From a hippie icon to a $2 billion star: The peculiar arc of Doctor Strange
Yes, I know we’re all over the MCU stuff by now, but believe it or not, there was a time when Marvel was cool.
Not in a “biggest movie franchise in the world” kind of a way too, cool in a “has genuine alternative appeal” way. The kind of cool that mainstream superhero comics never had. People like to point to the likes of Watchmen and The Killing Joke as the moments where superhero comics became ok for adults to like but that still didn’t make them cool. Adults liked them, kids liked them, cool people still resolutely held out despite the fact that around 20 years before the release of both those books, Marvel had a brief flirtation with genuine cool.
Which was no accident, by the way. Stan Lee has often said that the very idea behind Marvel Comics was to create superhero stories that people could actually relate to. That wasn’t simple morality tales that the likes of DC comics had fallen into as a result of the Comics Code Authority breathing down their neck. Thus, the likes of The Fantastic Four, Spider-Man and The Incredible Hulk were created as more complex beings than most caped crusaders were painted as.
Pretty soon, this more progressive attitude towards the kind of stories these characters featured in began to extend to the actual art of these comics. Artists like Steve Ditko wanted to push the boundaries of what a superhero comic could look like, and in 1963, he brought a pitch to Stan Lee of a character who’d be the perfect way of pushing those boundaries. With a five-page B-story that he scripted and drew himself, he created the master of the mystical arts, Dr Stephen Strange,
How did Doctor Strange become a cult icon?
Up until this point, the stories of the Marvel superheroes had been resolutely New York City-based. To be clear, this is part of what made them so wildly successful and gave them their air of relatability, but Ditko had bigger ambitions. Pretty much as soon as Doctor Strange stories started hitting the shelves in Strange Tales magazine the same year Ditko pitched him to Lee, his stories started taking him far beyond anything resembling New York, this world or even *whisper it*, New Jersey.
Historian Bradford Wright put it best in his book Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America, saying, “Dr Strange’s adventures take place in bizarre worlds and twisting dimensions that resembled Salvador Dalí paintings. Dr Strange remarkably predicted the youth counterculture’s fascination with Eastern mysticism and psychedelia.” Within two years of Strange’s introduction, the hippy movement was in full swing, and the Sorcerer Supreme was their representation on the comics page.
While Doctor Strange comics never sold to the level of Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four, there was a solid fanbase of readers consisting mainly of college kids and young adults, keeping Strange in publication for the whole rest of the 1960s and well into the 1970s. Considering that not even the mighty X-Men could put up numbers like that in the 1960s, that’s saying a lot. This was a readership that stayed with the character as well, with Doctor Strange books being published into the 1980s and 1990s as well.
Perhaps that’s the reason why such a bizarre character could then crash into the mainstream so successfully. Between them, the MCU flicks Doctor Strange and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness grossed nearly one point five billion dollars. Yes, with a B. Perhaps this was because they turned up at the heyday of the MCU, when they could turn D-listers like the Guardians of the Galaxy into box office gold, that’s absolutely a part of it.
Yet maybe there’s something deeper than that. Perhaps the fact that Doctor Strange has secretly been one of the most successful comic book characters of all time due to a fanbase of hippies, students and stoners finally came home to roost in multiplexes all over the world. Fittingly for the master of mysticism, whether that’s the case or not will remain a mystery.