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…

Most people think of magic instruction as being your basic master/student relationship (not least because so many people just think of it as being like how the Jedi do things in Star Wars), and sometimes this is, in fact, the case. Certainly it was the case for Stephen Strange’s introduction to magic, but what many people overlook is that the Ancient One was a fairly gregarious man as mages go in the first place (and quite possibly it is that ability to simply connect with and understand other people that makes for a good Sorcerer Supreme). Indeed, the one master/one student rule exists because most practitioners of magic simply don’t care for other people much, and if the system is to maintain itself then it shall maintain itself with the minimum stress to its users, and that is how it works.

This is not terribly surprising; after all, pursuing magic is in many ways a rejection of society as a whole. In the modern era it is a rejection of science; in the past it was a rejection of religion. Working magic almost always means defying not only societal norms but the things you have been raised and conditioned all your life to believe as true, to reject your own experience as true. Or, to put it more glibly: it is very hard to fire a magical zappy bolt when you have never fired a magical zappy bolt before, and it becomes harder when you have never seen anybody else fire a magical zappy bolt, and when they have never have never seen anybody fire a magical zappy bolt… it adds up. Which meant that many practitioners of magic had (and even today still have) to abandon society just to get anything done, and not coincidentally why the profession tends to be somewhat misanthropic at the best of times.

Still, magicians need to learn somewhere, and for years the only option was master/student in person, typically with the master demanding the student pay him a stipend or be a servant or what have you. This started changing in the mid-18th century as correspondence among the upper classes (who of course had most of the magic, as not having to work fourteen hours a day to avoid starving definitely gives one a leg up in studying magic) became more prevalent. Sir Humphrey Zzaxx-Clarkson, like many other mages of the era, began his career by sending a polite and very carefully worded letter to someone he (correctly) thought knew a few things. The polite response contained answers, and other names a promising young tyro could correspond with. And so the second age of magic instruction began – decentralized and somewhat impersonal, oftentimes limiting the students to basic tricks, and generally lending itself to any number of devastating flameouts (one thing at which master/student relationship excels is “keep student from blowing self up”), but on the whole was vastly more efficient at generating mages in greater quantities than previous years.

And this would have been fine, except for one thing: the extension of mass correspondence to the lower classes. This is not to say that the upper classes were deserving of magic, of course, but it is a simple human tendency that, when you generally have a good life, you’re more wary about risks – say, the inherent risk of binding a minor cacodemon to a candle so you have a permanent source of light, or something similar. Many of the minor aristocrats pursuing magic in the 18th and 19th centuries through correspondence would barely cast more than two or three spells a year. But when you’re the first person in your family to ever be able to read – you’ve usually got need for more than two or three spells a year.

Still, even though poor people now had the opportunity (mostly in America, of course) to learn magic through correspondence, it didn’t really explode until the late 1920s and the dawn of the pulp magazines. Magic enthusiasts followed Weird Tales and all the other fantasy, horror and weird pulps, and if there was only one truly enthusiastic student for every hundred people sending around their homemade fan magazines dedicated to Robert Howard or Lord Dunsany – that was enough, because those homemade magazines were like The Anarchist’s Cookbook on steroids and LSD all at once. The floodgates opened, and they never really closed from then on out, and it is not for nothing that in the Marvel Universe, this was when superpowers started emerging around this time in quantity. (Of course science was involved as well – but not all of the new powers emerging were scientific in their origin.)

This isn’t to say that all of the new superhumans emerging in 616 at this time were magic users; this isn’t even to say all those powers were caused by magic. But magic is fueled by belief and will, and when you suddenly have a lot more of all three sloshing around, there are knock-on effects. (Chupacacabras did not, in fact, exist until 1922, at which point they always had.) Magic is not predictable; loose, wild magic being powered by extraneous belief can do almost anything, and usually will.

Why does this matter to Dr. Strange in the present day? Well, it matters for three reasons. Firstly, it matters because quite frequently the answer to a magical dilemma can be found in correspondence between two sorcerers who have both been dead for over a century, which means negotiating with the people who now hold those letters. (Dr. Doom, unsurprisingly, has a large library of it.) Secondly, it matters because it’s still happening today via email and secured forum posting – and, yes, snailmail for the traditionalists – which means at any given point there are literally dozens of would-be wizards casting spells and unintentionally (one hopes) causing chaos that can be a tremendous bother when you are Sorcerer Supreme.

And thirdly, it means that someone clever enough and reckless enough will eventually realize that if he can make magical communication hit critical mass – by popularizing it, getting people to challenge themselves, ideally without them even knowing that they’re doing so – he can change the world itself forever, even if he’s not sure what result he’ll get. And preventing that is definitely part of the Sorcerer Supreme’s job, because one of the things you have to realize about magic is that by its very nature it can’t be for everybody, no matter how antidemocratic that may sound.

The Sanctum Sanctorum has, of late, become just another clubhouse for capes on Earth-616. The Defenders and Avengers hang out there every so often when they want to be somewhere a little less public than average. The Thing runs one of his three ongoing poker games there. The X-Men and Avengers run fieldtrips there for their students so Dr. Strange can teach them how to fight magical foes. (He doesn’t mind doing it, although he always takes care to make sure to inform each young hero’s subconsciousness that, although not falling apart in fear is an excellent thing to do with magical foes, that in reality they know next to nothing and therefore their confidence should not be unreasonable. This is about as much as he can realistically do. He has tried to make this work on Spider-Man approximately seven hundred times and it never takes.)

Now, the Sanctum Sanctorum is the headquarters of the Sorcerer Supreme. It is a fantastically important place. Doctor Strange allowing visitors to it is kind of like Nick Fury opening the doors of one of his forty-three hidden secret bases for an open house and bake sale: it’s honestly kind of a terrible idea, not least because someone – probably Hawkeye – will poke at something they shouldn’t poke at, and the next thing you know demons are invading Cleveland.

But, at the same time, the Sanctum Sanctorum is kind of expected as part of the whole “Stephen Strange experience” now. There’s nothing for it: the Defenders all talked to their friends about the place (and since one of them was Hank McCoy that meant a lot of talking) and now it has a reputation. People expect the Sanctum Sanctorum to be mystical and spooky and weird, but also welcoming and safe. It’s a precarious balance to strike, and honestly, maintaining it is a hassle.

Which is why there are actually two Sanctum Sanctorums. Not in the Nick Fury way where there are multiple secret bases, and not anything to do with parallel universes. (Reed Richards, one of the very few who knows Stephen’s little trick in this matter, always gets a little bit irritated when he proposes a new way to explain how the whole thing works, and Doc’s response is inevitably to shrug and say “not really, but if you like.”) The Sanctum Sanctorums are both at 177A Bleecker Street; they’re the same building and they occupy the same space. If you know how, transitioning from one to the other is really quite simple.

The two Sancta are distinct. One – call it Sanc – is what you would expect the Sanctum Sanctorum to be. There are dribbled candles, extremely moody and dramatic lighting, and shadows cloak everything (even at noon). There are dusty bookshelves with musty old tomes and the occasional skull. The other – call it Tum – is what the Sanctum Sanctorum actually needs to be in order for Doctor Strange to function on a daily basis. It’s clean, with comfortable couches and good lighting so he can actually read all of his books. (The bookshelves are all from IKEA. He got them on sale.) There is of course still the occasional skull, but all of the eldritch paraphernalia is neatly stored away for easy access. It is embarrassingly practical.

Of course, since this is magic, the two Sancta have each developed their own distinct personalities – not exactly sentient, of course, but certainly there’s something there that is more than nothing. Both are completely sane and willing servants to the Doctor: Sanc is concerned with performance and Tum with comfort. Sanc allows windows to open so that candles flicker at precisely the right moment and howling wind whistles as necessary. Tum makes sure the thermostat is always set at the optimum level and somehow manages to dust itself. They are invaluable assistants. They’re a little bit at odds and tend to squabble in ways non-bodied personality complexes can (Sanc leaves a petrified demon raccoon out when someone transitions to Tum, Tum leaves a Swiffer out when transitioning to Sanc), but those are just personality quirks.

Until, of course, something happens, and suddenly these two personalities aren’t quite as disembodied as they used to be…

Recently I said that Marvel and DC have two different storytelling paradigms: DC’s is fantastic and Marvel’s pseudorealistic. Marvel heroes work best when the essential ludicrousness of their situation isn’t ignored, and the humdrum problems of everyday human life intrude: Spider-Man has to hustle to keep a job or a girlfriend, Iron Man has to be paranoid about staying on the wagon, the Fantastic Four squabble with one another as families do, Hank Pym has to remind himself “don’t beat up any women today,” and so forth. Even someone like Captain America, who’s pretty close to morally perfect, grapples with temptation from time to time, even if in Cap’s case that temptation is usually “be too proactive in doing good.” And generally speaking, Marvel’s pseudorealistic tone works across the line.

Except for Dr. Strange, and this is why, I think, so few writers these days are capable of cranking out a truly great Dr. Strange story. Dr. Strange isn’t conflicted. Dr. Strange isn’t on the hero’s journey. Dr. Strange left Joseph Campbell behind a long while ago: he’s a character who entered the superheroic stage fully formed. He’s already finished his hero’s journey. He has overcome his flaws. Dr. Strange doesn’t attend AA meetings for his drinking problem because he no longer craves booze; he doesn’t need rage therapy for his anger issues because he’s already solved them. He doesn’t fear his own death, not even a little bit. His only flaws, such as they are, are essentially virtues writ large: a stubborn refusal to give up in the face of overwhelming odds is not exactly a detriment to one’s character.

This should not be surprising. Dr. Strange only begins his run as a superhero after he has trained for years with the Ancient One. Quite possibly longer than years, in fact – years to us, maybe, but time can be subjectively manipulated in the right hands or right places. His studies probably lasted for decades or even centuries. On top of that Dr. Strange has been to war alongside the Vishanti, a war that lasted for over a thousand years. He doesn’t look old, because he chooses not to – but he is old, and with age comes perspective and acceptance.

Now, I understand that for some people this is a minus. These are the same people who think Superman is boring because he has no flaws, and that’s a perfectly valid opinion. Wrong, mind you, but perfectly valid. Flaws do not define a character or make him boring: bad writing does that. Flaws don’t make interesting stories: conflict does. Flaws just provide one type of internal conflict; choices present another, and the best stories involving Superman and Dr. Strange are about the choices they have to make. (Or about external conflict, which is heaps of fun.) Superman has the “can’t save them all” story, which gets reused regularly (and is vitally important for understanding the character); Dr. Strange has the “must condemn someone to save the world” story (same).

Really, the good Doctor is the Marvel Universe’s equivalent of Superman in so many ways: he’s the 800-pound gorilla of superheroing in his continuity, the guy who, if he shows up in practically any other title, outclasses everybody else when he’s being written right. (Which is rare.) He’s a source of near-infinite compassion, which is his true superpower when you consider that he is more or less a god walking among men. And all of this, incidentally, just demonstrates how pointless the Sentry really was: the Marvel Universe never needed a Superman analogue, because it already had one.

(What I hope is my final bar exam is today, so…)

Many people suspect that death is not the end of things, and some of them are right. Others aren’t. Death, in the Marvel Universe at least, is a capricious thing. Most everything never comes back: the spandex set has gotten so used to the idea of resurrection that they often fail to realize how many of them never come back. (Go look at the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe’s Book of the Dead sometime. I did the math: about three-quarters of them have never been resurrected.) And that’s just costumes. The regular joes of the MU know that dead is dead.

Of course, sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes, if you listen very carefully, you can hear the dead. Not with your ears, of course. But you hear them nonetheless. If you’ve got the right sort of training, you might be able to make out, on occasion, what they’re saying. If you tried hard enough, that is. And if you have that training, and you are the sort of person who discovered – relatively later in life than one might expect – that you in fact possess a deep wellspring of compassion, then you might try hard enough. And because you had that compassion, you might take action when you realized that they weren’t so much speaking as crying.

What Stephen Strange heard was weeping – fearful weeping. And so he put himself into a state of living death, because how else are you going to visit the nether realms? And he found a professional super-criminal, dead and gone, trapped in a box of their own making: a trial (this particular super-criminal had been through many trials when they were alive) of their entire life. It’s grounded in real-world details – a judge, a jury, bailiffs, a set of scales – but it’s all ever so wrong, and because this person is already scared every detail serves to reinforce their fear. The judge’s eyes don’t appear to exist. The jury is at times twelve people and then one person with twelve faces. Sometimes there are walls, sometimes not. Sometimes there isn’t a floor except for the faces of people the criminal sort of remembers. They’re not friendly faces.

Now, Dr. Strange knows better than most people that we can and usually do influence our own afterlives, but he also knows that just telling someone that doesn’t work – the delusion of our souls is too strong just for one to say “well, no, actually this isn’t happening.” That doesn’t work. You need to guide them through it on their own. So Dr. Strange takes up the role of this super-criminal’s defense attorney in the last trial of their existence. It’s as good an opening as he can manage: by representing the lost soul, he can subtly remind them of why they don’t deserve to be here. He can give them peace, which is, for them, the only gift that endures.

Of course, this is the Marvel Universe, which means there’s a problem: the prosecutor. You see, the prosecutor isn’t a delusion. He’s quite real. He knows when opportunities like this pop up, and he’s always ready to capitalize. He wants this criminal’s soul for reasons of his own – there are always reasons when you’re dealing with this sort of being. He wants the guilty verdict: he wants that super-criminal to want to be punished, unendingly and forever, and to choose it themselves. And he’s not entirely happy that Stephen Strange has come along to muck things up. But fine, he thinks, let the Sorcerer Supreme flail about; Strange doesn’t know the tricks of the courtroom of the soul, but the prosecutor does.

Because Mephisto has done this many, many times before. And his record is perfect.

Previously, we discussed how time travel works, or doesn’t work. Most time travel in comics follows the “create an alternate parallel universe in which you are then trapped” motif. There are reasons for this. If you are creating a time travel machine, you don’t want it killing you, and traveling to the past is the sort of thing which makes it effortlessly simple for you to accidentally not exist all of a sudden: you accidentally convince an Irishman in 1843 that he should travel to London to find work rather than emigrate to America, and then all of a sudden you don’t exist because your parents met at a Ted Kennedy rally which never happened because that Irishman emigrating led to there being Kennedys (or at least that specific branch of Kennedys) in the first place. Sure, there might be someone present who’s kind of occupying your general space, but it’s not you, because you’ve ceased to exist. This is why smart people time travel in a way that generally keeps them detached from the effects of causality.

That having been said: it’s quite easy to muck around with the timeline you’re currently on. It’s mostly suicidal – if you’re worried about the effects on you. But what if you’re really, really powerful? And not really part of Earth’s timeline generally, say? In that case, mucking around with Earth’s timeline is kind of like playing with a four-dimensional ant farm. And if you’ve got goals beyond simply messing about, then you can be really, really dangerous.

It manifests itself when Dr. Strange notices that suddenly, people don’t recognize the word “obscene” any more. Or “road.” Or “unreal.” Or “dwindle.” He recognizes timeline alteration when he sees it; he’s made certain that changes to the timeline lag in their affecting of him. (It gives him time to notice changes and then figure out what to do. It wasn’t easy and he needed a lot of tutoring from the Vishanti to learn how to do it, but you don’t get to be Sorcerer Supreme by slacking.) In this case, after a day or so, he knows what’s wrong: every word invented by Shakespeare has disappeared from the English language. Along with all of his plays. Along with most knowledge of Shakespeare. So it’s pretty obvious what somebody’s done.

But it’s more than just a few plays. This isn’t a story about the power of stories. Neil Gaiman already wrote that.¹ It doesn’t change history that much if Romeo and Juliet never gets written; it just means that A Tale of Two Cities or Jane Eyre takes its place in the Great Works canon. History dauntlessly² marches on.

But this is the Marvel Universe, and that means history marches on, but there are key moments. In the history of the Sorcerer Supremes, there are countless magical standoffs. Most of them involved magic words. “But wait,” you say, “most of them didn’t speak English, or at least didn’t do magic in it.” And this is true and this is not true. See, magic words are sometimes a genuine pick in the lock of the universe, and sometimes they’re just a vehicle to sound impressive and gather confidence while your willpower and mojo do the heavy magical lifting and then they become that pick. And English differs from most languages in that it is completely and utterly an expressive language. There’s a reason it’s become so dominant: it’s easier to invent words in English, as well as steal them, repurpose them, mix their use. Really, plain old English is downright magical in many varied³ ways before you cast so much as a cantrip. Most of Earth’s premier sorcerers might talk about how they used the Incantation of Irix in the original pre-Sumerian, and it’s always good to have a little razzle-dazzle, that’s true. But for their everyday stuff – and when they don’t have time to think about how to pronounce pre-Sumerian, which is usually the most important moments – they use English.

Something wants to hobble the English language, one of the greatest weapons of its mystic defenders. Something wants to throttle it. And if you want to hurt modern English, you start by getting rid of Shakespeare, who invented nearly two thousand words and phrases, some of which are so mundane and common (“moonbeam,” bandit,” “scuffle”…) it’s shocking to think that a man sat down and literally thought them from nothing.

Which means that Dr. Strange has to go back in time himself and stop this assassination⁴ from ever happening. Luckily, he knows a spell that will set aside Ferdinando Stanley, who was not only the patron of William Shakespeare before Shakespeare hit it big, but also Lord Strange of the Barony of Strange.⁵ Can Strange – over the course of a decade in Elizabethan England – effectively mimic⁶ his namesake, prevent the actions of those who would interfere with Shakespeare’s most vital work, and not arouse⁷ the troublesome suspicion of John Dee, Queen Bess’ court magician?

1. About a dozen times. [↩]
2. Shakespeare invented this word. “King Henry VI.” [↩]
3. And this one. “Titus Andronicus.” [↩]
4. This one too. “Macbeth.” [↩]
5. Okay, he pronounced it “strang.” But it counts. [↩]
6. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” [↩]
7. “King Henry VI” again. [↩]

The Sorcerer Supreme is of course tasked with the defense of this reality from all others. But the thing about defense, as any diplomat can tell you, is that there’s multiple ways to do it. A massive display of might is always a good option A, but there will always be those too cocky, too stupid, or too powerful to be dissuaded by your ability to turn armies into a pile of barely-sentient suet named Wuggles.

Option B is diplomacy, and as in our level of understanding, it is often very convenient and simple: being on polite terms with powerful sorcerers of other dimensions is, by and large, quite worthwhile. Firstly, it means that you can worry much, much less about them being hostile to Earth’s reality, which in and of itself is pretty awesome. Secondly, it means that every so often you can deal with them for help, which comes in handy – well, not that often, really, because rulers of other dimensions tend to inflate the value of their services more than you would think and usually it’s just a better deal to go with the really powerful grantors of power, but sometimes it can be downright useful, and better to have the option than not.

However, the opportunity cost of the diplomatic approach is often… irritating. For example, the Sorcerer Supreme is, like it or not, considered a “get” for organizers of social events in other dimensions. (Even when the other dimension’s powerful person offering the invite outclasses Doc. It’s like having a party and, say, the President of Hungary shows up – you look good even if your country makes Hungary look like a 98 pound weakling.) And you can’t turn down all the invitations. You can turn down the smaller ones, of course, and they won’t feel bad – even if you just send a polite note (or polite etched memory crystal, or polite scent-of-regret-on-jasmine-airbursts), simply that will make your prospective host feel better.

But some of them are too important to turn down. So when the Malagascor of Fijw requests your presence at the liferment ceremony of his firstling, you pretty much have to go – because, sure, Dr. Strange can probably take down the Malagascor of Fijw in a straight-up spell-sling, but why would you want to have a fight to the death when you can just go to a party instead?

But of course it’s never that simple. Because

- the Undying King of Pallia and the High Ku Of Ku both find Stephen and demand he intercede on their respective behalves in the interdimensional war they’re currently fighting, both convinced that he’s promised to do so

- the party from Asgard insist that Dr. Strange, as an honorable champion of Earth, have them as his personal retinue, which is problematic considering they’re mostly half-drunk berserkers (except for that one valkyrie who looks oddly familiar…)

- Regena, daughter of Gjo, wants to discuss arrangements for an upcoming wedding that Stephen is quite certain he didn’t agree to (but she is quite certain he proposed, and in most gentlemanly extravagance!)

- he has to make sure that he and Umar are never in the same room – not because he fears her (although of course he does because he’s not an idiot), but because he’s put quite a bit of work into making sure that the Dark Dimension’s intelligence network thinks he’s still on Earth (and who the hell invited Umar to this thing anyway?)

- a Kronn chronolord demands retribution for the horrible insult Strange will cause him in twenty-five minutes’ time, although the exact nature of that insult is a mystery to all concerned

- and of course, the Malagascor had ulterior motive for inviting Stephen in the first place…

Time travel is part of the Sorcerer Supreme’s day job. It sounds interesting; it mostly isn’t. (I mean, from a certain point of view, time travel to the past is seeing stuff that already happened anyway and time travel to the future is like fast-forwarding through the good parts of the movie.) Two or three times a year, somebody invents time travel and they almost always travel to the past, which means Dr. Strange has to put on his time-travel pants, follow them back, do everything necessary to stop their stomping-on-butterflies (or whatever) from creating causality paradoxes, then remove the knowledge of time travel from their minds permanently. Really, it’s just kind of a slog.

(Every so often, somebody gets the bright idea of going back in time and murdering Strange’s parents before he was born, or Strange as a baby, or what have you. The same thing always happens: they commit their nefarious crime only to find out their targets are completely protected from their attack and don’t even notice the assault/explosion/whatever. Then they turn around, where Doc stands there, arms crossed, looking rather irritated.)

But this time around it’s different, because Colin Finn hasn’t invented time travel. He’s not even a theoretical physicist or mystic-in-training. He’s a deliveryman for a courier company. Drives one of those vans, wears a dorky uniform. Has a girlfriend who dumped him six months ago because his life was going nowhere. Plays XBox with his buddies, likes books with swords and knights in them. He’s an average dude.

Except that whenever he gets stressed or nervous he restarts the flow of time; rewinds the entire day instantly to when he got out of bed. He’s been doing it for a long time now; the universe has been stuck on July 7th over and over again. Sometimes he gets a few weeks out, sometimes a month or two, sometimes only a few days, but inevitably reality goes zzzzzzzwoooooop and he’s back in bed. He can’t control it, can’t stop it, and you’d better believe nobody notices it. He’s tried killing himself a couple of times and that just auto-rewinds everything for him. He’s really very depressed about the whole thing.

Well, except for Dr. Strange. Deja vu eventually becomes more than just deja vu, after all, when you’ve got the top job, and after a few thousand repetitions any Sorcerer Supreme worth his salt would start the day realizing he’d already started the day previously. After a few attempts to divine what’s going on fail (“By the million eyes of Ashtur, I beseech thee, reveal the-” zzzzzzzwoooooop “Oh, damn it!”) eventually Strange does what he probably should have done in the first place if he didn’t keep waking up the night after he’d only gotten three hours of not-very-satisfactory sleep: he goes outside the universe.

And that’s how he finds out that things are actually much worse than he thought. Because Finn isn’t just rewinding time. He’s using chronal energy, and that energy has to come from somewhere – and it’s coming from the past and the future. The past is steadily being eaten away as Finn rewinds, again and again and again, and the future will never be. And every time, the great rewind stores more and more chronal energy – Finn is literally becoming a timebomb, but in the far more literal sense as well as the one we’re all familiar with.

You can’t kill him – even if you could manage it, what would happen to that release of time? (Answer: a lot of things, most of it bad.) So Stephen Strange has to somehow cure the strange affliction which presents itself to him. But how do you do that? This isn’t a cute movie starring Bill Murray; it’s not about Finn, the rewind doesn’t care about him becoming a better person. This is something that was done to the guy. And Stephen has less and less time – literally – to figure out what.

Hey, you read World War Hulk, right? Wasn’t it cool when the Hulk called out Iron Man and Mr. Fantastic and Dr. Strange?

But here’s the thing. Tony Stark is an international celebrity and Important Person in the eyes of the public. Mr. Fantastic is similarly one of the most famous people in the world and also Very Important. Neither of them can go anywhere as themselves without being mobbed by onlookers who want an autograph or a lay or occasionally to kill them. In the Marvel Universe, Thor and Captain Marvel are both the centrepieces of cultish sects that worship them. And then there’s Dr. Strange, who has awesome magical power that at times has actually been divinely inspired for reals.

But Dr. Strange doesn’t have his own cult. He doesn’t make the cover of Time or People or even The National Enquirer. His name’s not unknown – heck, he was a famous surgeon once, now he’s mostly retired, does consulting work on surgical techniques and their integration with Eastern medicine – but he’s not famous. He walks around downtown New York all the time. Unbothered. He actually runs errands sometimes. (Mostly Wong does it, but Stephen likes to get out for a walk every now and then.)

How does he do that, when he participates in Big Superhero Shit every so often? How is it that, after being called out by the Hulk on worldwide television, nobody afterwards said or thought “huh, maybe this Dr. Strange guy is somebody I should pay attention to?” How does he keep going back to obscurity?

The answer’s pretty simple: it’s because the Doc wants it that way. Magic’s good for a lot of things, after all, and one of them is hiding. Not even “hiding in plain sight” hiding: no stage magic for Stephen Strange (who, if we’re being honest, can never remember which is the turn and which is the pledge and which is the prestige, and still doesn’t quite understand how the linking rings work). This was one of the first bargains Strange made during his magical career (he figured out how badly he needed it in the first two weeks after the followers started camping outside his door). Ikonn, the master of illusion and disguise, was more than willing to give it to him for a favour.

Strange paid that favour (he doesn’t talk about it nowadays) and has had the power ever since. It just makes him forgettable. You’d just gloss over him, or mentions of him. When the Hulk was screaming on national television, people were so goggled by him screaming for the heads of Iron Man and Mr. Fantastic that they just didn’t realize he also said “and Dr. Strange.”

It’s not universal. People who are determined to know of him can get around it easily enough, but Strange doesn’t worry about them. (At least two-thirds of them are people he should meet anyway, he figures.) People who are used to a weirder life than average – like much of the super-community – tend to ignore the effect of it as well, and although that has drawbacks, for the most part it tends to be a bit of a bonus.

(It used to be that supervillains drinking at the Bar With No Name would convince one of the newbie supervillains to attack the Sanctum Sanctorum so they could have a bit of a laugh at the noob’s expense. This happened a few times until the Doc figured out what was going on, and then he paid an entirely polite and well-mannered visit to the Bar. It doesn’t happen any more.)

Until one day, when something Stephen is reading about recombinant DNA therapy piques his intellectual curiosity, and hasn’t it been a while since Hank came over for tea? So he phones up Hank McCoy…

…and Hank has no idea who he is at first. It takes three minutes of conversation (Hank’s gregarious, after all, and has been known to talk the ear off of people who dialed the wrong number) for Strange to remind Hank that they have been friends for years.

It starts getting worse from there. After a little while, the Avengers are looking at him funny when he comes over. Then they start acting like he’s a civilian. Then Nick Fury – an obsessive secret keeper if ever there was one – doesn’t know who he is any more. Night Nurse starts hedging on his name from time to time. Wong, thankfully, can fall back on “Master,” although it’s clear in his tone that he’s not quite sure all the time why he’s using the honorific.

Something’s gone wrong. But what? And how does he fix it? Because when Stephen Strange looks in the mirror, now, he’s starting to wonder if he recognizes the man staring back at him…

It begins when a man in a Santa outfit is found dead in a New York alleyway, his face ripped apart beyond recognition and every drop of blood in his body exsanguinated. But it doesn’t end there. The very next day, a second Santa is found hanging from the London Bridge, his eyes gouged out – later during the autopsy, it is revealed that several of his organs have gone missing, even though there is no scar indicating a place where they might have been removed. A third Santa shows up in the middle of a Vancouver plaza on day three, with skin the consistency of melted wax; on day four, a headless, limbless torso in a Santa coat shows up outside the Sydney Opera House.

But these are not just any Santas. These, every one, are members of the Santae.

The Santae are a very, very old brotherhood, not just of humans but indeed a plethora of supernatural creatures as well. Wizards, sorcerers, spirits, ghosts, monsters, angels, demons, lawyers, you name it – the Santae don’t care what you are so long as you’re willing to contribute to their crusade. Which, in a word, is Christmas.

You see, a long time ago, a number of magicians and influential citizens of ancient Rome came together to discuss a growing threat – an enemy from elsewhere, which fed on human fear, sorrow and misery. This emotional vampirism empowered these entities ever more greatly, but the Romans understood that you couldn’t simply stop people from being afraid or sad; it didn’t work. Human nature is a bit too pessimistic to allow it on a mass scale. The entities were growing ever more powerful and standard magic grew less and less effective; their tendrils reached into this world to create moments of fear and pain that were occultly significant and gave them ever more power. They wanted to come here and turn this world into a new hell of their own design.

Then one of the group that would become the Santae, a penitent demon by the name of Krngl, had an idea. What if people could be convinced to spread joy, cheer and love? Not all the time – just enough that the Santae could use these outpourings of positive emotion as the equivalent of spiritual and cosmological booster shots for the entire planet, working behind the scenes to create the circumstances where occultly significant shows of hope and love and other fine emotions could be tuned to attack the entities. The group didn’t have any better ideas (they were frankly pretty desperate by this point) and were cheerfully surprised when it turned out that this plan actually worked at that year’s Saturnalia.

From that moment the Santae worked tirelessly to serve their planet, using winter festivals and holidays as their cover. The Santae used whatever was convenient: the Festival of Sol Invictus, Diwali, the Chinese New Year (which they made sure spread to most of the eastern half of Asia), Yule, Eid, Chanukah (recently, Jewish members of the Santae have taken to calling themselves “Chanukah Harries,” mostly because they like a good joke as much as anybody else), and of course Christmas. It was the Santae who made sure that Oliver Cromwell died of “malaria,” ending his Puritan Parliament, and it was a member of the Santae working in the Coca-Cola corporation who suggested a new Christmastime marketing campaign using Santa Claus, popularizing his image throughout the world. Every year, they turn hundreds of shows of virtue into magical weapons in the Earth’s defense; every year, they protect the planet anew.

And now, somebody is killing them off. That’s when the Santae go to the one man they know can help them: the Sorcerer Supreme.

It’s common knowledge that magic, generally speaking, needs intent to function. Magical spells are complex tools, and the driving will of the caster is akin to the torque applied when you use a screwdriver. Just as merely putting the screwdriver against the screw is not enough to twist it, so is merely saying “enogh morlincck ptg’aah” enough to appeal to the Seven-Handed Sloghee of Ptu for a magical zappy bolt. Without the will, the word is meaningless. Everybody knows this, and it is always the case.

Except, of course, when it isn’t. Not every spell is like a screwdriver. A small few are more like a .45 automatic; the culmination of lifetimes’ worth of refinement of work, resulting in magical expression so innate that intent becomes meaningless. And just like the .45, if you gave them to a baby, the baby could blow his head off. Or yours, for that matter. That’s why nobody ever uses them: the entire point of magic is that you have the power, not Joe Shitbag down the street. (Sorcerers tend to get in a huff when the peons get magical power without a lifetime of study. It smacks of cheating.)

It begins when a teenaged girl burns up in a pyroclasm outside of Houston. She had thought she was a mutant, even told her parents of her intent to go to San Francisco and join the X-Men so she could use her powers of fire and flame to help people. Her parents weren’t wild about it, but accepted her choice – until the aforementioned fiery death. But Hank McCoy knows a mutant when he sees one – and when he doesn’t – and puts two and two together, and calls Reed Richards. And Reed Richards eliminates everything Hank didn’t, and that’s when he calls Stephen Strange.

A bit of investigation leads the Doc to a tattoo parlour, where he discovers in the sample book a series of glyphs no tattoo artist should have, much less ink. The glyphs are old magic, very powerful and very dangerous – spells meant only for combat with massively dangerous consequences. The girl had a glyph that combined seven separate fire-wielding magics into a single rune stencilled onto her back. (The tattoo artist explained that it meant “warrior” in Sanskrit. He was not correct about this.) She only lived another six months after getting the tattoo; it was amazing she managed six days given that she didn’t know the limits of her power.

But she’s dead now, and tragic as that might be, she can’t hurt anybody at this point. But the other tattoos the artist unknowingly empowered other cool-seekers with can. So Strange and his coterie have to find those other young people and get them to remove their tattoos. Not easy, but not impossible. Right?

Except that they’re not just looking for one or two people who might explode, but specifically a group of five people with a multi-part spell tattooed on their backs. If those five people ever ended up within, say, twenty feet of one another, the spell activates. That the designers of these magic glyphs – who were willing to give people power to turn themselves into walking bombs – actually took the time to put in a failsafe that meant requiring five individuals to work in concert, you can get an idea of how dangerous the resulting spell is. (Hint: think in terms of hemispheres being removed.)

Except that the tattoos were designed to not only give great power, but also avoid detection. (These were designed for an ancient civilization’s warrior elite, after all.) So the usual scrying spells won’t work, and that means Strange and his band have to do things the old-fashioned way: with footwork and deduction. Although none of them are stupid, this is not exactly their forte.

And except that somebody gave the tattoo artist that book of glyphs – and they have a vested interest in making sure that the fivepart charm fires off.

Rintrah’s death was a bad one – both in the actual nature of the death (it looked rather unpleasant) and in the writing of it. Those unfamiliar with Strange’s most recent disciple (who was a friendly big green minotaur from another dimension, which is par for the course when it comes to the life of Dr. Strange) should understand that he died after rescuing Strange from an evil demon named Tartessus – Rintrah decided to smash the amulet that was Tartessus’ sole gateway to this dimension, and died in the resulting explosion.

Unfortunately, Tartessus was a “feeding” demon, one that consumed souls for sustenance and power. What Dr. Strange didn’t know (since this happened at the apex of his mystic powerlessness) was that in smashing the amulet, Rintrah’s soul was severed from his body and captured as he died. Tartessus restrained itself from feeding, for Rintrah’s soul was more than just a snack: it was an anchor to his home plane of R’vaal. Tartessus started quietly raiding Rintrah’s home plane for food. Unfortunately for the denizens of R’vaal, though, Tartessus had a bit of an advantage now: Rintrah had died on earth, so the anchor through to R’vaal that his death had created was also tethered to our dimension. He couldn’t be destroyed without traveling here first.

The ruling councils of R’vaal decided to take action to confront the threat of Tartessus, keeping their populace under guard by the various mages’ councils, while a few of their boldest adventurers would set forth and find the link to Tartessus’ plane and destroy it, thus keeping Tartessus safe. They prepared a spell matrix of transport and began outfitting the selected heroes for the dangerous journey ahead.

However, it was at this point that Bromion stole the matrix.

Bromion, one of the foremost soldier-captains of R’vaal, five times victor of the Great Warrior’s Squall in the central circle of central circles; Bromion, who had argued long and fruitlessly that for R’vaal to simply allow Tartessus to freely pillage other dimensions was a moral outrage; Bromion, who had demanded that R’vaal go to war against Tartessus for the crimes the demon had committed against it. Bromion, who could not abide it in his heart to allow Tartessus to live after the foul thing had slain his younger brother and entrapped his brother’s soul as a tool, and whose need for vengeance was obvious to all in the councils.

Bromion knew that Tartessus would prove a deadly foe, but he prepared himself, taking forth (or, more accurately, also stealing) the Adze of Old R’vaal, which as all knew could cleave the very forces of magic itself in two. He similarly equipped himself with (again, stole) the Trumpet of Gazplach, which when sounded could send forth radiant and deadly light against one’s foes. And he took one of his little brother’s childhood projects: the small crystal Rintrah had made as a young hornling, which would glow brighter in his presence. Clearly, Bromion reckoned, this would guide him to the soul trap the demon wore.

But before he did any of that, he consulted with a sympathetic oracle – his desire for revenge did not outweigh his sense of duty, and he wished to make sure that his quest at least had a chance of success. The oracle told him that success was possible, but he would require help.

“Seek the counsel of your kin’s former master. He will guide you to your ultimate destiny, and to the ultimate downfall of your foe. Only with his wisdom shall you prevail, Bromion son of Enitharmon daughter of Los; only by his unsteady hand can you triumph.”

Where do gods come from in the Marvel Universe, anyway?

I mean, at this point it’s pretty clear that they exist independent of human belief, so the ever-popular Terry Pratchett theory of godly creation (which was adopted by Neil Gaiman for the DCU in Sandman) is right out. They’re just sort of there. Either they were created by some even more vast power than they themselves might be, or perhaps they grew out of nothingness: the primary gods in each pantheon were formless energy which somehow gained sentience in the early days of the universe. Each theory has its proponents, of course (with more than a little personal interest backing said theories more often than not).

What we can adduce, though, through simply observation, is that regardless of whether or not the creation of gods is directed or spontaneous, it is most certainly difficult, and likely requires a set of circumstances that mostly do not exist nowadays: the heady days when every cosmic fart would create a brand new pantheon looking for a bunch of believers to collectively call Home are long since over. The gods themselves don’t know how they came to be: if you asked Odin or Zeus or Izanagi or Gitche Manitou how they came to be, not a one of them would remember. And even if they did, and they don’t, they certainly wouldn’t tell you.

Which is why it comes as a shock to Stephen Idle, a bike courier in Los Angeles, when he suddenly figures out that he’s the God of Couriers. He’s not sure how it happened; all of a sudden he’s faster on his bike than the wind and can hear the nonspecific prayers of his fellow couriers for speed and skill and truck avoidance. Plus, there is that one time that he flips a semi when it’s about to hit his best friend, with naught more than a wave of his hand. And why are all the girls at the courier agency looking at him like he’s James Bond all of a sudden? He gets himself checked for a mutant gene, but there’s nothing there. His powers aren’t natural; hell, when he tries to get them identified they disappear entirely, like they don’t want to be seen.

Hank Farnell, in Oklahoma, realizes at about the same time that he is the God of Cowboys. His lasso can snare the horizon itself. The cattle follow him like loyal dogs, his horse seems to be glowing for some reason, and Hank’s pretty sure he shouldn’t be able to ride across falling snowflakes. Betsy Klein in London discovers that she is the Goddess of Negotiation when the company she’s dealing with, in a tense labour standoff, agrees to not only accede to the union’s demands but offers a potential worker buyout – the CEO says he’s so very sorry, and would they like his past decade’s salary as a sign of good faith? Alex Ngwambe in Zanzibar comes to understand his place as the God of Bargains; Thoi Pham in Hong Kong learns he is the God of Mad Beats; Shannon Mckittrell in Auckland learns she is the Goddess of Bungee.

And if the societal confusion caused by this brand new pantheon was not bad enough, here is the thing: the other gods, the ones already extant? They’re pissed. Most of them, remember, aren’t really very nice people: good chaps like Hercules and Thor are not very representative of their pantheons, really, and the Asgardian and Greek pantheons are actually a couple of the nicer ones. Tensions start ratcheting up; half of the pantheons just want to kill these newcomers and the other half wants to recruit them. And what’s worse is that most of the new gods don’t want to be gods at all. Really, godhood is kind of a pain in the ass. (“Worshippers? You can have ‘em. And what the fuck is up with auguries? Why am I expected to respond to a pile of steaming entrails?”)

This is the sort of thing only the Sorcerer Supreme can do: serve as the go-between and negotiator for a dozen pantheons while simultaneously putting his foot down to protect the former mortals (even the leaders of most pantheons, powerful as they might be, don’t want to risk that the current Sorcerer Supreme might be able to take them on) and investigating to figure out why suddenly there’s so much spare godliness to go around (and who or what might have caused it). The fact that there’s any new gods at all isn’t wondrous: it’s potentially very worrisome. That’s the sort of thing that prompts Dr. Strange to make house calls.

There are cosmic horrors – idiotic, ravenous, indestructible things – lurking on the fringes of the universe. They adore the taste of sentient life; it attracts them to the cracks in reality, and then they force their way through for a time, destroy/eat everything in sight, and retreat back to the madness-worlds that they call home. You know this for truth; its obviousness is inescapable. Most people cannot accept this at face value, however, and that is why we come up with theories about life-destroying comets and the like.

The old races – the really, really old races, the ones that the Elders of the Universe outlived – discovered, back in the day, the power of warning signs. Life magic, using the energy of expiring souls to create runes that, if not capable of destroying those horrors, at least made planets rich with life taste like moldy Limburger to them. (Metaphorically speaking, of course.) Benevolent members of those races explored the universe and found the prehistoric ancestors of all the alien races, and taught them the rituals – who to choose, how to kill and when and where, what to do thereafter. (Murder is simple. Sacrifice is difficult.)

Of course, people being people – even when they’re aliens – after a few tens of thousands of years, everybody forgot the why and how and when and where, and it just became ritual sacrifice to appease gods. Sometimes the gods existed; sometimes they did not. However, the existent gods didn’t complain, because sacrificial worship is still worship, even if it is messy. The nonexistent ones did not complain for obvious reasons. Eventually, of course, most civilizations grew up and left behind ritual sacrifice as a practice, because it was barbaric and cruel and pointless. And it was – the original rules to create the warding signs had long since mutated into uselessness.

On Earth, the old races taught half a dozen nascent cultures, all of whom managed to forget in different ways the purpose of their task. It’s not surprising that humanity forgot the reason for the sacrifices; what would be surprising would be if somebody managed to rediscover the practice and the need behind it. It would be virtually impossible, an act of archeology so amazing Indiana Jones would jump out of the fridge and doff his fedora in respect.

Which of course means that somebody does it. An accomplished archeologist pieces it all together, and then realizes that, according to the instructions left behind on stone tablets from a dozen ancient civilizations, Earth’s current set of warning markers is just about all used up. They should have been renewed a century ago; now maybe a couple of years’ time and one person’s knowledge are all that stands between the planet and eternal cosmic consumption.

The good Doctor only learns of this person’s work gradually, when other, less magically-inclined heroes ask him to consult on a grisly, occult-looking murder. Finding the person involved proves to be difficult, even for one of his calibre. But then comes the most troubling question: what if the archeologist is right? What if the heightened and honed magical abilities of the Sorcerer Supreme (and similarly powerful mages) aren’t an upgrade to the old blood magic, but merely an interesting, totally non-similar skill set, and they can’t deal with the cosmic horrors at all?

It’s Strange’s job to protect this reality from destruction. Does being the universe’s protector mean being the universe’s butcher when necessary?

Pretty much from the start, emails and comments have appeared to the tune of “well this is all well and good but Dr. Strange isn’t the Sorcerer Supreme any more so everything you’re doing is meaningless.” And, as amusing as it is that people’s chief reason for dubbing this “meaningless” is that it does not necessarily follow current canon rather than the more pressing issue of it being unlikely that I will get paid moneys to write the comic any time soon, it’s still wrong. I mean, people, come on. You know I’m a continuity dork by now. I only mock Geoff Johns because he is so very like me in that he likes everything to fit when it’s possible to make things fit. And in this case the fix is really quite easy.

Pretty much from the first one of these things, I have been trying to gradually instill the idea that the chief plot point of the series is “majorly bad shit is coming down the pike.” And when I say bad shit, I mean seriously baaaaaaad shit, man. Shit that is bad enough that it scares Stephen Strange, who is very pointedly somebody who doesn’t get scared and doesn’t panic about much of anything.

(Additionally: I can sum up the reason for said bad shit coming down the pike in exactly three words.)

And when Strange saw what was coming, he knew what he had to do. He needs to work unfettered, without the constraints and day-to-day issues of the mortal world distracting him, but more importantly even than that, he needs to make sure said bad shit isn’t coming at him. The nice thing about being the Sorcerer Supreme is that you’re always the Sorcerer Supreme, until you’re not – but most people don’t understand that the job is attained in such a holistic manner. They think it’s a title of rank, or a privilege. They think it’s about having the Eye of Agamotto, the Cloak of Levitation and all the other trappings. (Which are nice, sure, but they don’t make you the Sorcerer Supreme.)

And he’s been preparing this for a long time, making sure that it was believable to any superhero who might think about investigating. (“Not being able” to use his magic to do simple things like save the New Avengers from a lousy crashing plane, for example.) He started downplaying his abilities more and more, making it seem more and more difficult – because the New Avengers, decent and brave as they might be, would be cannon fodder in what was coming, and he needed to make sure when it did in fact arrive that they were nowhere near the scene of the real fight.

And then he crowned all of this with his masterstroke – choosing a “new” Sorcerer Supreme.

Which actually worked something like this:

continue reading "“It isn’t calm before the storm. Stuff happens.”"