One indication of the esteem that "Dr. Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts" held during his first run in the early days of the Marvel Age of Comics can be noted on the front and back covers of the hardback Marvel Masterworks volume collecting his first adventures. While other entries in the company's reissue series sport reproductions of front covers where the characters (Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, Hulk, et al) first made their appearance, the Sorcerer Supreme only gets represented by a pin-up page that'd appeared in one of the comics' interiors. Look to the back, where an array of covers is reprinted, and you can see the reason. None of the covers of Strange Tales, home to Strange's earliest adventures, contained a good full-page image of the guy. More often, Strange's feature was shunted to the bottom of the page while Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, was more prominently displayed.
Last laugh's on Doc Strange, though. Today, few recall the Human Torch features as anything more than a weak Fantastic Four spin-off, while Stan Lee & Steve Ditko's second big co-creation after Spider-Man has grown in fannish stature over the years, largely on the strength of artist/co-plotter Ditko's surreally inventive eye.
The series' beginnings were humble enough. As shown in Volume One (which reprints Strange's 1963-6 run in Strange Tales from issues 110-111, then 114-141), the early Strange Tales barely read less like a hero strip and more like one of the soft supernatural comics that had been Marvel's bread-and-butter before Fantastic Four revitalized the comics company. In his earliest appearances, in fact, Strange's adventures don't appear much different than those experienced by Doctor Droom, an earlier sorcerer character who'd made sporadic appearances in the line's monster comics.
In the first five-pager, for instance, a businessman comes to Strange because he is being tormented by nightmares. Strange agrees to help him, and travels into the land of nightmares, but - surprise! - it turns out that the tormented sleeper is being bedeviled because he has a guilty conscience. This was the sort of "twist" ending that writer Stan Lee recycled endlessly in the pre-superhero Marvels, and he clearly wasn't ready to abandon it in those early outings. That big ol' seemingly haunted house? It's really - big spoiler here! - a creature from another space-time continuum! That town of bewitched European villagers? They're actually possessed by aliens from another dimension!
Lee & Ditko didn't even bother to craft an origin for Strange until his fourth story, a situation that Lee would attempt to frame as chaos-as-usual in the Marvel Bullpen ("It could only happen to the off-beat Marvel Comics Group!") but more likely reflected the character's flyweight status in the Marvel lineup. Despite these modest beginnings, the character began to develop his own unique look and storylines, grabbing more pages of his host comic and growing his own continuity. Artist Ditko started receiving open credit as "plotter," while Lee apparently stepped back and basically filled in the blanks with his stentorian dialog. (Anyone who believes Lee wasn't essential, though, need only compare his agreeably hokey prose with the flat-fisted fare by Don Rico, who scripted one episode midway into this book's run.) This open shift in creative responsibility seemed to free Ditko to let his fertile visual imagination run rampant - which was all to the good.
Article comments
1 - Bob Mozark
Great Review! I was lucky enough to get one of the first edition hardcovers (at a discounted price, even!) and enjoyed re-reading the earliest adventures of my all-time favorite superhero from my childhood.
2 - Jim Carruthers
Steve Ditko was one of my favourite artists when I was a kid. I always loved the wierd swoosh thing (obviously Nike should pay him something) he worked into all his drawings.
The Ditko character I really liked was "Shade The Changing Man". I guess this was the inspiration for Rorschach (or maybe Arnold Horshack) in Watchmen.
Didn't Ditko do some work for Charleton in the early 70s?
If I recall correctly, hasn't Ditko become some sort of loon?
3 - Bill Sherman
Ditko did a lot of comic work for Charlton, whose superheroes were the original source material for Alan Moore's Watchmen. The Question, a character he created for Charlton who was known to espouse some of Ditko's Randian Objectivism (a belief system that became increasingly prominent in his comics work), was more the source for Rorschach, though you can see elements of the character in Shade, too.
4 - Erik (drstrange.nl) Elzenaar
Very good and positive review.... Couldn't have said it better.
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