Doctor Strange [2015] #15 - Marvel Comics

DOCTOR STRANGE No. 15, February 2017

Starting with a genuinely disturbing sequence which depicts an already bloodied million dollar embezzler about to be bludgeoned to death by a posse of his financially-deficient victims, and ending with the cataclysmic cliff-hanger “of the dread Dormammu” impressively rising from beneath the shaking streets of New York City in order to kill the titular character, it was probably hard for this publication’s 39,549 readers to confidently predict where this twenty-page periodical’s narrative would take them from one pencilled panel to the next. Certainly, as comic book journey’s go, Jason Aaron’s script for “The Face of Sin” provides such a wildly irregular portrayal of “Doctor Strange’s Rogues’ Gallery”, including an unnerving scene where Karl Amadeus Mordo sadistically butchers a bar room full of customers with a magical knife whilst his sacrificial ceremony’s future casualties watch in open-mouthed horror, that his plot-threads become so increasingly choppy as to debatably make his writing a rather disagreeable mess.

For starters, it is hard to imagine the Sorcerer Supreme ever simply sitting feebly still in the back-seat of a “damn” taxi cab as the yellow-coloured vehicle’s driver purposely mows down an unarmed man in cold blood. Admittedly, the entire point of the Alabama-born author’s “Blood In The Aether” story-arc was to depict a number of the magician’s most-formidable arch-villains taking “their shot at a weakened” Master of the Mystic Arts. Yet it debatably doesn’t follow that the Orb is single-handedly so powerful following his receipt of one of the Watcher’s eyes, that he can bedevil the former “preeminent surgeon” with such immediate impotency so successfully; “And what did you do about it Doc? Nothing, that’s what. All you did was watch. In other words… nice work, Doctor. I think we’re gonna have a fun night.”

Similarly, it must have struck many of this comic’s audience as a somewhat surreal moment when “Captain Cornea” out-bests the founding member of the Defenders simply because his cue-ball shaped head is “like punching a beach ball filled with tapioca” and the criminal has no “stupid neck” with which Stephen can choke him. These tongue-in-cheek gags, like a screaming Doctor Strange ultimately being tied to the bonnet of a car as it gravity-defyingly careers down the side of a skyscraper, indubitably provide a modicum of dark humour within this magazine’s ever shifting story. But noticeably such pleasantries frustratingly jar with the murderously murky, distinctly dour depiction of the Baron and Mister Misery which surrounds them, and must have left some bibliophiles wondering whether the Inkpot Award-winner was in two minds as to the tone of this particular tale…

Writer: Jason Aaron, Artist: Chris Bachalo & Jorge Fornes, and Letters: VC's Cory Petit