2007-09-25 A genuine Marvel

It's easy to see why Dr Strange never really thrived in the field of superhero comics. He's middle-aged, he barely ever gets into fist-fights, and he's almost totally disconnected from the everyday 'real world' which forms the backdrop to most other superhero stories; indeed, most of his stories take place in other dimensions. Spider-Man this isn't; in fact, it is the anti-Spider-Man, the polar opposite to the other series Lee and Ditko were producing together at the time. Spider-Man worries about which girl to date and how to afford Aunt May's medicine. Dr Strange worries about whether his latest foe is going to destroy the multiverse, and not a lot else.

But it's brilliant. It's almost embarrasingly good. Ditko sends Dr Strange hurtling from one crazy, M.C. Escher-meets-Salvador Dali universe to another, bolts of energy flying from his hands, shapeless demons with laser-beam eyes in hot pursuit. Astral assassins fly through walls. Interdimensional tyrants sit on geometric thrones in abstract voids. Alien 60s chicks in high heels and bizarre haircuts fret over their crystal balls. The astonishing art and brilliant layouts are only matched by the lunatic bravado of the story-telling, which deals exclusively in mega-gods, world-eating demons, and similarly off-the-scale characters and events; Dr Strange himself is so powerful that he regularly destroys hell-worlds, topples intergalactic empires, and liberates magical kingdoms almost by accident, merely as a by-product of his larger concerns, but even he's outclassed by the cosmic villains he is regularly called upon to confront. These stories are almost all long, multi-issue arcs, and must have been dreadful to read at the rate of one a month, but collected together they're thrilling (if occasionally confusing) stuff.

The last of the issues in this volume are drawn by Marie Severin rather than Ditko, and lack his inspired madness, but still feature lots of convincingly alien world-scapes and bizarre creatures. As a whole, this is probably my favourite of the entire Marvel Essential series I've read so far, possibly equalled only by parts of Kirby's run on the Fantastic Four. Overall, this is a real jewel of a book, preserving a brilliant series that would otherwise have been lost to comics history. Five stars.