Strange Tales #111: Face-to-Face with the Magic of Baron Mordo!

This is part of an ongoing series where I will be reviewing Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s Doctor Strange, covering his appearances in Strange Tales #110-111 and #114-146. 

    Face-to-Face with the Magic of Baron Mordo! introduces one of Strange’s main recurring antagonists. This story does a decent job fleshing out the secret world of magic within this corner of the Marvel Universe. Mordo is another student of The Master (or Ancient One, as he is know known), who learned many of the same skills as Strange but turned to evil. Mordo attacks The Master, Strange comes to the rescue, they fight in astral form, and Strange tricks Mordo into retreating. There’s a lot of bland, grey backgrounds here, and the astral fight doesn’t have the surrealist touches that the encounter with Nightmare had. Still, there are some nice visual touches- all the characters have sanctums with Victorian architecture, scattered with ancient artifacts, scrolls, and incense, and the astral panels that do have a background look great. It's also pretty funny that the first astral battle is just a fist fight but with the two characters floating around, rather than a more overtly magical dual. 

lots of grey

    We don’t actually see much of the Sanctum Sanctorum (which wouldn’t be named until later) in these first two issues. It’s pretty impressive how narrow in scope the book manages to be to work within the 5 page format, with each issue only featuring like 3 characters. Everything takes place in the shadows, a mysterious world of magic that might as well be it’s own universe entirely for how little it connects tot he rest of the Marvel Universe of the time. Strange never got the cover until Ditko left the book, content to stay in the background and avoid the spotlight. He seems to have little in the way of friends; a mysterious, obsessive devotee of black magic who is disconnected from the larger world and dwells in his own realm of witchcraft and sorcery. 

    It’s nice to see Strange come into his own a bit more, after The Master had to swoop in and save him in the first issue. Here, Strange saves The Master with the amulet, showing what he’s capable of in a nice bit of growth, reversing the scene from #110.  The ending is a bit anticlimactic, as Mordo is clearly being set up as a regular villain, and there’s no pretense that this battle has much weight to it. Still, it’s a competent follow-up that paves the way for a much stronger sequel issue in Strange Tales #114, when Strange and Mordo would return after skipping out #112 and 113.

The Master saving Strange, Strange Tales #110

Strange saving The Master, Strange Tales #111