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Appearing in "A Time for Love, A Time for Hate!"

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Synopsis for "A Time for Love, A Time for Hate!"

Continued from last issue....

At Baskerville Castle, Nazi sympathizer and mystic Sir Anthony Baskerville and Viscount Heinrich Krowler have taken Dr. Strange as their captive. Krowler muses with Baskerville how his plan came into action, how he had used his grandson, Baron Mordo, as a pawn to achieve great mystical power, including casting a spell on the young boy that would send all Mordo`s mystical knowledge to him. Krowler recalls using his financial support to help boost Adolf Hitler's bid to power.

When Krowler asks Dormammu to spare his grandson, Dormammu refuses and transforms Mordo into his most basic mystical form which he gives to Baskerville and tasks him with putting it into a suitable host body. Once Baskerville has left, Dormammu takes possession of Krowler`s body. Meanwhile, Dr. Strange has not been taken out of the fight as everyone thinks; having loosed his astral form, Strange confronts Adolf Hitler to try and see if the madman had anything to do with it. However, after finding that Hitler is merely a pawn to spawn enough hatred in the region to facilitate Krowler's spell, Strange decides to use Dormammu against himself by travelling to Dark Dimension and (disguised as the Ancient One) tricking the Dormammu native to 1943 into attacking him.

Elsewhere, Baskerville, accompanied by the body of Dr. Strange that is now under his mystical control, capture Pamela Hawley and Morgana Blessing for use in their scheme, while at the US Army compound, Nick Fury and his Howling Commandos are sent to investigate suspicions that Nazi spies are holed up in Baskerville Castle. As the Howlers attack the castle, Sir Anthony implants Mordo`s mystical essence into Morgana Blessing to be used as a pawn for their spell. They are interrupted by the arrival of Nick Fury and his Howlers who give them chase.

In a chapel in London, Krowler (using the power of Dormammu) begins a ceremony which is powered by the hatred created from the Luftwaffe`s current bombing raid on London to power his spell to bring Dormammu to Earth's dimension, using Clea as a sacrifice to open the portal, with the aid of the Mordo-possessed Morgana.

As Fury arrives at the chapel and tries to bust up the ceremony, Clea, while seemingly unconscious, casts a sympathy spell that connects the psyches of Nick, Morgana and Pamela, and routes it through Strange`s then-soulless body. When Pamela feels Nick's presence through Strange's body, she kisses it, completing the circuit and generating an outpouring of love that weakens the hate. As Strange`s disguised astral form manages to channel the power of the 1943 Dormammu against his future self in Krowler`s body, Morgana`s soul rejects Mordo`s hate and uses his power to simultaneously attack Krowler. The combined attack rips Dormammu`s fire from Krowler`s body and, without his power to protect it, the chapel is hit by a German bomb and reduced to ruins. All of the "goons in the robes" are killed by the bomb but Baskerville and Krowler survive, although the experience has caused the viscount to lose his sanity. Unable to find any trace of Dormammu or Baron Mordo, Strange bids Pamela, Nick and Dum Dum farewell before sending them back to Castle Baskerville through the magic door while casting a spell of forgetfulness upon them.

With the battle over, Strange reunites with Clea, who now feels distant and cold towards Strange because when the spell of sympathy was cast, she learned that Morgana has a deep love for Dr. Strange that is greater than her own love for him, driving a rift between the two lovers.

Notes

  • The version of Dormammu that Krowler and Baskerville are serving is from the same future time as the four other time travellers in this story. Clea learned that he had mysteriously disappeared from the Dark Dimension in Doctor Strange (Vol. 2) #49. The story never explains how Kroweler and Baskerville ended up contacting that future Dormammu instead of the contemporary Dormammu.
  • Karl Mordo appears in this issue at three different ages: As a boy in his grandfather's memory; as "Mordo-the-young-man" in his grandfather's mind's eye; and as his older self from the future.
    • When this story was published in 1981, Mordo, although not young, was not thought to be old enough to have been studying under the Ancient One in 1943. As a result, some readers assumed that the transferal spell was transmitting Mordo's mystical knowledge backwards through time from some future date. However, the story in Doctor Strange Sorcerer Supreme #7 established that Karl had been eighteen years old when Krowler sent him to Tibet to find the Ancient One in 1939.
  • Krowler described himself as a "German viscount." However, in the real world, the title "viscount" has never been used by German nobility.
  • Sir Anthony Baskerville's home is twice named Baskerville Castle and then twice named Castle Baskerville. Although the castle is 'a good hundred miles away' from London, a glowing magic door connects the castle and the chapel where the mystic ritual was to be carried out.

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