There’s an invisible prison, with invisible walls
Invisible cells and invisible bars.
On Wednesdays you’re allowed to exercise
Under invisible guards’ watchful eyes.
It’s not just a metaphor for mental illness, you see. Like most metaphors, it’s borne from something quite real. Unlike most metaphors, it’s not used in a way unconnected to the original use. The Invisible Prison is a very real thing: it captures one or two mages, sorcerers and wizards every year. Nobody knows who invented the bit of not-very-well-written doggerel that later became a skipping-rhyme (where, one figures, some smart kid grew up, became an expert on mental illness, and coined the phrase to better describe a very real societal problem with no connection to the rhyme’s origin). Nobody knows why it happens or how it happens. But they know it happens, and they know what happens to the people it captures. You see them on street corners, talking to themselves and begging for change. (Not all of them, of course. But a very few.)
Of course, lots of cut-rate supervillains have used the gambit since, because “make your enemy think he is crazy” is something every garden-variety sadist can come up with. But all of those supervillains miss the point. It doesn’t matter if you try to make Wolverine crazy because sooner or later he’ll pop his claws or realize his healing factor still works. It doesn’t matter if you try to make Captain America crazy because sooner or later reflex memory will kick in and he’ll do something he wouldn’t be able to do. You can’t convince a superhero that they’re delusional – at least, not enough for it to matter.
The invisible library has magazines
Which you read and you dream your invisible dreams
Of when you won’t sleep on your invisible cot
And will not get lost in invisible thoughts.
But you can convince a sorcerer of it. Because magic depends on will and belief – and if you doubt your ability to do magic, you won’t be able to do it. And if you take away their ability to do magic, then the underpinning of their world falls apart because you’ve destroyed the defining tenet by which they’ve organized their lives. It’s very effective and it hardly ever fails, which is why there are more than a few wandering, unstable homeless people who still, very occasionally, do magic by accident wandering the streets of New York City (where they are inevitably deposited by the Invisible Prison these days; it has done for centuries now, although before that it dropped people in London, Paris, Rome and Ur).
And, because we’re talking about magic, the Invisible Prison has advantages your standard villain-lair-designed-to-convince-the-hero-that-they-are-in-an-asylum does not. Because it’s not a physical place (although it can be). In many ways it’s more a state of mind. The Invisible Prison is wherever you are, and it takes a different form each time. It’s when you wake up in a hotel feeling the end of a three-day bender on which you never went. It’s going outside and feeling eyes on you from above, but when you look up they’re not there. It’s when you look in the mirror when you brush your teeth in the morning (because any mage worth their salt knows that dental hygiene is important) and you see bars in front of you – but only in the mirror. And sometimes, yes, it’s a dank cell in a dark pit, in the middle of a complex whose geography is odd and non-linear.
It is as subtle or as blunt as it needs to be, because the Warden (and there is a Warden) provides a tailored experience, whatever will destroy your mind most effectively, be it brutal, terrifying horror or creeping, steady paranoia. And there’s a relevant side-effect: once you’re in the Prison, you go “off the grid” for the purposes of divination magic. In the Prison, it is as if you never existed – until you leave it, a shell of what you once were. Nobody knows why it does what it does. Some think it’s a leftover tool of vengeance by a master mage who wanted to destroy a rival, and that that tool gained a sort of self-driving awareness. Others think it’s a conspiracy that tries to reduce the number of magic users in the world (and there are plenty of people who would like that to happen). But given its success rate, it really doesn’t matter.
One day you might stride out the invisible gate
After a lengthy invisible wait
But the invisible prison will not leave you whole
It tears at your mind and your heart and your soul.
Now, Dr. Strange isn’t going to get trapped in the Invisible Prison. Dr. Strange is the Sorcerer Supreme, after all, and you don’t get to that level without being able to deal with psychological warfare – even magically-assisted psychological warfare. The reason anybody knows the Invisible Prison exists in the first place is because a Sorcerer Supreme was the first (and only) person to break out of it in the mid-1400s. The Prison doesn’t go after Sorcerers Supreme. Maybe it’s because it only wants to grab people it knows it can break. Maybe it’s because it was scared off that one time. But in any event, Stephen Strange is quite safe from it.
But if a Sorcerer Supreme were to not live in isolation (as most do), and were to take apprentices (as most do not)… well, then the Prison might find itself a target that would allow it to strike back at the Sorcerer Supreme, albeit indirectly…
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It’s like Christmas when you update this. Keep them coming.
Love the way you mention heroes like Cap and Wolverine, keeping your stories grounded in the Marvel Universe and painfully reminding us all that no, you in fact are not an employed as a writer for Marvel.
Does the Invisible Prison have to render its inhabitants homeless, though? Could they simply be high functioning people with a form of mental illness afterwards? I know that in the past, this would be far less likely, but I can see someone who is unstable thanks to the marks of the prison, but can hold down a job and take care of themselves. Unless I’m underestimating the level of damage an inmate takes.
Side note: I wonder if those who aren’t marked by the prison, but also have mental illness, can distinguish between ‘normal’ sufferers and Prison inmates.
My first thought was ‘No! Not Creaky!’
Realistically, Indrani seems more likely, but clearly something has been done right here.
Suggests a whole lot of other ideas, too – a powerful sorcerer could plan to stage a “break-out” from the prison – allowing all those once-powerful wizards to regain their faculties at once could have disastrous consequences..
So is the Prison a (semi)-sentient entity in its own right, or is it operated by some other group/being? Because it seems to me that it’s rather odd for a prison to hold a grudge that would cause it to want to hurt Dr. Strange, unless there were some other motivating force behind it.
See, now I want to see Doom go up against this thing and watch the pyrotechnics.
File the serial numbers off these chips of story and write, damn it.
This seems less like something the Prison is actively doing, and more an unfortunate consequence of the inmates getting very spatially and chronologically displaced. There’s doubtless a few sorcerers who can recover from this (due to contingency plans made centuries before, and to bank accounts with compound interest which have mysteriously survived centuries of political and economic upheaval), but not very many.
Slight tangent: I can’t help but think that there would be people (or whole organizations) whose business was providing new legal identities to time travelers, immortals, and the like.
It seems to me that there’s a flaw in the “you can convince a sorcerer of [insanity]” argument: even if they can’t perform magic, they can still see others perform magic, which immediately makes the idea much more plausible. Not certain, of course, it’s still quite possible to believe that magic exists and that you yourself can’t do it, but it’s not on the same level as it would be in our world, where the idea of doing magic at all is bizarre.
I’m not going to review years-old posts for the full bios of the proposed apprentices of Dr. Strange, but as I remember them, they are the bastard daughter of a bad guy, a Victorian-era magician with electrical powers, a hyperactive insectoid alien, and a green-furred minotaur.
The prison doesn’t seem too bad for Creaky because he already has such an alien way of thinking. (But then again, maybe this would keep Strange and the other apprentices from noticing the problem until it’s too late.) Sure, it’s tailored to the individual, but magic users are even rarer among his species than among humans, right? Or at least, maybe it would be bad in a different way – if it’s not just a temporary annoyance, then it might be so traumatizing that he’s not just crazy when the prison is through with him, he’s dead.
Indrani has already overcome more hardship in her life than some superheroes. She wouldn’t be an easy target. Also, she’s not the damsel in distress type.
The Victorian guy or the minotaur both seem likely victims of the prison. As for the Victorian guy, who knows what could happen. He could go bad. His powers could change again. He could travel in time back to when he came from, or further back.
With the minotaur, showing a green minotaur going crazy and hanging out under a bridge with some hoboes is sufficient reason all by itself.
The really complicated thing is, though, why am I assuming it would be obvious who it is? Like the post says, sorcerers supreme rarely take apprentices. The prison probably doesn’t usually find powerful mages collaborating. If it targets Creaky, maybe it would manifest by making him play head games with the Victorian guy, so at first it looks like he’s the one in the prison? Or vice versa?
And then there’s the fact that Dr. Strange is an important person. Really, really important. Now one of his trusted confidantes, more or less, is wandering around crazy. This is a dangerous security risk to both Strange and New York. What if the wrong person finds the victim before Strange and friends do? Were any cauldrons left simmering or ancient grimoires left misfiled? Even after he or she is found (because, come on, it’s Dr. Strange we’re talking about, a curse of insanity is not all that big a problem, even if it also makes the victim unscryable), how does he make sure the victim is safe in the Sanctum Sanctorum again?
would the Ancient One have been the sorcerer supreme in the 1400s? If I remember his origin story with Kaluu correctly, he’s been around that long, but I don’t know if it’s been determined when his supremacy began.
Dang it. Stupid HTML.
WHY ARE YOU NOT writing Dr. Strange? I would read THE FUCK outta this.
namor
season one
inspirational
First off I’d just like to voice my appreciation for these posts, they’re genuinely inspiring in showing cool original ideas (and also horribly depressing in that these ideas aren’t being used.)
I’m not totally up on the relevant continuity involved, but is there a chance that the Invisible Prison was involved in Namor living as a crazy hobo for years until he fought the Fantastic Four and got his memories back? Because seeing the Doctor team up with the Marvel U’s resident married-woman-chasing, really-kind-of-an-asshole merman to provide magical therapy to a crazy green minotaur would kick all kinds of ass.
On another note it’s come to my attention that Doctor Strange Season One book, by Greg Pak and Emma Rios is due out this week, and while I understand that you’re not in the habit of taking requests or reviewing books, or even buying many books, I’d still really like to see what you think of it. You’re clearly a guy who’s thought a lot about Doctor Strange and has some pretty strong ideas about how the character should be used, so I would enjoying seeing your reaction to the book.
And yes, those are cliff notes above my comment, because when I’m doing other stuff and don’t want to forget what I’m commenting about I like to do a breakdown of what will be in my comment. Usually I delete that part afterwards, today I forgot.
Would seem kind of unnecessary to use the Prison to explain Namor’s bout with homelessness since the reasons behind it have already been covered in the MU.
To everyone trying to guess which apprentice it would take: Who’s to say we’ve seen all the apprentices yet?
Wow. This hurt to read. I mean, in a good way, but it hurt.
PRINCE HAS BEEN KIDNAPPED BY NINJAS.
IS DR. STRANGE A BAD ENOUGH DUDE TO RESCUE PRINCE FROM LASER JAIL?
i love your doc strange posts. this one, too, is beautifully written. but im not sure how you would make a comic book story based on this. how would you visualize it? an arc (or evena single issue) of people going nots and not/ doing any magic is visually not very interesting. visualizing the concept with spacy astral-plane scenes could work, but kinda robbs this concept of what makes it special, making it just a generic “magical prison which does what the plot demands”, no? am i being unimaginative? (or taking this too seriously?)
“even if they can’t perform magic, they can still see others perform magic, which immediately makes the idea much more plausible.”
i guess a invisibly imprisoned person would think themselves crazy, and just assume its another fucked up hallucination?
oh (and i just cant stop posting) is anybody reminded of ‘the farthest shore’ (3rd book in the earthsea series) by ursula le guin?
If the Invisible Prison isn’t a threat to Doctor Strange, what is it about the Prison that would make the reader believe that he would have any trouble rescuing his apprentice from it? If it’s only that he can’t physically find his apprentice, then it’s just a kidnapping story and the whole concept of the Prison itself is kind of wasted.
@Jase
I suppose. I just wasn’t sure about the continuity of Namor’s hobo-phase, if it was properly explained then I guess revisiting it is unnecessary.
If the Invisible Prison isn’t a threat to Doctor Strange, what is it about the Prison that would make the reader believe that he would have any trouble rescuing his apprentice from it?
I think the thing about the Prison is that you can’t rescue other people from it. It’s a matter of belief or perception, which means that no-one except the imprisoned person can free themselves.
Oops, sorry. I’m still learning to use HTML tags. Only the first paragraph of that was supposed to be in italics.
@kingderella – there is nothing about magic that doesn’t remind one of A Wizard of Earthsea
Kinderella, if I understand you right, the blogger & et al have just proposed putting a Minotaur into an invisible prison. Just reading that sentence should make you think “minotaur in a maze”. It’s the myth of Theseus, but the roles are reversed. And New Yourk City is the modern Crete, sewers and skyscrapers running together into the labyrinth. Any artist worth his Kirby krackle can make it happen.
Excellent idea MGK, but New York is no longer a viable dumping ground for the homeless (see: Giuliani/Bloomberg Campaign To End (Visible) Homelessness & Poverty). Unless they’re in on it? (!!!) OK, a shiny nickel to whoever writes a 500 word fanfic w/ Doctor Strange v the Dark Magus Rudy. Bonus points if the TMNTs cameo…
This reminds me of the Rooms of Renunciation from Unknown Armies, which you need to read.
@SilverHammerMan
Namor’s life as a hobo was a result of a battle with Paul Destine. Although, thinking about it, Destine’s power source was the Serpent Crown (a source of malicious magical power), and the Prison is designed to warp the minds of mystics (which would explain why Namor’s bout of amnseia was cured through the superpowered equivalent of a visit to a barber’s chair. This story could serve as another way to pull off a Defenders reunion!
…Yes, I have been in the presence of conventionally attractive nude women without paying them for the privilege (not on a daily, or even monthly basis, but I have.) I’m not a geek, I swear.
And if Creaky was imprisoned, he seems like the type of character who would spend most of the series wandering in and out of it’s confines without even trying…