Magic in trade paperbacks!

DR. STRANGE: A Separate Reality by multiple writers (primarily Roy Thomas, Gardner Fox and Steve Englehart) and multiple artists (most notably Gene Colan and cover artist Frank Brunner) is both a good read (mostly) and an interesting look at the transition from the Silver to the Bronze Age. It starts out as Thomas and Colan try transforming Strange into more of a superhero figure (mask, secret identity) but that doesn’t save his book from biting the dust as the 1960s come to a close. This leads to Dr. Strange retiring then getting revived for a new and rather uneven story arc involving a thing/person/place/entity named Shuma-Gorath. Steeped in evil, it/he/she/they are rising from sleep and other dark forces are swarming after it like remoras with a shark; but what is Shuma-Gorath’s end-game? And can Stephen Strange thwart it?

By the end of the arc, Englehart and Brunner are the new creative team. While they were only on the book together for about a dozen issues, they’re a classic piece of 1970s trippy mysticism (as many people have described it) as Dr. Strnage travels in time, witnesses the birth of the universe, then gets sucked inside the Orb of Agamotto for a journey into unreality. While stretches of the book are not good, the best bits make this worth buying.

Hellboy in Hell seemingly wrapped up the series chronologically by having Hellboy transform Hell as he did the Earth. In KOSHCHEI IN HELL by Mike Mignola and Ben Stenbeck, the Russian sorcerer, has settled comfortably into the empty netherworld, at peace for the first time. Then Sir Edward Grey’s ghost (who gets a Mignola-drawn story of his own) nudges Koshchei into taking a stand against Hellboy’s demon half-sister, who seeks to resurrect Pluto, the primal lord of Hell; strange things result, including the appearance of several familiar faces among the damned. Weird in the way the best Hellboy is weird and probably laying the groundwork for further adventures. Mignola did the cover.

Up on the surface of peaceful New Earth we have FRANKENSTEIN: New World by Mignola, Christopher Golden and Thomas Sniegoski.  A sequel to Frankenstein Underground, this has a young girl in the Hollow Earth drag a reluctant Frankenstein to the surface. Wouldn’t you know, some sort of unspeakable evil shows up at exactly the same time? It seems even the end of the world isn’t the end of the adventures … Better than the predecessor volume.

HELLBOY AND THE BPRD: 1957 by Mignola and multiple co-creators has the typical weirdness of these retcons to the early years — werebeasts, a Thunderbird, a haunted sawmill and an evil medium. Nothing as wild as Koshschei in Hell but good fun.

#SFWApro.