Issue(s): Doctor Strange #52
Cover Date: Apr 93
Title: "Field of bad dreams (A morsel named Morbius)"
Credits:
Roy Thomas - Script
Geof Isherwood & Len Kaminski - Plot
Geof Isherwood - Penciler
Geof Isherwood - Inker
Barry Dutter - Assistant Editor
Mike Rockwitz - Editor

Review/plot:
We saw in Morbius #8 that Nightmare was messing with Morbius, and somehow Dr. Strange dreamt about it too.

After giving us our final glimpse of Rintrah...

...Dr. Strange investigates the Morbius situation and winds up getting his mind sucked into the Nightmare dimension.

Morbius is still whacked out on Jazz, so he thinks Strange look like a demon...

...and so they fight.

Strange uses "what meager magic I can still summon" to turn himself into a vampire...

...and he bites Morbius, sucking all the drug poison out. Morbius' sanity returns, but now Strange is suffering from the effects of the drug.

And Morbius is led away by an illusion of his dead miscolored girlfriend Martine .

And while Strange is out of it, Nightmare possesses his body in the real world, which is apparently also/still vampiric (or is that because Nightmare has possessed it?).

I continue to be underwhelmed by Geof Isherwood's art. It's fine (although that stiff image of Strange first encountering Nightmare didn't need to be a full page splash), but i don't feel like Isherwood really takes advantage of the mystical elements to go wild. I mean we're in Nightmare's realm, but it's all kind of boring. However, that panel of Strange looking like a demon is awesome, and makes up for a lot.

Roy Thomas is technically here, scripting. But he's not the main writer anymore, and the letters are in reacting to him being off the book. And as i've noticed elsewhere, now that a creator is off the book suddenly we're seeing criticisms of that creator that we never saw during the run:

Your DOCTOR STRANGE has lately undergone a tremendous improvement. First, Doctor Strange sounds like Doctor Strange again and not like Roy Thomas. Every character Roy writes sounds like Roy Thomas; a mixture of distracting trivia and parenthetical rambling. In fact, Roy takes the virtues of a good comic writer, such as attention to continuity, and turns them into droning vices.

Quality Rating: C

Historical Significance Rating: 1

Chronological Placement Considerations: This continues directly from Morbius #8, and continues from here in Morbius #9. The story also somehow takes place concurrently with Secret Defenders #1-3. Quite when Strange takes time out to summon the Secret Defenders for those issues is not shown here.

References: N/A

Crossover: N/A

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: N/A