Doctor Strange’s Brother Is Basically Marvel’s BATMAN

Superheroes tend to have a tragic family history, but Doctor Strange took this trope to new heights. His little sister Donna drowned while still in her teens, and Stephen always held himself responsible for the accident that took her life. His mother Beverly died a few years later, causing Stephen even more grief. Two years after that, Stephen’s father Eugene passed away and Stephen wouldn’t visit his deathbed. And then there was Stephen’s brother, Victor, who became Batman...Well, sort of.

Actually, Victor – much like the rest of Stephen Strange’s family – suffered a horrible accident. Shortly after Eugene Strange’s death, Victor confronted Stephen for abandoning their father in his final moments and ran out into the street, directly into the path of an oncoming car. Unable to cope with losing any more family members, Stephen placed Victor’s broken body in cryogenic storage, hoping that medical science could still save him one day…

Related: Batman Is An Actual VAMPIRE In Astro City

As it turned out, it wouldn’t be science that saved Victor but magic. Shortly after sticking his brother in a refrigerator, Strange suffered the car accident that cost him his hands and his fortune (although the warehouse where he kept Victor’s frozen body was still kept running thanks to a trust fund Stephen made sure he couldn’t access). Ten years later, however, the warehouse was torn down and Victor was released – as a vampire!

How did Victor wind up one of the undead? Turns out, shortly after learning the mystic arts, Stephen tried to restore his brother to life by reciting arcane spells from the Book of Vishanti without even knowing what those spells would actually do. Thanks to this ridiculously stupid and careless strategy, one of the spells – the Vampiric Verses – ended up transforming Victor into a vampire. Cold storage kept him from running rampant, but when the warehouse was destroyed, “Vampire Vic” was unleashed.

Victor ended up being captured and used as a pawn by the immortal Marie Laveau, who needed vampire blood to stay young. After Marie outfitted Victor in a costume similar to Captain America’s old vampire enemy Baron Blood, Victor wound up looking like a second-rate Batman. Ultimately siding with Doctor Strange against Laveau, Victor decided to take the whole “Batman” motif a step further by becoming a Baron Blood superhero and feeding on criminals. He even started dating Doctor Strange’s old girlfriend Morgana Blessing, who let him feed on small amounts of her blood (and actually developed a weird kinky fetish for that sort of thing). Although Victor did manage to defeat several supernatural foes with his powers, his attempts to be a “vampire superhero” went south after he discovered the criminals he bit came back as vampires. Eventually, Victor’s own blood cravings began to overpower him, and, not wanting to become a monster, he killed himself by plunging a stake through his own heart.

While Doctor Strange is one of Marvel’s more bizarre heroes, the revelation that Stephen Strange had a previously unknown brother, kept him frozen for years, accidentally turned him into a vampire by randomly reciting spells, and later let him run around in a bat costume as a vampire superhero is easily one of the weirdest Doctor Strange tales (which is saying something). Victor hasn’t been mentioned in years, but now at least trivia fans can know that Doctor Strange and Batman were once brothers... kind of.

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source https://screenrant.com/marvel-batman-doctor-strange-brother/