For Your Consideration: Marvel Masterworks: Doctor Strange Vol. 5
by Robert Greenberger
One of the best parts of Marvel’s continuing Masterworks program is that for many characters, they have now entered the seventies and it was one of their most fertile and creative periods. A second generation of talents, notably writers, began working on the stalwart heroes. Among them was Steve Englehart, who worked on staff but is best known for his politically-tinged run on Captain America and The Defenders. One of his overlooked gems was his collaboration with Frank Brunner on Doctor Strange and now those tales are due for collection.
Englehart told Mania, “I think we all knew comics were as good as they’d ever been that we were all on the crest of a wave. I don’t think we ever considered that waves eventually crash. But we knew it was a great time to be in comics, having complete creative freedom, at the most popular comics venue. We knew we were a generation, as you say – the first to come into comics having not done anything else beforehand (work-wise) – the first that was essentially college kids, for whom Marvel was very much designed, and who now had the chance to write and draw for people just like us.”
Marvel Masterworks: Doctor Strange Vol. 5 truly begins a new era for the sorcerer supreme as the last vestiges of the Steve Ditko era are cast off and new, more cosmic tales take center stage. After losing his title in 1969, the good doctor appeared here or there, regaining a regular berth in the newly launched Marvel Premiere in 1971. Unfortunately, it was a hodgepodge of creators and directions for the first eight issues, as witnessed in volume 4. Noteworthy with MP #6, though, was the arrival of Frank Brunner, who then missed the next two issues.
When he returned in MP #9, he was accompanied by Englehart, who discarded the H.P. Lovecraftian direction and went cosmic. “We had complete creative freedom,” he told Mania, “with no editorial edicts. Roy [Thomas] or whoever might suggest an idea, but he never insisted on it. His famous words to me were, ‘If you can turn the book in on time and make it sell, you can keep doing it; otherwise, we’ll find someone else who can.’ And that was it. So since I did that, to the extent of having Strange sell so well as to go monthly for the only time in its life, I could do whatever I wanted. And I did.”
On his own website, Englehart notes, “The Dr. Strange run falls into two parts: the first half was done in close collaboration with artist Frank Brunner; the second half I plotted alone. The second half’s artist was the legendary Gene Colan, but there’s no denying that Frank gave Dr. Strange a unique look and feel.
“When I’d first encountered Stephen Strange in The Defenders, I’d written him basically as a superhero who shot rays out of his palms. When I took on his solo series, I decided I should learn a little about actual magick – and it led to a continuing interest in the subject.
“Frank and I each had ideas for what we wanted to do with this series, so we’d get together at my place or his, lay out our respective interests, and spend the evening – often a long evening – in the extremely fun process of merging the two. In the end we always had more than the sum of our parts, and it led to some very advanced storylines.”
The cosmic stories gave us the arrival of Shuma-Gorath, which led to the Ancient One ascending to a higher plane of existence and elevating Stephen Strange into the next sorcerer supreme. There was romance with Clea, the threat of Siseneg, and a visit with Benjamin Franklin (who winds up bedding Clea!) and much more in these stories taken from Marvel Premiere #9-14 and Doctor Strange #1-9.
“When Frank Brunner turned out to be too painstaking to keep regular deadlines, the extraordinary Gene Colan replaced him as artist, but not as co-plotter – Gene puts all his talent into his art. So I felt it was incumbent upon me to maintain the level of magickal wonder Frank and I had had on my own, and it seems to have worked out because we went monthly with #13 – the only time this title has sold that well. It fell back to bi-monthly as soon as this run ended,” Englehart added.
The story from Dr. Strange #1-5 became the basis for the CBS telefilm in the late 1970s and the run has been repeatedly reprinted through the years, as befits this classic set of stories by creators at the peak of their skills.
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