ONLY SPIDER-MAN IS A MORE DITKO-LOOKING CHARACTER:

Yes, strange as it may seem--and hard as it may be to believe today, with two cinematic blockbusters now under his sash and key roles in several other super-hit films as well--back in the 1960s and for decades afterward, Doctor Stephen Strange was one of Marvel's less important, and least popular, marquee-level heroes. (In fact, Marvel editor Stan Lee later revealed the hero was nearly christened 'Mr Strange', but instead he got promoted to being an actual doctor, because Marvel already had a 'Mr Fantastic.')

He started off his four-color life in a mere five-page throw-away story by scripter Stan Lee and artist Steve Ditko in Strange Tales #110 (July 1963), basically just filling space behind a cover feature wherein the Human Torch battled the Wizard and Paste Pot Pete. . . and with another five-page science-fiction vignette taking up half of the mag's remaining oxygen. 'Dr. Strange, Master of Black Magic!' was therefore the inevitable choice to lead off this volume of some of the greatest sagas starring the man who would eventu- ally become the Marvel Universe's Sorcerer Supreme. It wasn't a bad little adventure, introducing both Doc and the otherworldly villain Nightmare, who's been bedeviling him ever since.

Two additional Dr. Strange five-pagers were spread out over the following four issues, and by the fourth Doc story--'The Ori- gin of Dr. Strange' in Strange Tales #115 (December 1963)--it's clear that the Stan Lee and Steve Ditko team are running on all cylinders. And, as usual, the result whenever Lee and Ditko were, even briefly, on the same page creatively is nothing less than spectacular: a backstory that gives the mustachioed wizard a very human, even tragic background (as a greedy, self-indulgent surgeon who loses the use of his hands--and thus his livelihood, even his reason for existing--in an auto accident) that contrasts starkly with the Lost Horizon-influenced renewal of life he finds in what some then referred to as 'the Mystic East.' This was far from the first pop-cultural artifact to be influenced by James Hilton's 1933 novel that introduced the hidden land called Shangri-La (and even more so by the 1937 movie version), but it was definitely the best and most enduring of those offshoots. For this story, the page count was increased from five to a whole eight.

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