Doctor Strange: Surgeon Supreme

It was disappointing to hear that this relaunch of Mark Waid’s run on “Doctor Strange” wound up being a casualty of Diamond Distribution’s pandemic-prompted shutdown last year.  Do you know what’s even more disappointing than that?  Reading this volume and realizing that it’s STILL cancelled.  Waid and artists Jesus Saiz, Javier Pina, and company were already doing good work on the series before it was relaunched.  The addition of new artist Kev Walker and the change to the Doctor’s status quo — he can now use his hands and work as a surgeon again — prove to be exactly what this series needed to take it to the next level.

So instead of Stephen Strange just dealing with the various magical threats that cross his path, he’s now back to working as a surgeon at the McCarthy Medical Institute.  Why?  Because now that he can use his hands to operate, he believes he has an obligation to do so.  Things are trickier since he now has to balance his battle against the forces of darkness with surgically removing tumors that only he can handle.  Oh, and dealing with a raft of supervillains like the Wrecker who are causing havoc with magically enhanced weapons.  Where are these weapons coming from?  Closer than Strange knows, and he’s really hoping that his new boss Anthony “Doctor Druid” Ludgate doesn’t have anything to do with it.

The story that Waid wrote where Strange regained the full use of his hands had the potential to be a real game-changer for the character.  We get to see how that plays out here as it really hasn’t made his life any easier.  Even though the Doctor can use his hands to perform surgery now, he’s lost the spellcasting muscle memory that he used to have with his formerly crippled upper extremities.  He’s still the Sorcerer Supreme, but he’s now at something of a disadvantage when it comes to fighting off threats.  As his first encounter with the Wrecker shows.

That said, Waid isn’t about to let that drag the character down too much.  As the volume goes on, Strange’s spellcasting issues will only really come up whenever he decides to remind us about it in his internal monologue.  This isn’t too much of a problem since the threats he finds himself facing prove to be a clever enough distraction.  The two-part encounter with the Wrecker is solid superhero fun, as are the subsequent stories involving a young man who is having his youth sucked away by a demonic tattoo, and the magical equivalent of a bomb-defusal story on an operating table.  These lead into Strange and Ludgate infiltrating an other-dimensional bazaar where a certain villain is selling magical weapons to whoever is able to pay for them.  

These are all clever, fast-paced stories that set up weird problems and find imaginative solutions to them.  In short, the kind of work you can expect to see from Waid when he’s firing on all cylinders as he was during his “Daredevil” run.  He also does a good job of filling out McCarthy with a good supporting cast, especially with the mystery surrounding Ludgate.  I mean, he was dead before he showed up in this series, so you really do have good cause to wonder what he’s doing here and where his loyalties actually lie.

Best of all in this volume, is the artwork from Walker.  While the man’s artwork has always had an entertainingly weird bent to it, he’s been investing it with an impressive level of detail ever since the first volume of “Doctor Aphra.”  So not only is the artist very well suited for a series like “Doctor Strange,” he’s also delivered the best-looking volume of Waid’s run.  Awful cancer demons lurking in a hospital, a block of New York being decimated (and rebuilt), the strange beings of the Tattoo Dimension, magical carnage being wrought at a magical bazaar.  This volume has it all, and it all looks great.

Unfortunately, that’s all we’ll be getting of it.  It’s a damn shame that this series didn’t survive the hiatus imposed on it as Waid and Walker really clicked as a creative team here.  Even if they only got one volume with the Doctor, it’s my hope that they’ll team up again elsewhere in the future.  “Surgeon Supreme” may have been short-lived, but it’s something I’d highly recommend to any fan of Doctor Strange or the mystic arts as they pertain to Marvel.