"Never have you known his like!

"It is a great pleasure and privilege for the editors of Strange Tales to present, quietly and without fanfare, the first of a new series, based upon a different kind of super hero -- Dr. Strange Master of Black Magic!" So read the introduction to the third story in Strange Tales 110. "Quietly and without fanfare" was putting it mildly--he wasn't even mentioned on the cover! However, his strip was much superior to the Human Torch's and, until Ditko left, to Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. "Somewhere in the city, between darkness and dawn, a tortured man tosses fitfully in his bed, vainly seeking the peace that will not come . . ." -- so begins the first adventure. We see the tormented sleeper through rain-drenched pane.

"No! No!! Go away! Please--please go away!" he cries. Waking he resolves to seek help: "Dr. Strange! He dabbles in black magic. Perhaps he can help me!" To Greenwich Village he goes next morning. "I'm here to see Dr. Strange! He doesn't know me, but--".

"Doctor Strange knows all! Enter!" replies the servant. "Suddenly," reads the following caption, "a tall, brooding figure appears, wearing a striking amulet at this throat! The cold grey eyes of Dr. Strange seem to pierce the mist of the room like a knife!"

We had to take Lee's word for it that the doctor's eyes were cold grey and piercing- -you couldn't tell from Ditko’s marvelous drawing: huge and bulging, they looked perpetually closed. This boy was strange!

The story continues as the man relates his problem: a recurring nightmare of a haunting figure, bound in chains, forever staring at him.

"Enough!" says Strange. "Tonight I shall visit you! I shall find the answer to your dream! Now go!"

"But how?? How will you do it?" pleads the trembling supplicant.

" . . .By entering your dream!!!" replies the mystic. The dreamer can only respond,"!!!"

Enter his dream Strange does, via "metaphysical spirit." This spirit form was one of his most-used weapons in the Ditko era. Soon it became much more developed: it transpired that it was far less potent than his normal, physical self, that he could not leave his physical body for more than 24 hours, and that it could enter and animate things and human bodies whose spirits were absent. In this first story we learn only that his body is defenseless.

Confronting the chained dream figure, Strange learns that it is a symbol of the sleeper's evil--a symbol that will continue to haunt him as long as he does not confess. Doctor Strange is about to re-enter his own world when he is confronted by Nightmare, an equestrian black figure who vaguely threatens death. At this moment the sleeper, realizing that his secret is out, awakens, pulls out a gun and prepares to shoot the absent mystic's earthly body.

"Behold, Dr. Strange," screams Nightmare. "You may witness your own destruction! Your mortal body is unprotected--its life is about to be snuffed out. Nothing can save you now!"

"There is yet one who can!" groans Strange. "Master! Hear me! I need thee, Master!!" The Master, in earthly Tibet, hears his disciple's desperate call and activates the amulet on Doctor Strange's chest. In its center opens an eye--"an eye such as no mortal has ever beheld . . . such as no mortal would ever want to behold again!" The would-be murderer is paralyzed just in time. Taking advantage of the interruption, Strange's metaphysical spirit darts past Nightmare and re-enters our world and his body. His first story is over.

Here is another oddity: Strange has been rescued by the efforts of another. All heroes were lucky and the Fantastic Four were sometimes pointed the way by the Watcher but never, to my knowledge, was anyone rescued solely (and repeatedly) by the timely intervention of others as was Doctor Strange. This, of course--that Strange often got himself in deeper trouble than he could get himself out of--was an unmitigated plus for the strip: it made him more believable (mystic spells and alternate universes notwithstanding), easier to identify with, less run-of-the-mill. Also, of course, the strip thus avoided the old Superman quandary: omnipotence is boring.

In Strange Tales 111, Mordo is introduced. He is the Master's other pupil--a renegade who seeks to become the sole master of magic on Earth. He poisons the Master-- this time in order to extort his mystic knowledge though later he would merely try to eliminate a rival--and has a fistfight with Strange in spirit form. Strange defeats him through trickery, scaring Mordo into returning to his physical body before he had defeated Strange. This was to be Strange's favorite weapon: deception. So he deceived Aggamon (ST 119) and Mordo (ST 134, 139) and tricked them into quitting even though they were winning; so he deceived Mordo (ST 114, 121, 135, 139), Tiboro (ST 129), and Tazza (ST 144) and tricked them into wasting their energy on dummies and illusions; so he deceived Nightmare into thinking that he was menaced by an invulnerable monster (ST 122).

Doctor Strange returned, after a two-issue hiatus, in Strange Tales 114. "In Strange Tales #110 and #111 we introduced the mystifying Dr. Strange," ran a commentary on the splash panel. "Then, we waited to receive your letters, to see if you would want him continued! Well, your enthusiastic response left us only one choice, and so . . . we proudly present the third in our newest series . . . ." This re-introduction on the basis of reader letters strikes me as a minor miracle. Considering that a mention in the Fantastic Four lettercol was the only advertisement he got, considering that the Human Torch had one of Marvel's most juvenile strips and Doctor Strange one of its most sophisticated, it seems amazing that Lee and Ditko received any mail about the new character, let alone "enthusiastic." Return he did, and in this story, Doctor Strange clashes again with Mordo--in another mystic fistfight, this time amid bolts of lightning.

The next issue had--in response to a "flood of letters" says another fantastic "editor's note"--the origin of Doctor Strange. As Doctor Strange was far apart from other super heroes, so was the story of how he acquired his power. He had been a real blackguard, you see. Where other super heroes were lame doctors, dedicated scientists, heroic test pilots, Stephen Strange was an arrogant, selfish avaricious but brilliant surgeon. The only like him was, to my knowledge, Plastic Man, a former bandit: both had health problems, both wound up under the care of holy men and (incredibly) reformed. Of course, the hilarious Plastic Man and weird Doctor Strange were poles apart in all other respects.

Unfortunately, Strange soon underwent a drastic drop in quality. First he lost the spots on his gauntlets--a small touch but indicative of Ditko's early heavily-worked style. His eyes lost their drooping lids and then their slant; moustache and eyebrows shrank and he turned into Tony Stark. He had some good fights with Mordo but also some dull ones with leftovers from pre-Torch ST: a haunted house that turns out to be an alien in disguise (ST 120); some aliens who take over earthmen's bodies ŕ la Invasion of the Body Snatchers (118). George Bell's horrid inking was the coup de grace.

Then things began looking up again. Around the end of 1964, Ditko's art made another quantum leap upwards. Drawings became cleaner, looser, his line thicker, shading was accomplished more with broad strokes and solid black areas than with the fine lines hitherto so abundant. In my own opinion, the old style was better--cruder but interesting and, constricted as it was, in some ways more appropriate; however, the new style obviously had appeal. The foreign dimensions into which Strange repeated plunged likewise became much more developed. Weird pathways, holes into other dimensions, strange planets and mysterious lines, objects, and geometric patterns floated in space. Mystic battles also evolved; far from the quaint fisticuffs of old, sorcerers now threw bolts and erected mystic defenses. On top of all this, Ditko began writing the stories as well.

According to the first-page credits, Ditko did not plot a story until 135, according to the letter column not until 130; however, I can hardly believe that he had not had a large part in writing earlier stories as well. There is a certain negative evidence for this in the sudden, deep, and prolonged deterioration in story as well as art that followed Ditko's departure.

Just in the stories with whose plotting he is credited, we can see a high level of skill. For one thing, they combine the advantages of continued and non-continued stories. In ST 130-46, there is the constant thread of Dormammu: Dormammu lends extra power to Mordo in his struggle against Strange, then fights Strange directly, then, defeated, banishes "the girl" who has twice saved Strange's life, obliging the earthly mystic to rescue her. Throughout this extraordinarily long series--17 issues--, almost every issue has its own complete story: in each one Strange takes on some problem or foe and comes out successful. These little problems and foes are almost always highly engrossing. Who would guess that a whole (albeit only ten pages) story could be constructed around an attempt to probe the Ancient One's mind? How many villains were more despicable than the ugly demon who captures Strange in order to mold a mask of his face and enslave him in ST 136? And how about the trio that knocks him out with a bomb, imprisons him, and takes away his cloak and amulet in 142? I don't know about anybody else but I was horrified by the sight of the imprisoned Doctor--mask covering head, square, blunt mittens over his hands. Unable to utter magic incantations or make the mystic hand passes, just to move he has to take a peek outside with his spirit self, re-enter his body to grope blindly for a few steps, then out again for another look. Who could avoid a sigh of relief when, next ish, he got out of that one?

Here, then, is why the post-Ditko stories were poor: where, under Ditko, each story (or at most pair of stories) was both complete, original, and hard-hitting and a small part of a grand running battle, stories after ST 146 just ran on. There is still the art to explain--how it utterly lacked any trace of charm, how it managed only to bore, bore, bore.

Part of the answer is, of course, the strip to which it was bound to be compared. For the first year and a half, S.H.I.E.L.D. was just another Marvel series. Laid out (usually for ruination by the penciller) and sometimes pencilled by Kirby (to be ruined by the inker), it meandered between imitation of Bond, Flint, U.N.C.L.E. and so on and the established Kirby comics: Thor; FF; Captain America. Having an inexperienced, unshaven half-wit suddenly appointed head of a huge, international spy network was presumably Lee's way of being original: original or not, it sure was a poor idea. Showing the director of such an organization fighting the enemy hand-to-hand, going on solo missions himself, was likewise ludicrous, comparable to showing the president of General Motors installing hubcaps on the assembly line. Ditko could have been half as good and still looked better than the early S.H.I.E.L.D.; his successors had the ill luck to compete against Steranko.

Steranko was not unbeatable. The Doctor Strange artists might either have matched his spectacular layouts or gone deep into the past and returned the "strange" to "Doctor Strange." Instead they tried, unsuccessfully, to imitate the late Ditko. Ditko swipes appeared often, hostile alien dimensions were still composed chiefly of floating fragments and colorful holes. On the other hand, close-ups, which appeared fairly regularly in Ditko's work, disappeared under Severin. Other worlds were emptier and less menacing. Too, where Ditko's mystic battles were endlessly, almost incredibly, varied, Everett's and Severin's were only repetitious and tiresome. Finally, Marie Severin just could not draw well: her distorted figures conveyed not power or movement, as do Kirby's and Colan's, but only frenetic emotionalism. Doctor Strange was in a sorry condition.

So I wrote in 1974. There followed a highly admiring appreciation of Gene Colan's work on Doctor Strange, a more qualified appreciation of Frank Brunner's. It is now well known that 'George Bell' was a pseudonym for George Roussos. My remarks on Bill Everett and Marie Severin may seem harsh, but they have to do with art, not persons, and from my perspective in the 2000s, Everett and Severin still look as unimportant, compared with Ditko, as they did from my perspective in the 1970s. Admittedly, I would not say today that John Severin 'ruined' Kirby's layouts, just that it seems a shame Severin was not left to produce his own.

As for emphasis, I would quote less dialogue today, since that was not Ditko's, and talk at greater length about the art, which was. I do mention close-ups, which were an important way Ditko 1) kept the page visually interesting and 2) drew us emotionally into the story. Samuel Taylor Coleridge once explained his and Wordsworth's plan to produce a series of poems in which 'the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real' (Biographia Literaria, chap. 14). Ditko's Doctor Strange series was certainly supernatural, but by close-ups and other devices, he continually interested us in Strange's personal reaction to his situation: in classic Ditko fashion, the lonely man who does his best, never gives up, fully recognizes the risks of defeat and destruction but runs them anyway. Colan's experiments with page layout were very interesting, but his Doctor Strange was less intense. (The opposite of a close-up is a long shot, and Ditko actually deployed long shots just as interestingly as close-ups. His pages tended to be layered, with objects at many distances away on view simultaneously; for example, Tazza in mid-ground attacking figures in the distance next to a tight close-up of Doctor Strange, or Dormammu in full figure with an inset close-up of "the girl" next to him. Pages by Everett and even more Severin are remarkably two-dimensional by comparison, with nearly all the action in each panel on a single plane.)

I also mention as a feature of Ditko's mature artwork the way 'weird pathways, holes into other dimensions, strange planets and mysterious lines, objects, and geometric patterns floated in space.' In a critique of my review, Neal Pozner put major stress on the naturalistic rendering of pathways and objects--recognizable, tangible trees, rocks, moss, and so on were emotionally gripping as Colan's more completely alien deserts and formless floating bodies were not. There's also the classic difficulty of magic to consider: we have so little idea what the ground rules are, it seems so easy for anything to happen, that it's hard to take any battle seriously. (It seems puzzling that neither Mordo nor Strange can restore a maimed hand [ST 135].) Tangible trees, rocks, moss, and so on may help establish the momentary illusion that there are real constraints on these sorcerers.

I also assert that 'Ditko's mystic battles were endlessly, almost incredibly, varied'. His graphic inventiveness is astonishing, the way he finds ways to represent different invisible processes; for example, in the story about probing the Ancient One's mind (ST 137), opening himself to being probed by the Ancient One and using the Ancient One's very probe as a path back into his mind, represented by a column with tendrils around it. Hardly a visual gimmick is repeated from one end of Ditko's run to the other.

As for external influences on Ditko's work, the most obvious model is Will Eisner, notably in rainy cityscapes and the window of Strange's sanctuary. There must also be dozens of pulp stories from the '30s about Tibetan-trained magicians and the like that I've never seen but Lee and Ditko sure did. Changes in Ditko's style have something to do with simple accumulation of experience and growing skill but also with how many pages he had to produce each month. As his output decreased from 1962 to '64 (as, I presume, his rate per page increased), he had more time to spend on each one, hence the greater detail to his work in 1965 and '66 compared with 1963.