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:

…and that’s it for this round. Join us next April, when I’ll delve into, I dunno, Brother Power: The Geek or something.

Top comment: I’d love it if those words were “Delicious, delicious sandwiches” or “Howard the Duck”…
“Shuma Gorath pregnant?”
“Tribunal’s face uncovered?”
“Hitler: Sorcerer Supreme”?
“Inverted kick flip”?
“Galactus ate magic”?
“Magic-Technological singularity”?
“Deadpool: Sorcerer Supreme”? –Ben

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(People just kept mentioning them and mentioning them over and over again, and I kept thinking, “man when I get to #29 they are going to accuse me of pandering or plagiarism or something like that.”)

The Dire Wraiths hate you. It’s not personal. They hate everybody. But it also is personal because if they knew you, they’d hate you just because you’re you. The Dire Wraiths are not very nice people.

But they don’t hate you blindly. They have reasons for hating you. You’re a human, and humans – along with ROM – are of course the reason the Dire Wraiths went from being one of the most feared races in the galaxy to a collection of suicidal prisoners in Limbo. Most of the Dire Wraith population is dead because of humans (and ROM). The Dire Wraiths don’t want to conquer the humans; they want to exterminate them and make them suffer. And they want to do it before they go to Galador, because the Dire Wraiths want to keep enough humans alive as hostages that the Galadorians won’t try to pre-emptively annihilate them.

And here’s the thing: the Dire Wraiths are much, much smarter than their Skrull cousins. They know how to pull off an actual secret invasion. They’ve done it before, you see. And unlike the Skrulls they don’t need to take out and replace superhumans. The Dire Wraiths know that messing with superheroes in any amount just tips them off. The Dire Wraiths are once again just doing what they do best – they’ve infiltrated a small town in middle America that’s nothing special – except for a few key elements it happens to be near. Chief among these are a high-tech research facility specializing in solar energy transformation technologies and a weatherbeaten steppe with inherent mystical properties…

…because the Dire Wraiths, this time, are led by a prodigy Dire Wraith, verily the Dr. Doom of Dire Wraiths in that, unlike the rest of his species, she possessed both incredible skill with Dire Wraith super-science and Dire Wraith sorcery.

“But wait,” some continuity nerd out there says, “the Dire Wraiths lost their magic abilities when ROM transported Wraithworld into Limbo.” And this is true. However, this fugitive Dire Wraith, one of the scant few dozen to escape ROM’s massive neutralizer attack on Wraithworld and only a child at the time, applied her scientific mind to the Wraiths’ lack of magical power source and came up with a very simple solution: hire out.

Someone – something – has given the Dire Wraiths magic again. And frankly, it’s more powerful by far than the podunk, pedestrian sorcery they worked before; now, Dire Wraith sorcery is powerful enough that when they use it, someone like Dr. Strange notices. (It is, after all, his job.) And they’ve got a direct line to whomever’s providing them with mojo; the magics they wield are so powerful that they are literally burning out their own bodies when they use them. But they’ve got enough magic now that they can pull Wraiths out of Limbo, and more Wraiths join their numbers every day, and they don’t care how many of them die -

- because if they can convert Earth’s sun into the new dark sun of the Wraiths, with science and sorcery, they win. Even if every Dire Wraith was immediately afterwards killed (which would be entirely possible because nobody likes the Dire Wraiths), they would forever have left their mark once more on the universe.

All of this begs two major questions. Firstly – who’s powering the Wraiths? For my money, I’d guess that it’s someone who somehow gains power from their magic-fueled deaths, which means it’s probably someone really bad. Cthon? Mephisto? Satannish? (You just know that whatever the answer is, it’s not going to be good.)

And second – given that Marvel Comics can’t show ROM in his armor, how is ROM going to get involved in this, anyway? Because you totally know he will.

Top comment: Like Naked Snake and Naked Jehuty before him, Naked Rom shall be a powerful, yet wholly unstable force to be reckoned with. – Doctor Hal

THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT DOCTOR STRANGE.

1.) He is polite. Not just because he routinely deals with impossibly powerful forces whom he does not want to offend (although that is certainly part of it); Stephen Strange is polite because at his core he is a man who has been humbled. He was an arrogant misanthrope who realized exactly what he was and decided he didn’t like that, and did his best to change. Someone like that is polite because not being polite is exactly the opposite of the person they want to be.

2.) But he’s still a doctor. He tends to think he knows best. This is because usually (although not always, not by any stretch) he does know best, and he gets irritated when people don’t do as he tells them to do (which is often). Because he’s polite, he tries not to get angry about it. Usually he succeeds. But none of this changes the fact that he decides courses of action based on knowledge and observation first and foremost, and he doesn’t like being contradicted or shown up, and he’s really, really quick to issue orders whenever he needs something done. He might apologize later, but he’ll issue them.

3.) He likes people. He didn’t always, but nowadays meeting somebody new is always a pleasant experience for him, especially when they are not trying to blow up his face with magic. He genuinely enjoys the experience of a new personality, because people are the only things in this universe that are still capable of surprising him on a regular basis, and because Sorcerer Supremes, for all that they are guardians of stability and order, like to be surprised. It makes the job a lot more bearable.

4.) But he’s not really comfortable with them. How could he be? He can stop somebody’s heart just by thinking hard, for crissake; he’s a step above most of humanity (or, really, a few flights of stairs above) and he knows it. He’s not comfortable with that fact, not in the least; he doesn’t like the idea that he’s not just a normal man, especially after the Ancient One only really got him to start learning by forcing him to accept that he was precisely that very thing. His power is vast enough that he’s on par with most demigods; it’s hard to look people in the eye when you realize that fact and aren’t quite happy with it.

5.) He’s urbane and blase. Not in the way of a jaded hipster, but – not a whole lot surprises or shocks him. He’s been exposed to so many alien cultures (dimensionally alien, spatially alien, or any other sort of alien) that dealing with a species of incestuous cannibals wouldn’t faze him in the least. (Or, if you prefer: everybody is a bastard in their own way.) Tack on the combat with otherworldly horrors, and you have a very cool customer. When other superheroes wince or gag at a brutal murder, Doc is looking over it calmly and utterly unfazed. He’s what writers wish Wolverine actually was, except Doc has to deal with the actual alienating consequences of being that sort of person.

6.) He’s a bit eccentric. He puts peanut butter on his spaghetti because that’s how they do it on Earth-2991 and when he visited he got used to it. He prefers to read crosslegged sitting on the ceiling because “you don’t get that glare you get sitting on the floor in the sun, I hate that.” He asks seemingly rhetorical questions without answering them (something that annoys the hell out of Wong, not that Wong would ever complain). He enjoys listening to reggae as performed on the harpsichord. The downside of thinking as everything as “usual” is that everything else you might like is likely not that usual.

7.) He looks at the bigger picture. Sure, he doesn’t want Earth to be conquered by Skrulls, but if it’s a choice between Skrulls and Dormammu – Skrulls. If it’s a choice between Skrulls and Nightmare – Skrulls. He knows it’s important to keep humanity alive and healthy for a number of very important reasons, but “alive and healthy” doesn’t mean “dominant civilization on the planet.” Most other superheroes get angry over this. That’s fine – most other superheroes only have to fight idiots wearing tights who rob the occasional bank, as opposed to, say, an organ-eating Prince of the Frankensteins from an alternate Earth seeking to conquer under the guise of a trading mission. Strange’s enemies are, on the whole, a lot more competent and a lot more dangerous than average. So he has to consider his duties from that standpoint first.

Top comment: At first I winced at Peanut-Butter spaghetti but upon thinking, if it was a peanut sauce then it wouldn’t be *too* far from Thai peanut sauce, which all the universe loves, and it’s an easy step to grill chicken in it and then put it over cooked noodles, which would be very tasty.

I think MGK just created a new fusion dish. – The Whelk

Homer made up a lot of stuff, mostly because he worked from unreliable sources.

Odysseus’ journey home, from the smoking ruins of Troy to Ithaca, did indeed last ten years. Or seventeen, depending on how you count it. See, if you just count from the time he left Troy to the time he arrived in Ithaca, it was ten years. But if you count the time as Odysseus experienced it, it’s seventeen years, because what Homer doesn’t mention is that Poseidon wasn’t the only god Odysseus managed to piss off.

Odysseus counselled the Argives to slaughter Hector’s young son, so that the child could not grow up to avenge his father and his city. This greatly angered Khronos, the god of time and destiny, who had written out the life of that young boy in advance and who greatly resented Odysseus for using free will to avert what would have become known as the Second Trojan War. Khronos was extremely irritated, but decided not to intervene on the course of Odysseus’ life.

When Odysseus set out from Troy, after he met up with the Lotus Eaters and the one-eyed giant Polyphemus, he stayed briefly with Aeolus, the man gifted with the power to control the winds, and left with a bag of wind that would blow him anywhere except home. Poseidon would not stop complaining about how this annoying mortal was thwarting all the challenges put before him, and Khronos explained to his fellow god that – if Poseidon owed him a favour – he might be able to help. Odysseus was destined to return home, ten years after the end of the Trojan War, and Khronos wanted to be sure that happened…

And so, Odysseus told the poets and storytellers that his crew stole the bag and blew his fleet off course. But that never happened. What happened was this: Khronos transported Odysseus’ entire fleet to a watery planet of carnivorous aliens called the Laestri. Odysseus immediately understood that they were in a different sea (by the stars, you see), and his crews insisted on putting in at port as soon as possible. He ordered his crew to hang back, which was a good idea because the Laestri weren’t particularly picky about what they ate and they devoured the rest of the fleet pretty quickly, seeing as how they were a starfaring race with all the technological prowess that implies.

But this wasn’t any regular old boat captain marooned on an alien world – this was Odysseus, one of the most cunning and wily men to ever live in any time period. He snuck aboard land, hid in ventilation ducts, and taught himself Laestrian over about three weeks. He didn’t understand all the technical specifics, of course, but he found out where the Laestrians kept their theoretical physics experiment installation was easily enough when he figured out the words for “time” and “travel.” (It never occurred to him that he wasn’t on Earth; he figured it was a far future where the Lamia had conquered the world.) As he sailed his remaining ship to that point, Khronos appeared and transported it to another strange sea on another world.

And so it went; whenever Odysseus got to a point where it seemed likely that he would thwart Khronos’ wiles, the God of Time would send him elsewhere. And it was always possible that Odysseus could get home from where he was, because Khronos has his own set of rules, and one of them is that he likes things to go a Certain Way. It just never happened, because Khronos wanted to punish Odysseus for his insolence – and, ultimately, for possessing free will. Khronos was determined to make sure that Odysseus would only arrive at Ithaca when he wanted Odysseus to arrive there. Odysseus’ crew are all long since dead; he sails his ship alone, with a thousand stolen technologies he only partially understands (but partially is enough).

But Khronos made one mistake. One time, to really, really get under Odysseus’ skin, he transported Odysseus to Ithaca – thirty years after he made it there, so that Odysseus could arrive to visit Penelope’s grave. And Odysseus saw it, and Khronos gloated at his captive’s pain, then turned his attentions elsewhere -

- and Odysseus was waiting for just that moment. Not the Odysseus weeping before his wife’s grave. The other Odysseus, the one who had already made it home after all the torments of a seventeen year journey, the one who had lived with his beloved Penelope another twenty-seven years before her passing. The older Odysseus had been waiting decades for this (and lying to anybody who would listen about Circe and Calypso and the Sirens and all the other hot women he totally could have bagged if he wanted to, but he didn’t because he loved his lady), because he already knew it would happen – and he told his younger self how to get home.

And now – a couple of dozen or hundred pit-stops later – Odysseus arrives in the modern day. (Somewhere off Cape Horn, actually.) He knows exactly what to do. He makes a beeline for New York City, where the Sorcerer Supreme makes his abode. Because only Dr. Strange can end his journey, and send him back to Ancient Greece where he belongs, for once and for all. He needs the really good magic to get home.

Top comment: I like the idea that Odysseus is still pulling the Trojan Horse bit. Like, he’s been to countless exotic worlds but they’ve pretty much all bought it so he thinks it’s like the be-all end-all infiltration tactic.

Double points when Strange realizes that Doom would absolutely not turn down a giant wooden statue of himself. – Five Eyes

A while back, somebody asked when I was going to talk about Clea. And my response was “they’re over.” Because Clea, although she is most certainly Stephen Strange’s most notable and notorious love affair, belongs in Strange’s past (at least romantically – she’s still a powerful sorceress and good friend). They were good for one another at the time, but there’s too much water under the bridge now to get back together, regardless of how sexy a platinum blonde she might be. The “bring back Clea” crowd is one motivated by little more than nostalgia, and I think by now people know what I think about nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. (HINT: I am not fond of it.)

However, there’s no reason Strange shouldn’t have a lady friend. He’s an urbane, dapper sort of fellow, the sort who in times past would be called a “real gent.” Men like that (when they are straight) can do quite well with a certain sort of woman who likes her men smart and talented (in more ways than one). And luckily, Brian K. Vaughan was good enough to kickstart a relationship between Dr. Strange and Night Nurse (who, as we all know, should properly be called “Night General Practitioner And Surgeon” but that was too long and didn’t fit on the business cards).

And it works. Night Nurse is tough and intelligent, and definitely older than the average Marvel Comics Girlfriend ™ and she can use a bobby pin to pick a lock and cut a bullet out of someone’s shoulder and all of this is just great. She is a class act who fits Strange well – they’ve both been around the block a bit and are both ready for that easier, simpler sort of relationship one only gets in one’s forties or later, the type where nobody has any patience for drama so nobody wants to create some.

Similarly, from a storytelling perspective, Night Nurse is a great fit because she is a classic explanatory/exposition target. If a writer needs to explain why magic can’t do something Strange needs to do, Night Nurse is right there – she’s smart but unlike most people in Strange’s world she’s not familiar with all the rules. And apart from being a storytelling tool, it can also be a plot hook –

- because sometimes, in the right situation, ignorance of the kind that Night Nurse has is actually the greatest protection you can have against the Eldritch Horrors From Wherever. Not being privy to the secrets of the occult world means that the secrets of the occult world will tend to overlook you. Not having to pay attention to the ebbs and flows of magical tides means that you get the chance to pay attention to that strange man in the nondescript Honda parked down the block who’s been staring at your friends for twenty minutes.

(And yes, most of this also applies to Wong – but come on, was there ever more natural a teamup than Wong and Night Nurse? I think not.)

Top comment: Someone should follow Matt Murdock around saying to every woman he meets “Do not date this man. You will end up insane or, more likely, end up in a pine box.” – Lister Sage

Doctor Doom plays a different role in any potential Doctor Strange comic than he does just about anywhere else.

In an issue of Fantastic Four, if Doom shows up, he is inevitably the antagonist. In an issue of Spider-Man, he is almost always the antagonist. In Avengers, antagonist. If he ever shows up in an X-Men comic – antagonist. When he’s not the antagonist, his presence is just about always a MacGuffin instead. And this is fine and good. Doom is a bad guy. He should be the antagonist.

But in Doctor Strange’s world, Doom isn’t necessarily the antagonist. He can be, but the thing about Doctor Strange is that, when it comes down to magic, he’s inevitably superior to Doom. Doom’s not bad by any means – really, he’s impressively powerful in a magical sense – but his desire to master both science and magic means that his magic will always be weaker than Strange’s. (But it doesn’t necessarily mean that his science will always be weaker than Reed Richards’ science. This is one of the ways magic is slightly different from science.) Doom’s entire character makes him often unsuited to be an antagonist for Strange, because in a battle between the two, Doom is almost always attacking at a disadvantage, and Doctor Doom doesn’t do that when it’s possible.

Plus, Doom doesn’t really have any reason to be an antagonist for Strange. Most of the time, anyway. Certainly Doom’s ever-present power lust is always going to be cause for potential strife. But he doesn’t dislike Stephen Strange particularly, not like he hates the Fantastic Four or doesn’t understand the motivations of Captain America. Stephen Strange makes perfect sense to Doom: a man who sought mystical power and got it, and who protects his home turf from outward threats. Of course, there’s more to Strange than that, but it doesn’t matter because what Doom sees, Doom understands. Everything else is just window dressing.

This means that Doom is a relative rarity in Doctor Strange stories; he’s a true wild card. Not like Baron Mordo, who on their rare team-up occasions inevitably would turn on Stephen the moment it seemed convenient. If Doom throws in with Strange, he will (mostly) throw in with Strange for real. But there’s no guarantee that he will throw in with Strange, because it’s entirely possible that Strange’s goals will stand in sharp relief to Doom’s.

Which means that when Doctor Doom shows up in a Stephen Strange story, you get a novel experience not normally associated with Doctor Doom: you don’t necessarily know why he’s there or what he’s going to do. And that’s valuable.

Top comment: Just looking at the artwork MGK chose for this post makes me wonder: When did Doctor Strange sport a “Meathead” mustache, and why isn’t Doom mocking him for it? – ps238principal

(NOTE: Brad Reed originally submitted this idea to me a couple weeks back, and I liked it so much that I removed one of mine to make room for it, because it’s nifty. I tweaked it a bit, but this is still mostly Brad’s.)

The reasoning is simple: you all know about ley lines, right? And how in popular fiction where there is magic, there are inevitably places where lots of these ley lines meet up, and that’s where magic becomes more powerful and spells have more oomph and faeries still walk the Earth and occasionally go to McDonald’s (redcaps love Big Macs for some reason) and children born in the area become Mystic Defenders or the like?

Well, it follows that if there are supermagical places where the ley lines converge, then there must also be submagical places where the ley lines are way the hell off on the horizon. These are the Boring Places, where magic is mostly absent. Children born here grow up to become accountants, chiefs of human resources and the boring kind of scientist who sniffs at MythBusters because they make jokes and such. In these areas, magic is especially hard to do. Not impossible – but difficult, because you’re martialling the energy of the universe at a distance. It’s like you’re used to broadband and suddenly you’re back using 24K dialup.

The most boring of all places – the single least magical place on Earth – is a small town in New Jersey, twenty minutes from of Newark. And the least magical place within that town is Herbert’s Taco Hut, which if it were not for its location would be your standard “Mexican restaurant run by white people who have never seen a chili pepper in their lives” joint. It should have had the lifespan of any other mediocre restaurant in the middle of nowhere (IE, short). But Herbert’s does very good business indeed, for one simple reason:

It’s where sorcerers and mages come to do business. Because it’s safe. Herbert’s is the magical equivalent of an old Wild West township, where you have to check your six-guns with the sheriff when you enter. Most sorcerers can muster a simple teleportation spell for a quick escape from it if necessary (and those that can’t can prepare something similar in advance) but not much else. SHIELD and HYDRA and everybody else all know about it, but nobody ever tries to fuck with Herbert’s because having a neutral ground (which happens to serve mediocre burritos) is inherently a useful thing to have at one’s disposition.

And because of this, it’s not only a place to do business, but a place to network, to chat, to simply unwind and shoot the shit with one’s fellow magical practitioners. After all, the food isn’t that bad, and they let you bring your own booze for a small surcharge (and you’ll want to, because their beer selection is terrible), and how is anybody going to know that you just stole the fabled Red Ruby of Un’nx if you don’t have someplace to show it off? Plus, it offers the best grounds on the planet for picking up within the profession. (There is no guarantee that the person you take home won’t try to sacrifice you to a demon prince – but come on, you think magicians are going to give up sex?)

And yes, Stephen Strange goes there occasionally. Because he has to make appearances, keep tabs on goings-on, keep his ear to the ground – and because it’s nice, every once in a while, to take off the mantle of “world’s most powerful sorcerer” for an hour or two and just tuck into some nachos.

Top comment: While we’re mentioning ley lines, can we get a story where Dr. Strange investigates Disney World to see if it truly is ‘the most magical place on Earth’?

I’m partly interested to see the mysterious origin of Walt Disney’s occult practices, but I mostly just wanna see Dr. Strange ride the tea cups. – RobotKeaton