Doctor Strange: Season One (2012)

Doctor Strange: Season One (2012) was part of the Season One series that Marvel produced in the early 2010s where they tried to retell the origins of iconic heroes and teams to try and get new readers into their legacy characters whose backlog of comics can be seen as rather intimidating to the average person who is not already fully invested into these characters. 

As stated, this is a retelling of the origin of Doctor Strange and his first run against the vile Baron Mordo. But this is also meant to be a quick catch-up point or a supplement to the newly initiated. This is all to say that this a very condensed adaptation of the strange origin of Doctor Strange, a crash course if you will, but should not be seen as a full replacement for some of those stories. Though depending on how you look at it and who you ask, you might be dodging a bullet by allowing this to replace some of those older issues. That would be my main downside with this comic is that it tries to squeeze an entire original series in 1 issue that is roughly 120 pages in total. While I personally would not recommend reading this then immediately jumping into the newest Strange comic, comics are as always what you make of them and therefore if that is the way you are going to enjoy this amazing character than that is the way you should do it.

My main compliment of this book has to be with the art. The art shows the absolute contrast of this character from the beginning of his journey to where he ends up. Before Strange gains his magic and he is just a disheveled man looking for a way to fix his hands, the art imitates his life by being much darker and rougher looking than we have come to expect from stories involving Strange. However, the moment he gains the use of his magic the art returns to a style that many fans of the character are use to, employing the use of bright colors all over the spectrum to really emphasize whimsical and fantastic nature of the magic he uses. 

Overall, I would recommend this book to just about anybody interested in Doctor Strange. This is a good jumping on point or crash course to the origin story of Doctor Strange. This series can please fans, both new and old, of the character by introducing him to a broader audience or by giving diehard fans another story of Strange before he became the Sorcerer Supreme. As always if you have any questions or just want to talk about this story, please feel free to leave a comment here or let me know on Twitter.

Overall Rating: 8.5/10