3 out of 5

Meeehh.  Sometimes when I don’t like a story featuring a character whose history with which I’m not as familiar, I wonder if the writer is actually dolling up classic aspects of the book that I would appreciate if I were a fan…  A recent example of that might be in film version, with Dredd – I liked the film because I’m familiar enough with the character that it seemed like a pretty rockin’ capture of the book, along with being a fun film.  But there have been many viewers whose only comparison point is the previous Dredd film, and so they were expecting something a bit more goofy.  But there you go – expectations.  I can separate appreciating a tribute from digging a good film, and even if Mr. Vaughan was aiming for some type of tribute with his Strange mini, it doesn’t really stand on its own as the best of stories.  So la dee da.  Was any of that exposition necessary?  WHAT AN APT QUESTION.

‘The Oath’ vacillates around the concept of the Hippocratic oath, playing up Strange’s ‘Doctor’ moniker and pitting it against a rare elixir that can cure all the world’s diseases – or just his man-servant Wong’s cancer.  Throw in a mystery villain who wants to destroy the elixir (on behalf of some pharmaceutical companies who wouldn’t make any money without diseases), and we have five issues of delaying an overly complicated explanation with battle scenes and back story.  Which could be a trite way of explaining many stories, but Vaughan’s writing style lends itself to it in this instance.  I don’t know how deals are meted out in the comic world – I imagine sometimes a writer pitches a story, sometimes the publisher says “we need a Doctor Strange mini because we’re putting out a DVD soon…” or whatever other variations.  I apologize to Mr. Vaughan if he’d been hoping to write this specific Doctor Strange story for years and years, but it feels terribly like a “Who wants to write a 5 issue Sorcerer Supreme tale?” and Brian raised his hand.  In other words – it’s not an inspired story, but a story created to fill space.

The additions Brian makes to Strange’s history aren’t uninteresting, but it does feel padded to reach its issue count, and such padding set the pacing off such that our ‘explanation’ has to come in a totally “villain explains the plot in an all text and flashback page” that BKV tries to shrug around by having the Doc make a joke about it… but we’ve seen that trick enough, and it still doesn’t really excuse the method.  And Brian, of course, writes our leads with his typical pop-aware sarcasm, which does work for Doc when it’s cut with a more philosophical edge, but he sounds too youthful here for it to seem legit.  If this all sounds negative – well, yes.  Honestly, I wasn’t too keen on the series.  But despite (perhaps) having trouble properly splicing this up and getting the voice of his lead down, and the overall quest of the story seeming suspiciously like a macguffin, the back-story and the character it produces are fascinating, and as he is a BKV creation, he can pitch him with a more purposeful tone.  His development and direction in the mini is worthwhile, and the overall resolution is properly thematic and well done.

One further disappointment – I think Marcos Martin was newer to the game then, and it’s too bad he wasn’t as experimental with his paneling as he is now, because he could’ve dolled these pages up more than he did.  The book is fairly static for what’s normally a character surrounded by acid trips.