M014--Doctor Strange by Green-Mamba on DeviantArt (original) (raw)

Doctor Strange
Real Name: Stephen Strange
First Appearance: Strange Tales #110 (July 1963)

The resident of 177A Bleecker Street was something of an enigma to his neighbors. His very continued existence was baffling--in the seventies there was a world renowned neurosurgeon named Stephen Strange who lost the fine motor skills in his hands in a terrible car crash. Shortly thereafter Strange disappeared, only to reappear many years later, now living in the odd building that is his current address. But that couldn't truly have been the same man, could it? He looked as though he had not aged a day in the decades that followed--the odd occurrences around the building and Strange's own publicly eccentric lifestyle did not seem to help much. The man claimed to be a magician, but he never performed for anyone. What trickery was going on there?

Those who would come to be true allies of Strange would find out the whole truth--in Strange's journey to find a cure for his condition he came to be a student under the nameless Ancient One, where he learned of other worlds beyond ours and the art of manipulating their energies in a way one might call sorcery. But when another student of the Ancient One named Karl Mordo stared too long into the depths of one of the darker dimensions outside of conscious thought and saw that the abyss stared back, he was lost forever to the darkness and led an assault on the Ancient One's home of Kamar-Taj and other sanctums around the world. In the end Strange found himself as one of the few students of the Ancient One left, and he took it upon himself to become the resident protector of the Sanctum Supreme in Greenwich Village, one of the last lines of defense our reality has against others that might seek to interfere.

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He draws energies from timeless realities in order to sustain his youth, as Mordo had never fallen and now they are attempting to out wait each other. He is of course wearing the Eye of Agamotto around his neck, and the red coat on his shoulders is actually the Cloak of Levitation in disguise.

So yeah okay, I wanted Strange to look like an eccentric citizen of New York instead of a traditional sorcerer, like there's this elaborate disguise going on about him. He still visually comes across as Doctor Strange to us, but to those in universe he's got some plausible deniability about his true nature, that sort of thing. When he tells people frankly about his nature most don't believe him, I imagine there would be a big moment when he reveals his true power to other heroes like the Avengers and stuff. Like there's this other side of existence that most don't know about and simply can't even comprehend--in my mind I see Strange's magic as being absolutely eldritch and difficult to grasp for a human mind kind of thing.

Still have a couple other characters completed that I'm still sitting on.

*UPDATED JANUARY 19, 2022*

As of writing this, Doctor Strange was my oldest character in the GMU project that was not updated... and that is no longer the case! I always liked my idea of Strange as a wizard passing as a normal human in New York, but I felt I could push him further--there was a lot of Doctor Strange iconography that my initial design dropped that I felt I could rework into his look. So I took a look at my original design, and decided he looked like a fairly eccentric guy, but what if he was *really* eccentric looking? And that is how I decided to take the design, making him into this rich hipster uncle type, if that makes sense. His suit is kinda part robe as well, he's got a yellow sash, his "coat" is flashier, he's got the rose colored sunglasses, and his facial hair now screams "I run a quirky micro brewery." I had a lot of fun with this revamp. It's the same basic idea as my original look but just pushed further in basically every direction.

One more updated old character coming this week as is how I like to do these updates.