Stephen Strange was born in Philadelphia in 1930 to Eugene and Beverly Strange, though the family's real home was their Nebraska farm, where his sister Donna arrived two years later. A couple years after that came his brother Victor.
Strange's childhood was marked by something most kids never experience: Karl Mordo, a bitter apprentice sorcerer, deliberately tormented him with demons for years. Mordo was jealous that this kid was apparently destined to surpass him as the next Sorcerer Supreme—a title that meant everything to him. The Ancient One, the Earth's current mystical protector, eventually intervened and ended the harassment, becoming Strange's unlikely savior.
The turning point toward medicine came at eleven, when Stephen helped care for an injured Donna. That single act of helping her sparked a real passion for the field, and he pursued pre-med at New York College straight out of high school. But tragedy struck before his nineteenth birthday. While swimming with Donna during a college break, she suffered a cramp. Stephen searched frantically but found her too late—she'd already drowned. That failure haunted him deeply and poisoned his earlier idealism about medicine, leaving scars that would shape him for years.
Content compiled by AnimeList.moe from publicly available sources.
