The Re-Read: Ditko and Lee's Doctor Strange
Sunday's Child Is Listening to the Winds of Watoomb Outside
So there’s another Spider-Man movie opening up next weekend.
Judging from the trailers, it’s also kind of a semi-sequel to Doctor Strange.
Doctor Strange, the character, is my favorite comic-book protagonist. That’s despite the fact that the history of comic-book storytelling with Strange as the central character is so profoundly uneven. I don’t have any trouble recognizing a near-perfect Doctor Strange story or a writer who really gets the character, and because there have been some near-perfect stories and writers, I know it’s possible. As a consequence, I tend to be way more intensely irritated with bad approaches to Strange, of which there have been many. Some are just low-quality work, some are conceptual misfires. I don’t quite include the Marvel film in that camp, but neither was it especially good in this respect. (Strange in Infinity War, on the other hand, was close to the mark.)
So maybe I’ll do a few of these Reread columns on past runs of Doctor Strange. If I’m going to do that, best to start with the key story arc of the Lee-Ditko era that started the character off.
The interesting thing on re-reading all of Lee and Ditko’s work on the title is that one hand, it presents a different sense of their collaboration than their more famous (and famously contentious) work on Spider-Man. Later writers and artists knew where to take the story of Peter Parker, but nobody really had a good sense of what to do with Strange after Lee and Ditko stopped working on the book. Part of that lies in the origin story, which is a key part of what I love about the character. The character had three stories behind him before we found out his background. He wasn’t a teenager bitten by a spider, a mutant born with powers, a team of adventurers exposed to cosmic rays. He was a successful professional surgeon in early middle-age who had become vain, wealth-seeking, shallow and cruel. He had a terrible automobile accident (much later, stories would suggest he had been drunk at the time), resulting in nerve damage that made it impossible for him to perform surgery. Colleagues offered him teaching positions or to make him a hospital administrator, but he refused—those would make him dependent upon institutions, just one more person with medical knowledge and experience. He spent all of his money searching for a cure, and then became a destitute wanderer. In time, he found his way to an ancient mystic in the Himalayas who saw potential in Strange. After a humbling experience with the mystic’s sinister apprentice, Baron Mordo, Strange prostrated himself and sought to learn the ways of sorcery.
You can see why the character was the odd man out in Marvel’s early line-up and has been at times subsequently. This isn’t the story of adolescent wish-fulfillment or even of a family. It’s a thoroughly melancholic adult story. This is a redemption story, a second chance for a man who failed as a person and now is going to try and build himself back up. There’s some resemblance to Tony Stark’s history (though it took a stunningly long time for Marvel writers to see the emotional resonances between the two men)—but while Stark learns a lesson about his own arrogance and feels a debt to the man who helps him escape captivity, Strange rises into his second life as a student and with a much greater sense that to succeed in his new role as a protector, he must unlearn everything that made him the man he used to be—and yet somehow also still be a prodigious talent and as determined as ever.
That’s an origin, potentially as generative a story engine as “I took a vow at 14 to avenge my slain parents” and “I failed to protect my Uncle Ben and learned that with great power comes great responsibility”. Marvel’s writers have only occasionally really tapped that potential. And oddly enough, it’s not really what drives Lee and Ditko’s successful portrayal of Doctor Strange.
Their run on Strange is essentially a repetition of the same story with a little bit of filler in between the two iterations of it. In it, Strange is a hunted man, not the confident Sorcerer Supreme. He has to use guile to stay ahead of his arch-enemy, Baron Mordo, who has gained stunning power from some mysterious source and has an army of thugs, spies and spirits searching for Strange. Strange’s mentor, the Ancient One, serves mostly as a kind of damsel-in-distress through all of this, too weak to help his apprentice and needing to hide from the villain.
In the famous second arc that repeats some of the story beats of the first, but also compresses them, Strange discovers the secret of Mordo’s power: he’s being backed up by a nearly omnipotent extra-dimensional menace called Dormammu. The Ancient One has been incapacitated, but he’s left Strange a clue about how to match Mordo and Dormammu: seek Eternity. That takes up a few issues and exposes Strange to various dangers, including Mordo being close on his heels. In desperation after failing to find the secret of Eternity, Strange resolves to probe his ailing mentor’s unconscious mind for the answer. He gets what he was looking for and uses his amulet to travel into a strange dimension where he meets Eternity, a mysteriously powerful entity who denies him additional power, saying that he already knows what he needs to defeat his enemy. Strange returns to confront Mordo, who has captured the Ancient One, and faces Mordo. With some guile, he outthinks and thus outfights Mordo. Dormammu pulls them all into his own dimension and then stupidly challenges Strange to a duel with an exotic form of martial arts before a huge audience, and vows never to conquer Earth if he loses. He loses—it’s pretty much the standard Stan Lee/pulp hook of the ultra-powerful bad guy defeated by his own arrogance and underestimation of his enemy.
Anyway, that last bit is the weakest part of the story (and yet, of course, virtually the only way out once you’ve built up the Big Bad to that level). What really sings in this story as I re-read it is the way it imagines magical battles between two sorcerers. Mostly Mordo and Strange aren’t speaking spells and incantations at each other, they’re shooting magical energies from their hands while dodging and moving, making shields that change shape. Ditko creates a fantastically kinetic, dynamic visual language for magical battle that almost no artists on the title have followed. As a teenager, I remember being so drawn to these issues—I bought tracing paper and went over them again and again. I used to try and think of how to adapt the way these issues looked and read to tabletop RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons (and gave up, because it’s completely counter to the fluidity of what Ditko draws here).
The other famous thing in the second arc (the first arc that has Mordo chasing Strange around the world is rather boring to re-read by comparison, though it introduces characters and settings that later writers would reintroduce) are Strange’s travels to other dimensions, especially his meeting with Eternity. Here too it’s Ditko’s visualizations that are still really stunning—and were famous from the very first moment they appeared.
There’s part of me that wishes that Eternity had never re-appeared nor been explained further. But it’s hard to imagine how later artists and writers could have left it alone. The problem is that once we got the explanation in a later arc where Eternity and Dormammu go at each other directly, that Eternity is literally the sum totality of all existence in the Marvel Universe, that led to the introduction of many other “cosmic abstracts” in Marvel story-telling: Death, Chaos and Order, the Celestials, the Beyonders, etc, all of which began to seem faintly silly the more often they were used. In this early story, Eternity is still awe-inspiring—you can feel Strange’s sense of wonder and amazement—but eventually he started to just seem like a tall dude with a great fashion sense. When fundamental principles like Death and Chaos and Love etc. start to be personified in rather banal ways, as if they’re just more superheroes, you’re losing something important in the emotional and narrative stakes. (At the least, you might do something more like Neil Gaiman did for Dream, Destiny, Desire, etc.: if you must personify, make the characters interesting.)
The other odd dangling element of the early Strange stories is Clea, who would eventually become his disciple and lover for a time. She’s from Dormammu’s dimension (and in fact, though we wouldn’t know it for decades, was actually his niece). But in these stories, she’s mostly watching Strange’s travails from afar, over an interdimensional viewscreen. He doesn’t really know who she is, nor is he romantically intent upon her. He barely knows she exists, while he’s a major fascination for her, and she eventually helps him without him knowing it. At the end of the story, Dormammu punishes her by sending her into exile in an unknown dimension and showing that to Strange in order to make him feel guilty. That sets up a later story arc, but she doesn’t feel planned as an element of Strange’s world—I think another sign of how different his situation was. (Strange has much later on gained a reputation as a ladies’ man, which is odd given how relatively ascetic he is in the early stories—though there are women besides Clea who fixate on him.)
There’s also, unfortunately, the Asian characters who look after the Ancient One and then Strange himself, Hamir and Wong. Wong, for all that he became an absolutely central supporting character later in Strange’s various comic runs, is actually not in evidence in these early stories, and Hamir only appears a few times, tending to the Ancient One. Wong’s character is thankfully one that the Marvel Cinematic Universe knew would have to be changed entirely to become Strange’s peer and comrade, and various attempts to make a shift like that took place in the comics as well early on. But he’s still a pretty awful stereotype when he did start to become prominent: a humble servant who was also a skilled martial artist but who mostly brought tea and tended house.
Anyway, re-reading the Mordo-Dormammu arc is still a great experience, and brightens the flame of my affection for the character. I can completely understand why he became a big deal for me when I first read those issues.