60 Years of Dr. Strange

July, 1963 marked the first appearance of the Marvel character Dr. Strange in Strange Tales magazine #110.

As I’ve had occasion to mention, Dr. Strange is my favorite Marvel character. Of course — magicians! He was conceived by artist Steve Ditko, with many of the details fleshed out by Marvel publisher and chief scribe Stan Lee. In a general way, it’s not the most original concept Marvel ever cooked up, with its echoes of previous characters like Chandu and Mandrake and other magicians, with esoteric Himalayan settings borrowed from Lost Horizon, and Eastern Mystical lingo redolent of Madame Blavatsky. His surname is obviously due to the comic book in which he had his origin, although truth to tell, there had also been an unrelated Golden Age comic book character named Doc Strange in 1940.

Strange’s job title (arrogant New York neurosurgeon) seems borrowed from all of those horror stories where a world class sawbones loses the use of his hands. Desperate to restore them Dr. Stephen Strange spends his fortune and travels the globe seeking alternate cures, which brings him all the way to the feet of the Ancient One, high atop a mountain in the world’s most remote and inaccessible region. There he learns more than he bargained for. The Ancient One makes Strange his pupil, teaching him all of his magical arts. The comic draws from the myths and traditions of many cultures; Hindu, Egyptian, Zoroastrian, East Asian, and others, but only in the most hilariously hokey and hodge-podge kind of way. The acquisition of magical powers, however, obligates Strange to battle evil Sorcerers and God-like beings who threaten mankind. His bag of tricks include a Cloak of Levitation, The Eye of Agamotto, The Orb of Agamotto, and the Book of Vishanti. He can tell the future, fly through the Astral Plane, and cast spells. He seldom needs to trifle with mere street crooks. His adversaries tend to be existential threats to humanity with names like Baron Mordo, Dormammu, Nightmare, and the Mindless Ones. He often flies through inter-dimensional mindscapes full of surreal dream imagery that seem to mimic the hallucinogenic drug experience.

Marvel Comics in general appealed to the counterculture in the ’60s and ’70s. Cosmic, trippy characters like Dr. Strange and the The Silver Surfer were especially prized. A new generation of artists improved upon Ditko’s rather crude but imaginative conceptions as time went on. In 1978, at the same time of his Incredible Hulk and Amazing Spiderman series on CBS, Lee created a pilot for a Dr. Strange series starring Peter Hooten as Strange, with Jessica Walter as villainess Morgan Le Fay, and no less an eminence than John Mills as his mentor, the Sorcerer Supreme. It was not picked up.

I tried to watch the 2016 MCU film starring Benedict Cumberpatch but couldn’t get very far into it, both because I’ve never liked Cumberpatch, and because I didn’t like the film’s visual look, which I thought had an obligation to be powerful and dazzling, but wasn’t. I was also put off by a misconception that Tilda Swinton was playing the Ancient One as an Asian man, like he is in the comic book (though apparently she chose to play him as an androgynous Celtic mystic, which wasn’t at all clear in the film). I may give the film and its 2022 sequel another try at some point. Somehow it seems just kind of wrong for me not to be at least minimally conversant on the topic of anything having to do with a “Multiverse of Madness.”