This digest was my first exposure to the good doctor, behind a Frank Brunner cover that promised me a full-on magic superhero. What could be cooler than that? Bring it on!
When I opened the book, though, this was the guy I met:
Um…? He was skinny. He didn’t have a cape. He was… Asian?
That first tale revved up without much explanation about who the character was. Instead we got a random guy having nightmares:
The chiaroscuro lighting & the sweaty desperation of this man made it immediately feel different from any of the other Silver Age comics I’d discovered.
DS didn’t even use the kind of powers my young mind had been trained to expect from wizards — instead of hurled beams like on the cover, he just… floated away.
(I do remember pausing here to look up the words “fleeting” & “metaphysical” in the dictionary. I still didn’t understand the latter after reading the definition.)
Ultimately, the amulet saved the day.
It was all… odd. Not satisfying like the stories in the Fantastic Four or Spider-Man digests.
Now, this premise intrigued me. Plus he had a cape!
But again, the whole enterprise felt off. First, the doctor was a jerk (a new concept to me then).
Next…
This was Dr. Strange?? He looked more like the neighbor who came over & stood in our driveway to complain to my dad about the government.
In addition to a jerk hero, the story also gave me my first exposure to the “white man goes to Asia for training/wisdom/guidance” template.
I liked Ditko’s weird, gangly art on Spider-Man, but here I couldn’t find a foothold to fully enjoy this world.
For every scene my young mind responded to, like this awesome beam vs. beam showdown…
…there were others that left me adrift. Where was my superhero wizard??
I never pursued the character past my digest, so for a long time all I knew of him were those early stories.
As I came back to these years later, I appreciated Stan & Steve’s foray into the psychedelic.
I can see an artist having fun, free to cut loose.
To this day, this remains my ideal costume for the character:
The red cape works so much better than the blue-on-blue, and the black pants make the whole ensemble pop. All I’d add to make it perfect are those black blob-dots that were on his gloves in the first appearance.
What strikes me now is that, unlike other series of the time, there are no communist villains or stories anchored to the Cold War. Marvel could publish these now — unaltered — and they’d still work.
Let’s skip back to my graphic novels/comic books for today. Starting with,
“Doctor Strange: Master of the Mystic Arts” by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko
Stan Lee and Steve Ditko made the OG Marvel superheroes I grew up. Old school comics. I was never really into Dr. Strange back in the day but recently started to expand my comic repertoire.
This is the first collection of Dr. Strange comics. I know there are a couple more so I’ll get there. For now I start here, and with the rest of my comics.
“Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal wlth one another must deal by trade and give value for value.” —Ayn Rand, Anthem, 1937
A fun counter-factual is to imagine if Steve Ditko had stayed at Marvel after discovering Objectivism. What would Spider-Man or Dr. Strange look like if he had continued co-working on them, rather than creating Randian vessels like Mr. A or the Question?
It isn’t exactly known why Ditko left Marvel, but John Romita later said Lee and Ditko "ended up not being able to work together because they disagreed on almost everything, cultural, social, historically, everything, they disagreed on characters..“. Given that, and the fact that Ditko immediately created two Randian superheroes after leaving, I think its safe to believe his desire to sneak Objectivism into his work had something to do with it.
