Doctor Strange #388 - Marvel Comics

DOCTOR STRANGE No. 388, June 2018

Considering that Issue Three Hundred and Eighty Eight of “Doctor Strange” seemingly promised its readers a truly mouth-watering confrontation between the likes of Man-Thing, Moon Knight, Elsa Bloodstone, Doctor Voodoo, Wong, the Ghost Rider, Iron Fist and Blade with the Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, there must have been many within its 30,155 strong audience in April 2018 who were bitterly disappointed by Donny Cates’ bizarre decision to instead have this twenty-page periodical’s narrative almost exclusively focus upon its titular character conducting a lengthy conversation with the ghost of his dead basset hound. True, this bemusing plot twist involving the Sorcerer Supreme’s dog does apparently result in the Master of the Mystic Arts finally regaining his sanity after previously believing Mephisto’s glamour upon his disembodied soul that he was being rescued from Hotel inferno by the likes of Wanda, Loki and Clea. But this dialogue-driven, incredibly sedentary and sleep-inducing solution to his precarious demonically-possessed predicament hardly compares to the sense-shattering shenanigans a blow-by-blow battle between the Midnight Sons and Avengers would have produced.

In fact, this particular instalment to the Texas-born writer’s “Bleeding Neon” storyline is arguably absolutely packed full of head-scratching decisions which genuinely seem to be at odds with the notion that a “Damnation” Event tie-in edition should provide an entertaining, or at very least eminently sensible, experience. For starters, if all it takes for Strange to shake-off his devilish opponent’s deception is his pet pooch's presence, why doesn’t “Stephen’s old magic buddy” Wong simply instruct the animal to “bail him out” straight away, rather than wait until his “team of weirdos… vampire slayers… and… uh, Spider-Man in a hoodie” are beaten within an inch of their lives..?

Equally as bemusing is just how Shuma-Gorath suddenly appears from amidst a casino packed full of lost souls, when the All-Killer of the Dawn and Devourer-God of the Eternal Ever-Was doesn’t, as even the titular character pointedly exclaims, belong in Hell..? Disappointingly, such an utterly bizarre inclusion of the Many-Angled One would debatably seem to only have been made just to provide a worthy opponent for Jane Foster’s Thor to arbitrarily clobber into tomorrow when the female physician’s super-strong alter-ego gobsmackingly appears completely out of the blue so as to supposedly save the sorcerer at this comic’s conclusion; “Yes, by all means, the mighty Thor shall handle this monstrosity for as long as it takes for you all to have a wonderfully casual and lengthy conversation!”

The regular cover art of "DOCTOR STRANGE" No. 388 by Mike Del Mundo