Now, the elephant in the room: Power. See, I think there are two assumptions people make that are faulty when it comes to Strange; I agree with you that he is hella powerful, and should be, being a man that can look a Great Old One in the eye and make the thing blink. But;

1) Magic is not science, so it takes nothing from science. Marvel Super Science takes a page or six from magic all the time. Richards, Pym, Stark, they’re the artificers and alchemists of the modern age. You even have the wise old soothsayer with Doc Samson’s psychology. Furthermore, real world mythological lore has never just been ‘Wave a wand and it happens.’. Magic is hard, magic takes work, magic takes a, dare I say, scientific level of discipline just to keep the fundamentals from coming undone and the spirits you’re drawing power from deciding to eat you. All of this means that Dr. Strange can weild a tremendous amount of power, but he has to be smart about it-he needs time to preform the right rituals, he needs to make pacts with the right spirits, he needs to use the proper materials, all of which give him the same weaknesses of any Marvel super scientist. You mentioned earlier how having Mephisto just go ‘Wwwwizard!’ and not explain what the magic did undermined the integrity of the story, because magic is just another plot device and needs to be treated as such. Same concept applies here.

2) Power is absolute. Yeah, you have the fans who bitch if Spider-Man is having a bad day despite “Sometimes Pete has a bad day and gets owned.” being a part of the story for longer than some people have been alive. Turning back to the Oath: for all of Strange’s cosmic power, proper preperation on the Brigand’s part nearly kills him. Yes, Strange spites the Lovecraftian idea of mankind being worthless by directly confronting the unknowable horrors of the world and forcing them to acknowledge him, but it’s just as important to remember that he can be tied up, beaten up, shot, and otherwise physically overwhelmed. The Great Wizard being helpless because he doesn’t have time to preform the proper ritual is a legitimate weakness, and one that when used properly, adds a lot of the drama and suspense to a Dr. Strange story.

Magic in a modern fantastic setting can be amazing if done properly-touching on similar metatextual elements as a proper Fantastic Four story can. Just going, “WAVE MY HAND, YO!” when you can have Dr. Strange have to wrestle the ghost of Charlie Brown, modern avatar of the postmodernist ideal, in order to force him to banish the spiritual rain cloud that’s tearing a family apart(At the whim of Nightmare, who wished to study the mental state the human mind goes through when the family unit collapses in order to further the range of human suffering he can feed off of.) is just lazy writing. If you’ve got a superhero wizard and you can’t make everything he does awesome, you aren’t having enough fun in showbusniess.

I like the way Ditko got Strange out of some of the hard spots. When Baron Mordo trapped an astral Strange in a close topped ethereal cylinder. Strange didn’t escape by throwing a more powerful spell to break it. He flew all the way down the cylinder (which went right into the ground) untill it opened up on the other side of the earth.

I remember a later writer sadly couldn’t supply this form of sneeky IQ for the character. when confronted with a spell destorying time aging demon. None of the spells against him worked, untill in a cross-over issue by the same writer, one of the spells explicably did.
A better way would have been to magic a hole in the ground under (or perhaps in front of his path hidden by an illusion) the demon. The nature of the demon causes the spell to quickly fail, which means he’s trapped in the earth.
This then gives Dr Strange time to surround him with a circle of banishment (which I don’t think, actually needs to touch him as such).

This is a very petty thing to nit pick at, yes, but I had to say it, or the fat little nerd inside me would not have shut up.

I like to look at characters as a kind of ‘tool’ for telling specific types of stories – they’re their own micro-genre.

Strange: “I was roaming the streets of new york city when spiderman was in diapers.”

Wong under his cuff: ” but he still gets confused in the outer boroughs.”

Rintrar once fulled the roll of DKS, but he was from another dimension and what I think Dr Strange does need, if anything, is to be well grounded when not involved in the mystical. So the magic seems more real, he needs to get wet in the rain and the ink from newspapers on his fingers.
Involvement with other superheros at some point is a given. but It might be best if they have the grit of the real world under their own fingertips. Spiderman is a good example of this I think.
Ghostrider dispite his mystic nature, less so I think. He’s a flaming skeleton ridding around on firey motorbike from hell. He’s a completely different brand of mystic sillyness and I think it’s best not to mix them.
Why didn’t Strange work well in the Avengers? Well the stories he was in had next to nothing to do with his magical world and the writer had him use his powers in very nonstandard ways. He never used his eye of Vishanti amulet to check for skrull intrusion within the group, his Cloak didn’t work, and he seemed to have gained the physical regenerative abilities of Wolverine, so he didn’t even seem like the real doctor.

That statement by Wong in BVK’s Oath, was in my opinion, it’s most flawed moment. Magic doesn’t work like that in the real world (yes I do believe in it) and it hasn’t either in the MU. Or Dr Strange wouldn’t have been able to travel back in time at the same time as the Fantastic four with their time machine. Dr Strange’s cloak shouldn’t be able to levitate because other heroes use some form of science based powers to do the same. there are plenty of others I could come up with but I’d be wasting time and space.

However clearly there was a point in the plot as to why Strange didn’t magic up more of the needed drugs.
A better reason would have been this;
Wong: ” Stephen can only easily recreate solid matter in what exists as a natural form, everything else is an energy construct. To recreate my medicine he’d need a sample of the real thing. And I’ve used the last of it”
A statement like this explains why Magic users in fiction can say make ropes into snakes but can’t make a jet fighter out of a house. As a living thing, the snake should be much harder.

I may post again later.

Inhumans = Are they dead or something?? Silent War sucked. They now hang out with Dr. Strange after he and Blackbolt leave the Illuminati and create their own organization of awesomeness.

Jean Grey = Cylon. Take her far, far away from the magical reboot ship and END HER.
Kitty Pryde = No longer the Mary Sue. I insist. Either stop giving her so much attention and write her realistically or END HER.
Wolverine = GOES AWAY FOREVER.

Dr. Strange is not ‘broken.’ He doesn’t need to be fixed, Marvel just needs to stop trying to shoehorn him into superhero books. He’s *supposed* to be incredibly powerful because the foes he flights against are gods and demons, not street criminals and ninjas and aliens. I wish that Marvel had the sense to put this character back into his element, and get some writers who understand how to write good magical/occult style fantasy instead of the same old boring superhero schtick.

What gets me is that Harry Potter took over the world with his popularity. That shows that readers are open to magic in their stories. Just give them a decent story to read. Give them characters with dynamics to care about.

Bonus points for House-style tryouts and eliminations, including the inappropriate hijinks that get things done.

This is kind of why I also like the Inhumans, and Namor-as-a-concept, because they came across as more human than the heroes in my first impressions of them, excepting of course rare moments of excellent writing for other characters. And also why it irritates me that both the Inhumans and Namor have been written like shit. Where’s my metaphor for indigenous people? Or angry mixed-race people? Or ancient people way more advanced than everybody else (non-metaphor)? Where’s my magic that can’t really be explained but is off the awesometer charts??

And yes; Constantine could take Batman in a minute. Interdimensional Judeo-Christian magical torment vs. “my parents died and that makes me sad but also badass (within human limits)” is kind of a no-brainer.

It was just so good.