CLIVE BENTLEY
Real Name: Lord Clive Bentley
Identity/Class: Normal human (British citizen)
Occupation: Lord
Group Membership: None
Affiliations: Edward Catherwood, Doctor Strange (Stephen Strange)
Enemies: None
Known Relatives: Victoria Bentley (daughter)
Aliases: None
Base of Operations: Bentley's Castle, London, England
First Appearance: Strange Tales I#114 (November, 1963)
Powers/Abilities: None beyond those of a normal human of his age and disposition.
History:
(Strange Tales I#114 (fb) - BTS) - Sir Clive Bentley lived in a castle near London and had a daughter, Victoria. He was a friend of Stephen Strange and when he needed him, the doctor was always ready to help him. However, after Lord Bentley died, Stephen Strange did not know about his death.
(Strange Tales I#114) - Ten years after Lord Bentley's death, Baron Mordo used Bentley's appearance and voice to trick Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts, and used this to lure him into a trap in Bentley's Castle.
Comments: Created by Stan Lee (writer), Steve Ditko (pencils) and George Roussos (inks) .
A very short profile, but what do you expect for a character who never actually appeared in any issue and was impersonated in 1½ panels in a story of 5 pages?
In the same issue, Strange found out that Victoria Bentley had a dormant talent for sorcery. Is it possible that Sir Bentley also had a talent for sorcery?
The thing I cannot explain is how Mordo knew about a dead person and whom Strange hadn't heard from in ten years ... was it sorcery or necromancy?
Donald Campbell on Victoria's degree of kinship to Clive:
I was recently rereading Strange Tales II#12 when I noticed that Victoria Bentley's butler, Catherwood, mentions to her that "Sir Clive was always pleased that his niece displayed strong latent occult power." I found this confusing since I had thought that Victoria's first appearance in Strange Tales I#114 had established that Sir Clive Bentley was her long-dead father. I assumed that writer Peter Gillis had made a mistake but then I reviewed the first story more closely and found something odd.
On the first three pages, Sir Clive Bentley and/or his castle in London are mentioned three times. However, on the fourth page, Victoria Bentley is twice described, once by herself and once by Baron Mordo, as the daughter of the late Lord Bentley. This is a discrepancy because the titles "Sir" and "Lord" are not interchangeable. A simple solution would seem to be that Clive Bentley could have been a member of the British peerage (and thus "Lord Bentley") who had also been knighted (and thus "Sir Clive Bentley"). However, since Peter Gillis has always been a continuity-conscious writer, I began to wonder if maybe his mistake in the more recent story was actually a retcon that had been too subtle to be noticed.
What If...Victoria was Sir Clive's niece? That would mean that the "Lord Bentley" who was her father was not Sir Clive but his brother. And that idea actually works or, at least, does not contradict any established continuity. Maybe Lord (No First Name) Bentley was Victoria Bentley's father who died in that castle in London ten years before she first met Doctor Strange. After his death, his brother Sir Clive began living there until his own (unrecorded) death. Meanwhile, Victoria refused to enter the place where her father had died until Strange (actually, his "mental projecto-image"/ethereal self) was forced to compel her to do so in order to save him from Mordo's death-trap candle.
The two scenarios seem equally plausible to me but the retcon idea has a slight advantage in that it doesn't require an explanation for why Catherwood would state that Victoria was Sir Clive's niece if she was actually his daughter.
Anyway, do you know of any stories in which it was definitively stated that Clive Bentley was Victoria Bentley's father? I haven't read about one-third of the stories in which she's appeared so I could easily have missed something. I'm also curious if it was ever established that Victoria had inherited her father's title (whatever it was) and was officially "Lady Bentley." In Doctor Strange II#68, a local veterinarian, Doctor Macrae (or MacRae), does address her as "Your Ladyship" but I don't know of any other in-story evidence.
To be clear, I'm not suggesting that Stan Lee intended anyone other than Sir Clive to be Victoria's father, I'm just wondering if Peter Gillis noticed Mr. Lee's mistake and tried to fix it with a retcon.
Profile by Spidermay.
CLARIFICATIONS:
Clive Bentley was Victoria Bentley's father, but he has no known
connections to
Images:
Strange Tales I#114/2, p1, pan2 (main image)
Appearances:
Strange Tales I#114/2 (November, 1963) - Stan Lee (writer/editor), Steve Ditko
(pencils), George Roussos (inks)
First Posted: 12/22/2007
Last updated: 12/20/2023
Any Additions/Corrections? please let me know.
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