Doctor Strange, Vol. 2: The Last Days of Magic by Jason Aaron
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
When we left you last time, your hero (me) was pondering whether the slow burn first volume of this book would be justified by the greatness of the second volume!
Since then you’ve hopefully made a very thorough and searching inventory of yourself. If you’re calling me your “hero” in any sense of the word, you’ve got some problems.
Also, since then, I’ve read the second volume. And I have an answer: kinda.
Kinda!
The first volume was slow as shit, and the second volume is fast as fuck. At all the oddest times. The actual fighting that goes on between Dr. Strange and Science Badguy Asshole is very, very brief. The collecting of artifacts and interesting bits that could go along with that are also rushed. But the standing around and talking about how the odds aren’t good…that seems to go on and on. Like a Jack Johnson song. The one that goes “On and On.” That wasn’t a slam on Jack Johnson. I COULD slam Jack Johnson, but I won’t. I feel like he lives in Hawaii and is stoned all the time and has probably one of the better lives ever lived. Why attack? If I’m not going to have one of the top 10 best lives ever, someone should, and I don’t want to be the guy that shits all over that possibility.
Anyway, the story is decompressed up top, compressed to hell after that.
Oh, and we also get an issue that shows how the Mexican Dr. Strange got involved (pretty much exactly like Dr. Strange did) and a couple of Chinese Dr. Stranges (pretty much exactly like Dr. Strange did), a Dr. Strange from New Orleans (pretty much exactly like Dr. Strange did, but with PYM PARTICLES!), and an eastern European Dr. Strange (pretty much the same, but drunk).
All these other Dr. Stranges have weird, made-up sounding names. Which has to be hard. If you’ve ever had a friend who tried to change his name in, say, college, nobody lets that shit fly. So if you changed your name in adulthood, and if you cited the reason for the name change as being “because I’m a wizard now,” I think you’d run into some resistance, and I’d have to say I side with the resistance on that one.
At the end of the day, a pretty good book, but damn do I feel like the beginning was really slow and the end was quick, that we saw a lot of stuff I didn’t care about and then rushed through some things I really wanted to see.