Strange Tales #117: The Many Traps 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. 

    The Many Traps of Baron Mordo! once again pits Strange against his rival sorcerer. Out of 6 stories to this point, all of them have featured either Mordo or Nightmare as the main antagonist. While recurring villains can be useful in building up a heroe’s life and tribulations, there is a bit of a lack of variety so far. Still, it looks great, with most of it taking place at night, playing up the gothic undertones of the arcane arts, and bringing Strange and Mordo’s magic duels into a more firmly surreal conflict, rather than just punching eachother in astral form. It also makes for another intimate chamber drama: the Anicent One shows up very briefly but otherwise it’s just the two of them. 

    Mordo traps Strange’s house in another dimension, which Strange exits in his astral form. Mordo traps him again in a “ethereal cylinder”, which Strange escapes by tunneling through the Earth, and then he proceeds to pose as the Ancient One to catch Mordo off guard, defeating him in a magical duel.

 

    Ditko sticks primarily to 9-grids here despite the 8 pages, using smaller panels to speed up the pace of the action, even breaking down further into a 4-panel row on page 6 as Strange tunnels into the ground to escape Mordo’s prison (shown above). The final page is probably the most visually striking, as the conclusion to their battle takes on abstract clouds of red and purple, and Strange returns to his shadowy sanctum to ponder the results. There’s also pretty heavy use of different colored speech bubbles rather than just white, which is something that pops up in a couple of Marvel books around this period: here you get yellow, orange, green, and purple, fitting within the story’s colour palette while making things look a bit more dynamic. I would’ve liked for them to stick with it longer, honestly. Overall, I still tend to enjoy the Nightmare stories more than the Mordo ones, but these have been steadily improving, each one better than the last. Next week begins a long stretch of brand-new villains, which is sorely needed.