Death of Doctor Strange #2 Review

WRITER: JED MACKAY

ARTIST: LEE GARBETT

PUBLISHER: MARVEL

PRICE: $3.99

RELEASE DATE: OCTOBER 20TH, 2021

The “New” Doctor Strange arrives and tries to understand how he fits into the modern world.

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THE STORY

Right on the heels of the Death of Doctor Strange’s last issue, we are given some more background on the new/old Doctor Strange that has arrived to solve his own murder. Meanwhile, the Avengers arrive to deal with the fall out from the good Doctor’s death. As without him, the world’s magical defenses have fallen and beings from other dimensions have arrived. Some arrived to run from a bigger threat. That threat is the “Three Mothers” which is an ancient powerful beings thats seen to feed off magical energy.

The first issue of this series did a great job of setting up the weird world of Doctor Strange. In this issue, we get some more detail into the appearance of the replacement Doctor. He’s a failsafe that Strange created early in his career, as he hid outside the timestream to appear after his death. It’s an interesting concept and shows how much Doctor Strange has to look ahead and prepare for any contingency. As this Doctor is from early in his career he’s not quite the “Sorcerer Supreme” yet. While I’ve had problems reading old Doctor Strange comics due to the extremely over-the-top dialogue, I wish we actually had this Doctor talk more that way. He does slightly, but it would have been great to see the other more modern characters react to that crazy dialogue.

The Avengers show up to basically show how serious the Three Mothers are. As the Mothers quickly dispatch the Avengers in battle, especially interesting was to see how even the God of Thunder himself was taken down. While this sequence brought some good action to the story, I would rather have seen that more in the upcoming Avengers one-shot that ties into the Death of Doctor Strange series. The rookie Doctor Strange does little to help in the battle, as he appears to still be a step behind trying to understand what is going on. Since according to the checklist at the back of the issue there will be several one-shots with different Marvel characters, it would be better if the main mini-series focused on the Doctor and his supporting cast more.

ART

Lee Garbett’s art continues to work well with this series. His take on the Ditko Doctor Strange is great and I hope there will be a Marvel Legends figure made of it someday.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Death of Doctor Strange #2 is more action-packed than the first issue. That being said considering how much story we got in issue one this issue felt slower in pacing. This “new” Doctor is not quite as experienced and therefore it will be interesting to see where this series goes with that. His interactions with the other characters are great and I hope that gets explored more.