Doctor Strange #389 - Marvel Comics

DOCTOR STRANGE No. 389, June 2018

As far as cataclysmic culminations to a multi-title, limited series tie-in comic book go, Donny Cates’ script to Issue Three Hundred and Eighty Nine of “Doctor Strange” must surely have had the vast majority of its 24,877 readers wringing their hands in despair at a plot which literally depicts the Sorcerer Supreme summarising his battle against the combined forces of Mephisto, Shuma-Gorath, Dormammu and Nightmare whilst sipping a hot beverage in a New York teahouse with Clea. Indeed, incredulously “Marvel Comics’ new wunderkind” even goes so far as to have the Master of the Mystic Arts simply encapsulate the entire sense-shattering conclusion to his “Damnation” crossover event within the space of a couple of word bubbles rather than provide the titular character’s accommodating audience with any sort of visual exposition whatsoever; “Well, Johnny Blaze went to hell and became its new king…. It was quite the spectacle, really.”

Such a shockingly abrupt and lack-lustre ending to this comic’s long-running “Bleeding Neon” storyline really proves monumentally disappointing, especially when mere moments before the book’s focus frustratingly shifts to the former preeminent surgeon dinning with his one-time disciple, he had “betrayed Dormammu, abandoned my friends in hell, and escaped Mephisto’s necrotic soul prison” so as to allow him “the chance to put things right on Earth.” Of course, it’s somewhat understandable that the majority of Strange’s subsequent shenanigans in Las Vegas would probably be covered within Cates’ separately published collaboration with Nick Spencer. But even so it is difficult to swallow that the Garland-born writer couldn’t have penned a pulse-pounding piece pitching Stephen against some villainous “unleashed horror” from the “recently-created Hotel Inferno” in the magic-user’s very own title rather than just present an idyllic depiction of domestic bliss in an idyllic coffee bar.

Disconcertingly, this all-too apparent reluctance to satisfactorily end the Sorcerer Supreme’s battle against Mephisto “in an immaterial sub-realm of Hell” also seeps into this twenty-page periodical’s storyboarding, with Niko Henrichon’s artwork appearing to increasingly suffer as the so-called script progresses. Initially packed full of ‘vim and vigour’ as Nightmare drives his demonic steed through a horde of nightmarish, bug-eyed monstrosities, the Canadian artist’s pencilling sadly closes with some lamentably lack-lustre drawings of a haggardly-sketched Doctor forlornly following the advice of his Faltine/Mhuruuk hybrid friend by phoning up his protégé Zelma…

Writer: Donny Cates, Artist: Niko Henrichon, and Letterer: VC's Cory Petit