Tag Archives: Dr. Strange

The END of the ANCIENT ONE!

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Steve Ditko’s art for Dr. Strange was perhaps my favorite of all of early Marvel art, and some of my favorite comics art, period. Elegantly twisted combatants posed against patterned surreal landscapes, the sublime and the absurd slid together in bombastically perfected patterns.
 

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Ditko’s work was inimitable — and yet, later Marvel artists worked to imitate him. In particular, Marie Severin drew a number of issues of Dr. Strange in 1967. I only have one of them; #157, scripted by Stan Lee, and featuring, like the title says, the death of the Ancient One(!)
 

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As you can see here, Severin is fairly deliberately working to copy Ditko’s style. Dr. Strange and The Ancient One have their hands bent into eloquently elaborated gestures; the mystical background is represented by weaving patterns of force. Through an effusion of mystic might, she has made it appear that the mighty mystic…remains!

Sort of. In fact, the Ditko influence hangs a little oddly. Those gesturing hands, for instance; they’re certainly twisted in Ditko fashion, but the twisting ends up being too realistic. The clutching here seems expressive of pain, rather than expressive of a world where everyone’s hands are trying to soberly communicate words of mystic significance in an eldritch language. The fact that the baddie has giant mace-like thingamabobs instead of hands is telling too; would Ditko ever have covered his most precious instrument that way? It’s like Severin is trying to cut her losses — she only has time to draw so many of those damn hands!
 

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If Stan Lee were smart, he would have written in the bubbles, “What kind of Ditko monster do you think I am? Fingers, damn it! I want fingers!”

The background swishes also advertise their not-quite-Ditko-ness. Ditko’s swirls tended to be solid; they emphasized the surface of the page, perhaps, but in the way a paint swath emphasizes a surface.
 

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Severin, though, actually draws lines as lines. It’s as if she started to imitate Ditko, and then stopped, leaving the schematic evidence of not being the right guy behind her.

The sense that we’re seeing not only an imitation of Ditko, but a self-consciously incomplete imitation of Ditko, is even stronger in this panel, which I think is the best in the issue.
 

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Again, the background is rendered not through mystic shapes arranged as design, but simply through an actual geometric doodle of lines. The Ditko pose is similarly rendered as a reductio ad absurdum of a Ditko pose, Strange’s body dramatically distorted, as if the effort to reach Ditko levels of posture has caused Severin’s drawing fingers to short-circuit. And, of course, Ditko’s digits are the most overheated, contorted bit of all, the gesturing appendage absurdly extended, the fingers a grotesque mockery of a hand. Meanwhile, Stan Lee burbles away in the caption. “I must escape or become a nameless, shapeless, nihility!” Is that Doc Strange struggling there? Or is it Severin, trapped in a factory system where she’s supposed to grind out product in someone else’s image, twisting and distorting herself into someone else’s shape and name?

None of this is to say that Severin’s art is bad. On the contrary, it’s great — arguably even in some ways better than that of Ditko himself. The sense of strain, the distance between the Ditko we should be looking at and the not-quite Ditko we see, gives the issue a clumsy charm, and even a poignancy, that is almost truer to Ditko’s spirit than Ditko himself. In the issue, the Ancient One, Dr. Strange’s master, is killed, and his death allows him to channel his mystic energy into his disciple. It feels like something similar has happened for Severin; though the Ancient Ditko is lost, his spirit gestures on — more mighty even than before.
 

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The final (splash) page of the story nicely summarizes the issues pleasures. Strange is off to the side, his body twisted in on itself, his fat-fingered hands raised — he seems to be looking at them, or at the Living Monolith’s equally blocky fingers, as if horrified to realize that somehow, someway, he’s stumbled into the wrong comics page, where Ditko does not reign. The Monolith itself is distinguished by being not all there; it’s head floats a bit above its body — so the limbs are controlled by some disconnected, distant brain. It’s wrong and clumsy and lumpy in a way Ditko rarely was — which seems right, since Ditko isn’t here. And yet he is, in that space between preposterous head and preposterous body, or in the awkward way our hero seems to have temporarily lost control of his limbs. Ditko’s the pattern that’s gone, or, if you preferthe master who’s dead, leaving behind a gift not of power, but of wrongness; the beauty of the bits that don’t fit together, and so make something strange.
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This post is something of a bookend to this piece on the Dr. Strange movie, fwiw.

Dr. Strange! Explained by a Nine-Year-Old

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My son has been really into the Lee/Ditko Dr. Strange recently. So I thought I’d ask him what he liked about it. Here’s what he said.

I like the art because it’s really colorful and I like how he gets different cloaks through the series. I like the plot too. I like how Dr. Strange runs around and does things and goes into different dimensions a bunch. I like how everybody talks to themselves a lot because it’s funny when they’re just saying things to themselves. I like the way they talk about the writers. For example, “written at twilight by Stan Lee.”

That’s kind of all I have to say.

And here’s a drawing of Dr. Strange he did.
 

Dr. Strange

The Erasure of Steve Ditko

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I think I first read Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s story “The Challenge of Loki” in a black and white reprint edition when I was around 8 or so. It’s originally from Strange Tales #123, August 1964.
 

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It’s not exactly right to say that it hasn’t held up — I wasn’t necessarily all that into it even as a kid, though it does have its virtues. Chief among them is a kind of self-contained inevitability; plotting that opens and closes with a satisfying “click.” In the story, Loki decides to use Dr. Strange to destroy his old enemy, Thor. He convinces Strange to cast a spell to rob Thor of his hammer while Thor is in flight. Without the hammer, Thor starts to fall to his death. Dr. Strange realizes he’s been tricked, and he and Loki battle. Strange is losing, but manages to reverse his spell, winding time backwards and returning the hammer to Thor. His life and hammer restored, Thor sets out in search of Loki, arriving at Dr. Strange’s sanctum just in time to scare Loki off and save Strange. The end.

I guess it sounds convoluted in the telling, but, again, the thing I sort of liked about it, and still sort of like about it, is the neatness of it — the way the story so swiftly and so unapologetically sets itself in motion, and then resets, or erases itself. Loki has an evil plot; it is discovered; everything goes back to normal. It’s transparently unmotivated, and then gratuitously rubbed out — pulp piffle which revels in its own greasepaint-daubed inconsequence. The gaudiness of the lack of pretense is refreshing — though also, admittedly, a little unsettling.

That hint of wrongness, might, perhaps, be tied to some of the characteristic tensions in Ditko’s work. Specifically, Craig Fischer argues in this lovely essay, in which he connects Ditko’s obsession with eloquently gesturing hands to the anxiety and unease which pervades the artist’s oeuvre — and then (obliquely) connects both the hands and the anxieties to repressed themes of abuse.

Certainly, hands are very important in “The Challenge of Loki.” Dr. Strange steals Thor’s hammer from him by generating a giant, blue/black hand.
 

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In part, the hand can be seen as pointing directly to Ditko himself; the elaborate motion lines an excuse to show the squiggle of the pen line — the diegetic hand as artist’s hand drawing the diegetic hand. The comic is showing you its own grinding mechanisms; it’s showing you the man (and the hand) behind the curtain.

What the man behind the curtain is doing, of course, is wreaking havoc. Thor is sadistically thrown to his death by the mystic hand — or, if you’d prefer, by the hand of the artist. There’s no motivation, other than Loki’s almost pure malevolence — which both is a plot device, and can be seen as characterizing pulp plot itself. The narrative almost figures artist as supervillain.

But then, of course, the artist relents.

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It’s interesting that the hand does not return the hammer, but instead fades away. Time is wound backwards (though, again curiously, this is not really visualized). Thor’s hammer is returned to him; the supervillain artist erases his own work. Not only is recompense made, but, apparently, the evil was never done. It effervesces, like a dream — or an instantly forgettable chunk of pulp detritus. There’s almost a wistfulness there — a fantasy that those hands (my hands? whose hands?) had never been or done; that they could just vanish with a wave of (the same?) hand.

I’m sure some folks will say that it’s a stretch to read into this story trauma or guilt or a confused identification/repudiation of an abuser. And I’d actually agree with that. “The Challenge of Loki” isn’t about abuse. It’s not about anything. It’s a stupid little story about Dr. Strange fighting Loki, with Thor thrown in for cross-promotional purposes. It’s well-constructed, and mildly entertaining, and that’s all that can be said for it, really. It’s inconsequential genre product. If there was ever anything more there, it has been scoured out by some violent or gentle hand.