Featuring: Dr. Strange
Release: December 10, 1964
Cover: March 1965
12 cents
Written by the nabob of the netherworld: Stan Lee
Illustrated by the sultan of the supernatural: Steve Ditko
Lettered by the overlord of the occult: Artie Simek
10 pages
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| Avengers #20 | Reading order | Strange Tales #131, Story B |
| Strange Tales #130 | Strange Tales | Strange Tales #131 |
There is more to this than meets the eye!
Man. Remember when Ben and Johnny met the Beatles? Seems like a lifetime ago.
I have a grammatically annoying habit in these posts to confuse time with my tenses. Sometimes I speak as though the present is 2022, and sometimes I speak as though the present is 1964. I’m going to double down on that confusing habit.
Strange Tales #130 was released December 1964, and we read the first story, in which Ben and Johnny meet the Beatles, back in May 2021. It’s now November 2022, a good 18 months later we are finally finishing the comic. Wow.
In our last post, we read Avengers #20, from July 1965, a good 7 months after the release of Strange Tales #130. We’re going back in time 7 months and 18 months.
18 months ago, I wrote the following:
Dr. Strange finally gets the cover almost to himself… but we won’t be reading his story. As we’ve discussed, the plan is to take a break from Dr. Strange, but keep reading the Human Torch/Thing stories. The Dr. Strange stories have mostly been happy to be single short episodes that fit in 10 pages. The only exception has been the 2-part battle against Dormammu. But even that epic was only 20 pages, the length of a normal Fantastic Four or Spider-Man story. Not one to make incremental change, Ditko decided he needs 170 pages and 17 months to tell the next story.
We’ve been waiting a long time for this story. Over the months, I’ve occasionally reminded you of it, asked for patience, and hinted at just how much I love it. Let’s see if it was worth the wait.
We’ve already read the first stories from Strange Tales #130-136, finishing up the Human Torch/Thing stories and beginning the Nick Fury Agent of SHIELD stories, including the first two parts of the “Hydra Saga”.
We’ll now catch up on the Dr. Strange stories of 130-136, and then read the entirety of Strange Tales #137-141, which will finish off the Hydra Saga and bring us to a climactic moment and decent enough pausing point for the Eternity Saga. (By “decent enough pausing point”, I mean the issue will end with a bomb about to explode in Dr. Strange’s Sanctum Sanctorum. But decent enough.) We’ll then need to spend a bit of time catching up with the rest of the Marvel Universe before coming back to finish off the Eternity Saga, which runs through issue 146.
I think of this 17-part saga as the “Eternity Saga” or the “Dormammu/Mordo War”, or some mixing and matching of those words. There’s no real official name. A quick browsing of the internet suggests “Eternity Saga” is the most common name, and that’s anyway my preferred name, so we’ll call it that.
This spins out of Dr. Strange’s 2-part battle with Dormammu in issues 126-127. If you look to the Best We’ve Read, you’ll see both parts of that saga are presently in our top ten, though that list is about to get shaken up. Much of this 17-part saga will find its way to that page presently, so check out the bottom couple rows of entries while you can. They’ll be getting pushed off.
Prior to that Dormammu arc, we’d heard a lot of invocations with strange words in them. Vishanti. Agamotto. Hoggoth. Dormammu. It wasn’t that clear what these words referred to. They almost seemed like magic words like Abracadabra. With issue 126, we understood that Dormammu is a demonic sorcerer who rules the Dark Dimension. And that when Dr. Strange or Baron Mordo would invoke his name, they were literally calling upon him to lend them power. That Dr. Strange’s power might come from an evil demon seems a bit of hypocrisy.
In an adventure in the Dark Dimension, Dr. Strange met a pretty girl and faced off with Dormammu, whose power dwarfed his own. He won the day only because of Dormammu’s strange sense of honor. While evil, Dormammu does defend his own realm from the Mindless Ones, and Dr. Strange aided Dormammu against the Mindless Ones. Dormammu then felt obligated to not kill Dr. Strange. Honor and all that. Because his sense of honor is really strange, he has now sworn revenge on Dr. Strange for being in debt. Dr. Strange did Dormammu a favor, and now Dormammu must destroy him. Honor and all that. And while Dormammu swore not to attack Dr. Strange, he didn’t promise not to lend his power to Dr. Strange’s greatest enemy Baron Mordo so that Mordo could kill the good Doctor.
OK, maybe some mild spoilers above. I see the opening of the story does obscure just who it is Mordo is talking to. But it will be revealed by page 5 and this is a 170 page saga.
Given how long this saga is, you’d expect a bit of prelude. But we get basically one panel of Strange and the Ancient One doing their thing, the calm before the storm. By panel 3, the attack begins.
By page 3, the Ancient One has fallen, Mordo controls his temple, and Dr. Strange is on the run.
Continue reading “Strange Tales #130, Story B”
