This is one of the latter jobs I did at marvel; one I believe I was never really played for either [see here for the that story]. It features two different versions of Dr Strange, the Stranger, Blade, and Morbius the living vampire. Also it’s the first appearance of the Tempo, a tower Dr Strange lived in that I designed for the issue, and was never given any credit for as far as I know…not that it maters that much but….

A mixed bag, with some good moments but lots of things that had I the time at the time, I’d have redrawn. This book left my desk with a lot of reservations.

It represents a good example of one of the problems I ultimately had working on deadline oriented books for marvel. You hear a lot of talk in the comix world these days about how projects done collaboratively are inherently poorer than work by one creator - the contrast drawn is often between personal books that come out of small operations like Fantagraphics and the commercial monthlies that Marvel & DC pump out.

This is bunk frankly.

There are plenty examples of strong work done collaboratively out there - you only need to look to the EU & Japanese comics scenes to find books that are consistently of a high calibre - and that's not to exclude some of the finer books from this side of the globe either. If you dig around you'll even find truly strong personal works done by more than one person.

The weakness is being misidentified in American monthly comics. It's not that there is collaboration and more than one ID in the mix, it's that it's deadline driven - product pumped out to fit a package, a market profile, rather than thoughtful storytelling given the room needed to grow properly. Often NO real time is given in a monthly schedule for significant revision and refinement. Stories go through little development and art has to be pumped out as fast as the workers can generate it. It takes unbelievable talented and expedient creators to maintain even a passing semblance of quality in that environment, and nerves of steel. Makes for a lot of tightly wound folks as well.

It also in general tends to lead creators to lock into cliché ridden genre storytelling so exclusively that new ideas become scarcer than water in a desert, something frequently sighted by the Indy world as one of more notable problems with the mainstream but frequently blamed on other things. It's not for lack of potential in the characters or any other reason than simply that the time isn’t there to muse too much in depth.

Well…that’s my opinion any way.

But here’s the work, its not too shabby really, given that I had a shorter than average deadline [I don’t recall why that was the case but I do recall it was less than the usual month+ that I was given to do most books] and I was working size-as, doing two pages a day on average. The large version of the pages in the gallery here actually open up LARGER than the size I drew them on your monitor if it’s set to 1024x768. You can download a zipped set of jpegs of this issue in it's final form here.