Next best is the big chunk of continuity - the Masterpieces or Archive model. Take a year or two of periodical comics, starting somewhere relatively coherent, and just reprint it, in the order original readers would have seen it, with any intros and outros necessary to give it a little shape.
But since corporate comics often worked on an assembly-line model, with creators treated as interchangeable widgets, neither of those models works well if you want to focus on the work of a single human being - because those companies, historically, didn't value the contributions of any single human being.
That's when you get the "here's some stuff by this guy" - and it is, 99% of the time, a guy. Sometimes the guy is a writer, and so it's a collection of mostly standalone stories - for example, DC Universe by Alan Moore or Midnight Days. But when the creator in question is mostly an artist, the book can get very random and miscellaneous.
Doctor Strange: What Is It That Disturbs You, Stephen? collects what I think is all of the work that P. Craig Russell did on that character, from 1973 through 1997, including things he penciled but didn't ink, things he inked but didn't pencil, and even a couple of versions of a mostly-Russell story. It would have been a rag-bag in the best of situations, but this 2016 book has no table of contents and only a jumbled page with credits for all of this material, perhaps in an an attempt to hide just how massively miscellaneous the book is.
It credits six pencilers, five inkers, eight colorists, five letterers (plus an "& Co."), two assistant editors, five full editors, and a whopping thirteen writers - from Gardner Fox to Marc Andreyko. Most of the book is from the caption-crazy era of Marvel comics, with a bunch of random '70s stories and then a shorter stretch of slightly more ambitious and less cringeworthy pieces from Marvel Fanfare in the '80s.
It opens with the title story, which appeared as a one-shot in 1997 and was itself an expansion or re-imagining of the first Dr. Strange annual from 1973 (which itself is next in the book). Both of those started from an idea Russell had - the 1973 version was molded by writer Marv Wolfman into a very conventional Marvel tale of the time and the 1997 version was allowed to be more consistently Russell-eqsue by Marc Andreyko.
In both stories, someone close to Strange - Wong in 1997, Clea in 1973 - is spirited away by mysterious mystical forces, and Strange goes to first a temple (where he's attacked by a librarian) and then to the usual floating-paths otherworld so common in Dr. Strange stories. In that otherworld, he's attacked by a sorceress, Electra or Lectra, who rules that realm and who eventually cajoles him into coming with her to save the person she's kidnapped. They travel in a ship crewed by the dead for a while, see a vast golden city rise up out of the depths, and land in that city. Electra/Lectra's sister - her name is more variable in the two versions - is supposed to be equal in rulership of this realm, but Electra/Lectra claims she's totally evil and had to be contained.
The truth, as even a very dull child will notice, is exactly the opposite: Electra/Lectra is door-shakingly insane, and has trapped her poor innocent sister (and the sister's gorgeous lover, who Electra/Lectra covets) magically. There is a confrontation, with lots of mystical hand gestures and bands of light zipping around the panels for a while, until the madwoman shatters the mirror that maintains this realm and dooms herself, her sister, and her sister's lover to oblivion.
Only Strange survives, cast back out into his normal world, presumably sadder but wiser. The person he came to save, Wong or Clea, is also carefully preserved to appear in future stories.
The plot is more than a little operatic, and Russell draws the 1997 version in much the same style and energy he brings to his opera adaptations. That title story is obviously the high point of the book and reprinting it is the overall purpose - it's a shame it comes first and the rest is such a letdown.
The 1973 annual sets the tone for much of the subsequent material: it's clotted with captions and bombastic dialogue in the tedious Marvel Manner, as readers are spoon-fed every possible bit of information they could possibly want to know.
Everything else here is just random Dr. Strange comics that Russell happened to touch - penciling a few stories, inking a few others. None of it looks like Russell to any serious degree, though really serious students of art could spend a long time staring at individual panels looking for his work. Oh, wait, there are also three random short horror stories from other series - standalone "chillers" without continuing characters - that were Russell's first work for Marvel. And then some backmatter with other covers and similar bits of Dr. Strange-related art. All in all, over two hundred pages in this book, of which the first sixty (the title story) is worth reading for an adult with a normal reading level in the 21st century.
We can note that '60s Marvel comics were a major advance over the competition, with more realistic motivations and characters that spoke more clearly to the teen and young adult audience of the time, and that they were popular and a welcome surge of energy for the field, while still pointing out that they were not very good, and that the things that came afterward in the same style were not even as good as that. Most of Disturbs You is hacky minor '70s and '80s yardgood comics, pages made to fill an editorial hole and entertain an audience that didn't want and probably wouldn't recognize nuance or subtlety. The book itself is one-half an celebration of all things Russell (even those apprentice pieces that maybe should not be celebrated quite so loudly with such fervor), and one-half cynical package so that Marvel could charge substantially more for the sixty-page story that it knew audiences actually wanted.
No comments:
Post a Comment