Steve Ditko - Doctor Strange

Wednesday Classics:
An ongoing weekly series exploring classic comic books that I've grown up with and loved. If you've never given them a try, consider this a massive recommendation.
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This week: Steve Ditko's extraordinary Doctor Strange series, as originally published in Strange Tales 110-111 and 114-146, and available for only about a tenner in black and white as Volume 1 of Marvel's Essential Doctor Strange series.

Steve Ditko - Doctor Strange

I grew up in the early 1960's in Scarborough - long before comic shops and the internet, and long before there was any kind of co-ordinated fandom in the UK. I snapped up whatever meager offerings of American comic books that I could find - in those days they were pretty rare objects, often just used as ballast on other shipments coming from the States. The best source for such things back then were as reprints, either in the Power Comics published by Odhams (such as Fantastic, Wham, Smash etc) or in the later short-lived Super DC from the same publishers.

My first exposure to the Ditko Doctor Strange was therefore in the Fantastic Summer Special of 1968, picked up at a small souvenir shop next to what used to be Scarborough's outdoor swimming pool opposite Peasholm Park. It featured a reprint of the Doctor Strange / Spider-Man team-up from Amazing Spider-Man Annual No. 2, and I was immediately hooked.
(The special itself was a thing of wonder, featuring Bill Everett's Daredevil origin story, a Kirby Torch / Iceman team-up and all manner of gorgeous, full-colour pin-ups).

Given the sparseness of American comics in the 60's, it was a long time before I was able to discover just what I had been missing. I was first treated to a full run of reprints of the strips as a back-up strip in The Avengers weekly comic from September 1973. Since then, I've bought the strip over and over again, in various reprints, including a rather odd 1980's recoloured version, which was fun but muddied the artwork somewhat.

So what is it that's so special about the series? Why is it still relevant these days, almost fifty years after it was first published? Why even bother reading ancient comics like this, when Marvel is pouring new, sumptously-coloured stuff in your direction every week? Isn't it just badly drawn rubbish?

Nope (click for a better, bigger look). Ditko was at the height of his powers when drawing Doctor Strange (arguably, his work for Warren later was just as good, but the Doctor Strange strips still stand head and shoulders over that, in my opinion). The strip starts small and takes a while to get going, mostly in short segments at the back of Strange Tales, but it really starts to hit its stride from about issue 126 onwards, when Ditko's imagination really kicked in, and the artwork took a huge leap forwards in quality, with Stan Lee's dialogue always keeping up, pushing the character into ever-more weird, surreal, mind-expanding directions.

Much of this artwork still stands up today, looking just as fresh and as startling as when first produced, and Ditko had a superb grasp of storytelling honed from years of work before Marvel, skillfully pulling the readers along, making them want more.

Without Ditko, we wouldn't have had P Craig Russell or Jim Starlin, both of whom absorbed the best of Ditko's art and expanded upon it, each inspiring their own fans in turn.

The character these days is languishing as an extra in The Avengers, barely even glimpsing the potential shown in these early days, cast as either a morose loner or a womanising egotist, his powers reduced to the basics, devoid of his mastery of the mystic arts and of his compelling, bizarre nature. If you'd like a master class in just how to create amazing, completely bonkers comics, look no further than this!