Marvel has the most popular magical characters in comics, led by Doctor Strange. Magic is one of the more interesting portions of the Marvel Universe. Marvel was built on Atomic Age sci-fi and Doctor Strange was an anachronism at the time. Over the years, Doctor Strange was the epicenter of the strangest parts of the Marvel Universe, and readers have watched him change in a number of ways over the decades, both on the pages of comics and on the screen, thanks the Marvel Cinematic Universe. However, one thing that has stayed the same about Doctor Strange is something that has infected the rest of the magical characters in the Marvel Universe — the magic system has no real rules and Doctor Strange’s popularity broke it.
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Marvel has a lot of cool magic characters, but the publisher and its creators have rarely created a stable magic system that makes sense. Now, long time Marvel readers won’t be surprised by this. Just look at Marvel’s most overpowered characters; any rules that were set for their powers at different points have been discarded in the name of power scaling. Doctor Strange has gone from a character with weaknesses to a character with the cheat codes to reality, and that’s been a big problem both for the characters and for the Marvel Universe.
Is There Anything Doctor Strange Can’t Do?
Doctor Strange slipped out of vogue in the ’90s, which is ironic because DC was doing gangbusters with magical characters at the time, and wouldn’t become a major part of the Marvel Universe again until the mid ’00s. This was the beginning of Marvel’s Joe Quesada era, when Brian Michael Bendis was the most popular writer in comics. Bendis brought Strange into New Avengers after Civil War. Bendis tried something that most other creators weren’t doing with Strange. Bendis didn’t give us an insanely overpowered Strange — Hand ninjas were able to almost kill him and the Skrulls could fool him — and tried to create a magical system. Strange’s spells all had names, and Bendis would tell what spell book they were from in captions. Bendis realized something about magic in superhero universes that a lot of creators didn’t — magic is a cheat code unless you put limits on it. Different spells that Strange did would have different power levels, and not all of them would work in any given situation. Bendis actually gave magic a limit, and it made it so that Strange wasn’t this unstoppable problem solver. He fit onto the more street-level Avengers team. Eventually, he’d lose his place as Sorcerer Supreme to Brother Voodoo, and we’d still get the spell captions, as well as Voodoo not being all-powerful. While this isn’t exactly a magic system like we’d get from some fantasy books, it was better than nothing. Magic had limits.
Something weird would happen in the intervening years; suddenly, Strange became akin to a god. Go back and read Bendis’s New Avengers, either Vol. 1 or Vol. 2, and you’ll see that magic has limits. Now, pick up Jonathan Hickman’s New Avengers and suddenly, Strange is way more powerful. It’s explained away as he’s studied more magic, but he’s able to tap into more power than ever and we’ve been stuck with that Doctor Strange ever since. Suddenly, instead of different spells being good for different levels of threats, it was all about how much power he could put into spells, something that has become pretty standard over Marvel magic since then. Just look at One World Under Doom; Doom is able to do things that gods like Loki can’t just because he taps into a greater power source. Loki and Scarlet Witch are also hopelessly broken magic characters, their powers allowing them to do basically anything they can think. They’re all as powerful as they need to be, know whatever they need to know, and it’s kind of boring. New Avengers (Vol. 1) #30 gave us Hand ninjas stabbing Doctor Strange in the chest and it was a big deal. Now, there’s no way that would happen because Marvel’s magic is so broken. They wouldn’t even get close enough to Strange to hurt him.
Marvel Needs to Nerf Magic
One of the things about Doctor Strange that we forget in our MCU-obsessed Marvel is that very few readers actually remember Doctor Strange from the old days (the MCU’s version of Doctor Strange is much closer to the magic-has-no-limits take and it isn’t helping things). There are very few best of all time stories that revolve around Strange and the one that does — Triumph and Torment — has a much less powerful Strange. Readers have gotten used to Doctor Strange as this all-powerful magic god, and it’s destroyed whatever system that Bendis had tried to build when he brought Strange back.
Strange is a difficult character to read about nowadays (as proven by his many cancelled series in the 21st century) because magic is much too powerful in the Marvel Universe. We’ve seen Strange defeat gods and monsters, and his magic just keeps getting stronger. Without some kind of limits on magic in the Marvel Universe, Strange is never going to be as popular as he could be.
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