest to find a kidnapped child, and the eccentric helpers he meets along the way. But all of Nemo‘s characters have strongly dramatized personalities, and the father fish’s desperation to find his son is palpable. Even more than the computers, it’s that sense of character and passion that animates Finding Nemo, whereas, as much as I may admire Triplets‘ humorous oddities, it ultimately leaves me cold.
TWO HEROES IN ONE, FOUR HEROES IN FOUR
1602 Part 4, by Neil Gaiman and Andy Kubert, makes me think that there may be more than a one-to-one correspondence between some of its leading characters and the familiar present day cast of Marvel heroes. In this issue we see that there are pterodactyls and even large, carnivorous dinosaurs in North America. The North American wilderness, then, is 1602‘s equivalent of the Savage Land. I had earlier identified Rojahz, the blond Native American who has a talent for throwing a shield, as 1602‘s Captain America. But it looks as if Rojahz is also another blond Marvel hero, this series’ version of Ka-Zar, lord of the Savage Land. And Ka-Zar, of course, was clearly inspired by Tarzan (as the Savage Land was by Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs’ underground realm Pellucidar). So, Rojahz is, in a sense, Captain America melded with Tarzan, transplanted into early 17th century America!
Perhaps this issue’s cover, showing the blind Matt Murdock with a bow and arrow, indicates a similar melding at work. I suppose this could be an allusion to blind Zen archers, and hence to the Japanese influences that Frank Miller introduced into Daredevil’s series. But I also wonder if 1602 has melded Daredevil with the Black Widow’s 1960s lover, Hawkeye the Archer. As for the Widow herself, this issue’s turn of events reminds us that the Black Widow started out in 1960s comics as a spy for foreign adversaries.
Here is yet another melding: 1602‘s Count von Doom is shown experimenting with utilizing electricity to restore the dead to life. Could it be that Gaiman is linking Doctor Doom to that other mythic Middle European scientist Victor Frankenstein?
It seems odd that after keeping Doom’s face in shadows in the previous issues, here Gaiman and Kubert finally show us the Count’s face, but without making the revelation particularly dramatic. I assume that since Doom is so far unscarred, he will not remain that way for the rest of the series. However, one might have thought that the scarring of his face was a prime motivation for the present day Victor von Doom’s adoption of his Doctor Doom persona, his drive for world conquest, and his obsession with defeating Reed Richards. The 1602 Doom is following the same path without having undergone the same traumatic experience.
Appropriately though perhaps coincidentally, issue number 4 finally reveals the 1602 Fantastic Four are still alive, even if we actually see only one of them. (Or maybe it’s not a coincidence. John Byrne has pointed out that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby revived long-missing heroes in fourth issues of early Marvel series: Sub-Mariner in Fantastic Four #4 and Captain America in Avengers #4. And here’s one Byrne missed: the original Human Torch’s first “Marvel Age” appearance is in Fantastic Four Annual #4.) Having pictured a labyrinth on a previous issue’s cover, Gaiman and Kubert now make use of another archetypal device: Doom descends into an underworld to visit his captives. I very much like the fact that the 1602 Reed Richards wonders aloud about the speed of light, and if it is a constant, thereby anticipating Albert Einstein by three hundred years. It does not seem right to me, though, that Count von Doom dismisses the ideas. It would seem more likely to me that Doom would have been thinking along the same lines, and would be both angered and gratified to find somebody else who had similar ideas. Doom and Richards are the two greatest scientific minds of their time, whatever that time may be, and hence they are not only rivals but each is the only one who can truly understand the other’s thinking on scientific matters.
This issue gives us the origin of the 1602 version of Doctor Strange. The Ancient One still shows up, of course, though clearly not ancient in this particular time. Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s origin story for Strange was a parable of a prideful man who falls into the depths and undergoes moral regeneration; unfortunately, 1602‘s version does not follow this theme, perhaps simply due to lack of space. It is a nice touch to have Strange say that with the ascension of King James, who hates sorcery, he will “drown my books,” echoing the sorcerer Prospero at the end of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (and hence even alluding to the final story of the original run of Gaiman’s Sandman series, which bore the same name). So could it be that if Shakespeare had not had Prospero renounce his magic, King James would have disapproved of the play?
I see there is now a “Master Banner” in King James’s court, so perhaps I was mistaken about the identity of the Templars’ treasure, whose box now looks smaller than it did in past issues. Well, perhaps we shall learn what it is in the next issue (and in a future column).
-Copyright 2003 Peter Sanderson
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