The Re-Read: Dr. Strange Vs. Kaluu, Zom and Yandroth
Sunday's Child Is Protected From a Q-Ray Blaster
Some more Dr. Strange rereading this week through to the end of the first Essentials black-and-white reprint volume.
It’s pretty awful stuff. If this had been my first exposure to the character, I doubt I’d have formed any sense of affection for him.
It reinforces my impression that there was a qualitative difference between how Dr. Strange (and a number of other characters) were handled by the writers and artists who followed Lee and Ditko/Kirby and the way Spider-Man was handled. Spider-Man got a creative team that had a really assured sense of the character and moved his story gently forward with new characters and plots (most famously with the deepening romance between Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy and its tragic conclusion).
With Strange, the transition from Lee and Ditko was at first fairly smooth, starting around Strange Tales #147, in 1966. There had been a storyline that extended the narrative of Clea’s exile, Dormammu’s thirst for revenge against Strange, and ultimately a cataclysmic battle between Dormammu and Eternity, and then Denny O’Neill came in to help work on a storyline that Lee still received partial credit for that introduced the Ancient One’s background. It starts promisingly with Strange going clothes-shopping in New York City.
Unless I missed something, this was the first time that Strange engaged in “ordinary civilian” activities. In his early adventures, he’d often had to disguise himself and mingle with regular people while on the run from Mordo, but I don’t think there had ever been a pause in the tumult of his first four years of stories where we saw him just doing regular-person stuff. That’s a pretty substantial contrast with most of the other early Marvel characters, and a departure from the formula that had quickly become known as the Marvel brand (the Fantastic Four enduring bankruptcy, Spider-Man living paycheck-to-paycheck, etc.) It was still years after this before Strange had anything like a regular life or routine, let alone any explanation of how he paid for what he needed, and to some extent the character has never really developed the rich supporting cast or regular-guy routines that most of his Marvel compatriots have had. On the other hand, you can see in this panel something that was an element of the character from the beginning and got stronger over time, which is a kind of otherworldly condescension towards both “ordinary people” and other superheroes. Later writers built on that characterization rather cleverly and it’s a significant element of how Benedict Cumberbatch plays Strange in the Marvel films.
Much of the issue revolves around tying up loose ends before the Ancient One suddenly appears and announces that there’s an urgent new problem to deal with, which is his former friend Kaluu (from some centuries past) has gotten out of mystical jail and is ready to conquer humanity etc. etc. Kaluu is a pretty standard Marvel bad-guy of that era: he and the Twentysomething Future Ancient Guy were good buddies studying the mystic arts together and then Kaluu started wanting more and more power and then he became an evil despot and then his former friend defeated him despite Kaluu being more powerful.
Kaluu steals the Book of the Vishanti, Strange and the Ancient One go into the past to retrieve another copy of it since it’s key to their victory, Kaluu does a whole lot of angry monologuing. Then the Ancient One does his usual thing just before the big confrontation and teleports out to leave Strange to face the danger alone. (He was a lot like Professor X in this respect, constantly lecturing Strange about how you gotta learn to solve problems without me even though the fate of the universe is at stake, yadda yadda.) Anyway, Strange uses the replacement Book of the Vishanti in a cheap-trick quick move to beat Kaluu, end of story.
The three good things I can say about this storyline is that first, it finally ended years of nearly-exclusive reliance on Dormammu, Mordo, and Clea. (There were a few brief diversions in the interim—in his first issue, Strange faced Nightmare, who wouldn’t reappear for quite a while, Strange faced Loki in one issue and a creepy sentient house in another, plus ran into various other-dimensional assholes as obstacles while running from Mordo or trying to find Eternity.) Second, while Kaluu is as one-dimensional as a bad guy can possibly be in this story, decades later Peter Gillis brought him back as a much more complicated and interesting character who mentored Strange in dark magic at a time when that was his only hope.
The third good thing I can say is that this is the last time Strange would get a fairly decent story for quite a long time. Next up for him was a confused story that first off dipped into the Dormammu well again to introduce Umar, Dormammu’s sister, who is basically a dragon-lady copy of Dormammu without the full-face flames, and then another all-powerful monster creature named Zom.
Strange and the Ancient One are responsible for setting Zom free in a familiar pulp-and-comics plot device of infuriating a dangerous monster or enemy stronger than you are and then leading it to your other enemy hoping that they’ll annihilate each other. (If you’ve played massively-multiplayer online games, it’s the same strategy that somebody’s using when they pull a bunch of mobs to your location and then disappear, though designers got pretty savvy to this a long time ago and found ways to mostly prevent it from being a problem.)
Anyway, it works in that it makes Umar run back to her home dimension and it doesn’t work in that Zom is a way bigger menace than Umar (which also often happens with this plot device—it’s a bit like Corum in Michael Moorcock’s The King of the Swords fetching two Elder Gods to deal with the Gods of Chaos and the Elder Gods decide to just wipe out all other gods while they’re at it). There’s a really messy multi-issue resolution to this that involves the first appearance of The Living Tribunal, who is maybe the worst of Marvel’s “abstract cosmic beings” and another cosmic being named Nebulos, who appears in an issue where the artist mostly just traces old Ditko panels.
Bad as this storyline is, I would almost say that it’s the origin point for a commonplace take among comic-book writers that Dr. Strange is a hard character to write because his powers are so broad, immense and undefined and can be used as a deus ex machina to resolve any plot. I really hate this argument: it’s an excuse for unimaginative writers. But I do see how in these late 1960s issues, the writers (Lee was still getting writing credit, but Denny O’Neill was also involved) were stuck in narrative cycle. Mordo was Strange’s only relative peer and much of the time he’d shown up in these early stories, he’d found some kind of McGuffin (including Dormammu) to power up. Strange was always the underdog and generally won only with some kind of cheap trick. And they kept upping the power levels: Umar’s as strong as Dormammu! Zom is as strong as Eternity! The Living Tribunal is stronger than any of them!
That this cycle needed a break was evident, and that’s about the nicest thing I can say about the story that came next, which featured “the Scientist Supreme”, a character named Yandroth, who was meant to be Strange’s opposite, his Moriarity, an equal adversary.
This was a terrible idea on the face of it. The idea of a “Scientist Supreme” who calls himself that operating in a fictional universe already dominated by science and technology is so cheesy that it has no hope of ever becoming anything better. Maybe a character like DC’s Dr. Thirteen who just doesn’t believe in magic and is determined to prove that Strange’s powers are just an alternative form of science might have worked (there was a story in Fantastic Four many, many years later that sort of worked over this ground via Doctor Doom). But if Strange’s powerset is hard to concretize, it’s even worse if you put him put against ray guns and robots without making some clear decisions about what he can and cannot do. (If he’s got no power over mundane objects or advanced technologies, then this is a Superman vs. Kryptonite story; if he’s got as much power in this domain as anything else, then robots and ray guns shouldn’t be enough to deal with Strange.)
But hey, like I said, you could see where it seemed like a solution to a storytelling problem, right? Whatever the possibilities, the actual writing for Yandroth is so awful that he’s only come back a few times since, never facing Dr. Strange mano-a-mano again.
He’s ultra-cheese and not the fun kind. Every bad pulp and comic-book plot device gets thrown into this stomach-churning mess—there’s a new damsel-in-distress named Victoria Bentley (who appeared a few memorable times much later in Strange’s history) who the Scientist Supreme keeps threatening with the usual “you will be my queen” thing (how villains in pulp narratives made rape threats), there’s a killer robot who is totally bargain-basement, there’s some really sub-par advanced technology, and also Yandroth is basically dumb as a bag of rocks, which doesn’t seem like a great way to develop a “Scientist Supreme” character, however you feel about science.
Still, I can give Yandroth credit not only for breaking the old cycle but actually setting up the possibility of new kinds of stories once Doctor Strange got his own title. (At this point he was still in the back half of Strange Tales, where all the glory and attention was going to the Jim Steranko Nick Fury stories in the front half.) It turns out those stories weren’t very good either, but maybe I’ll cover those some other time.