Even though he’s about to get the full Hollywood CGI treatment, Doctor Strange has never been a superstar of the Marvel Universe — more like an endearing benchwarmer with a knuckleball personality and a wacky Cloak of Levitation.
He arrived unheralded in 1963 in Strange Tales No. 110 as a back-of-the-book feature to the Human Torch. He was a slight, five-page afterthought dreamed up by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, who are better known for creating the Amazing Spider-Man.
Conceived at first in the cornball tradition of comics necromancers like Mandrake the Magician and Mr. Mystic, Doctor Strange gradually staked out a singular position as a master of the mystic arts and, eventually, Sorcerer Supreme. And unlike most Marvel heroes, who rely on their fists, he uses magic to defend Earth from malign, otherworldly threats like the match-headed Dormammu and the nefarious Nightmare. He finally got his own comic book in 1968, but it was cancelled the next year. Not even Doctor Strange’s mighty enchantments could overcome poor sales, a sad hallmark of his up-and-down comic-book career.
But now potential vindication is near. Doctor Strange opens this weekend with Benedict Cumberbatch starring. Based on my many decades of comic-book study, here are 10 things you should know before you see the movie. Magic, after all, can be exhilarating but befuddling.
1. He’s a real doctor
Before draping his cape and waggling his fingers, Stephen Strange was a talented yet arrogant surgeon, driven by ego and ambition. So he’s your man, whether you’ve got a bad ticker or, as Jason Aaron wrote in the recent graphic novel The Way of the Weird, “your daughter started cursing in Latin and walking like a spider.”
2. He’s an alliteration addict
This is really the writer Stan Lee’s fault, but Strange can’t speak without racking up frequent-alliteration points. His many munificent mutterings include: the Shadowy Shades of the Seraphim, the Seven Rings of Raggadorr and — who can forget? — the Hoary Hosts of Hoggoth.
3. He’s groovy, man!
In the 1960s and early ’70s, he did have a certain counterculture cachet. In T. Rex’s Mambo Sun, Marc Bolan sang, “On a mountain range, I’m Doctor Strange for you.” A 1965 psychedelic concert in San Francisco was called A Tribute to Dr. Strange, and he showed up on the cover of the Pink Floyd album A Saucerful of Secrets (1968).
4. He’s a merry prankster too
Speaking of the counterculture, the doc also appeared in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe’s nonfiction chronicle of the cross-country trip taken by the novelist Ken Kesey and his LSD-lit Merry Pranksters. Wolfe wrote of Kesey reading comic books, “absorbed in the plunging purple Steve Ditko shadows of Dr. Strange.” The writer Roy Thomas later returned the favour, giving Wolfe a walk-on in Doctor Strange No. 180 in 1969.
5. He lives in a village (of course)
Stephen Strange’s awe-inspiring Sanctum Sanctorum sits in Greenwich Village at 177A Bleecker. Presumably it’s not too far from his preferred watering hole, the wizards-only Bar With No Doors.
6. He’s a magical ladies man
Sure, he routinely saves the world — if not the universe — but Strange is also something of a cad and a hound. He’s been known to make out with any entity that’s vaguely female in form, including insectlike soul-eaters. Really, he’s more likely to be killed by a spurned girlfriend than by one of his arch-enemies.
7. He’s no Ali
He prefers to hurl spells, incantations and mystic bolts, but Doctor Strange will engage in physical combat if he has to. He knows martial arts, but his weapon of choice (in this fleshly plane of existence) is a baseball bat wrapped in enchanted barbed wire.
8. He knows supernatural bondage
One disturbing element during Strange’s Ditko years (1963-66) was how often Clea, the doctor’s love interest, was drawn bound and in poses of submission. But the Ditko biographer Blake Bell explained in Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko, that in the years he worked on the character, Ditko shared a studio at the corner of Eighth Avenue and 43rd Street in Manhattan with Eric Stanton, a fetish artist. Stanton was best known for his bondage work on comic strips like Sweeter Gwendolyn and Confidential TV. Maybe something stuck with Ditko.
9. His mentor was not Tilda Swinton
In the coming movie, Doctor Strange’s mentor, the Ancient One, is played by a beguiling if tough Tilda Swinton. In the comics, Ancient is male, an archaic Asian relic who owns an I’ve-seen-it-all face that looks like a fossilised prune. Swinton’s version is Celtic, and the change was one of a number of developments that led to renewed controversy over Hollywood’s whitewashing of Asian characters.
10. His defining artist was Steve Ditko
Though he stopped drawing the character in 1966, Steve Ditko is still the definitive Doctor Strange artist. For four years Ditko imagined Strange’s netherworlds, Daliesque dimensions and neuronlike phantasmagorias. (It’s hard to believe upon reading Doctor Strange that Ditko also once drew the spinach-green bulk of the Incredible Hulk.) As comics historian Dean Mullaney has written of Ditko, “He took the ethereal and made it tangible.” And two books have just been published that provide full access to Ditko’s dreamscapes. Ditko Unleashed (IDW) is the generously illustrated catalogue for a Ditko retrospective on display through January 8 at the Casal Solleric museum in Mallorca, Spain, while the Doctor Strange Omnibus (Marvel) reprints his full, epic run on the character. As the Marvel artist John Romita Sr., who succeeded Ditko on Spider-Man, told Bell, “No one could do Doctor Strange like him.”
Don’t miss it!
Doctor Strange releases in the UAE on November 3. Find where to watch it here.
