More magical mayhem awaits. We begin this month on a very trippy visual of Strange drifting through his own memory of a confrontation with his mother, wherein he’d learned about his dad’s mystical background, but she refused to admit any knowledge of it and angrily told him to forget about it. Real Luke Skywalker experiences.
That’s what! McKeever making a point to draw Spider-Man’s hip bones jutting out is so weird. Nobody approached comics like him. I can see how people could really viscerally hate his art, but I love it. Spider-Man dives into that portal, leaving Strange & Wong to wonder what just happened. Another exceptionally strange splash page follows complete with a recap, and then we’re back into Strange’s house.
Ultimate Peter just can’t keep that mask on. Strange assures him they have no idea who he is as his puts his mask back on, anyway. Then they discuss what’s going on, Peter more or les remembers being told to come here, and Wong, at least knows, what the Wand of Watoomb is, but he was also specifically told to smash through that window to “break the seal,” so you know what that means: Xandu and some mind controlled goons come rushing in immediately. Wong tries to stall them so Strange can work up something, but this Strange doesn’t seem to know much more about what’s going on than Spider-Man, so Wong just gets beat up and threatened before tricking them into a huge vault full of magical artifacts to sift through.
Those 2 have a nice zappy wizard battle for awhile, but the young Strange is outclassed, and Xandu finds the Wand. However:
The way Spider-Man is just along for the ride in most of these is really weird. Like Bendis knew he needed pages to try to present even the most basic sketch of these new characters, so Spider-Man just flits around in the margins.