10 Doctor Strange Fates Worse Than Death
9. Losing Your Powers And Getting Split Into Two People Trying To Get Them Back
Every so often, a new creative team comes on board to shake things up for a character. That's precisely what happened when writer David Quinn got together with artists Mel Rubi and Peter Gross to create the Midnight Sons arc for Doctor Strange in the 1990s.
When the good Doctor decides not to get involved in a cosmic conflict called the "War of Seven Spheres," he has his powers removed from him. More accurately, he could no longer tap into the extra-dimensional entities who gave him his magical abilities (Vishanti, Cytorak, etc.).
The former Sorcerer Supreme of Earth doesn't take this well, and much like he did when he first hurt his hands, he wouldn't let anything stop him from getting his powers back. Unfortunately, his means of regaining his powers resulted in a bifurcation of his being into two separate people, Victor Stevens and Strange.
It took some time, but eventually, the two new personas, who were effectively two different people derived from the original, managed to re-merge back into Stephen Strange. When this happened, he managed to get his powers back, but only after being split in two for a while. He was also significantly nerfed in his new form, so the whole ordeal pretty much sucked, every way you look at it.