Doctor Strange Confronts the Infinite. Then He Does It Again

One of Stephen Strange’s more frequent lamentations is “Curse me for a novice!” which he usually exclaims when he has failed at a task he considers to be simple or has missed the obvious.  It only works because Strange is not a novice: when Lee and Ditko introduce him in Strange Tales 110 (July 1963), Dr. Strange has already established himself as the Master of the Mystic Arts, defending humanity from within his Sanctum Sanctorum in Greenwich Village. By the end of the same year, Lee and Ditko revealed his origin (in Strange Tales 115), going back in time to Strange’s years as a surgeon and his eventual quest for the Ancient One. Doctor Strange is then cemented in the reader’s mind as both hypercompetent (his first appearance) and a man on a journey (his fourth appearance).  

Englehart sustains both aspects of Stephen Strange’s persona over the course of Marvel Premiere and Doctor Strange.  This is particularly fitting, since Englehart himself only started to explore the occult as a response to this new assignment.  Englehart wants Strange to be powerful, but it seems that he also wants Strange, like the writer himself, to be learning about magic along the way.

Over the nearly 60 years since his creation, Doctor Strange has lent himself to a variety of types of stories, from team books to adventure tales to superheroics, all of which have their roots in the early Lee/Ditko days.  Englehart was not alone in emphasizing the “cosmic” nature of Strange’s stories (does anyone really want to watch the Sorcerer Supreme stop bank robbers?), but he was the first to pick up on one the key elements of the doctor’s classic adventures:  the confrontation not just with the cosmic, but the infinite and ineffable. 

Lee and Ditko set the standard here with the introduction of Eternity, an anthropomorphic embodiment of all of creation.  It says a lot about Doctor Strange that Eternity has appeared so many times since that one could almost call him a supporting character. Englehart takes some time before bringing Eternity back.  In his first solo Doctor Strange storyline (and the last one to be published in Marvel Premiere), he nonetheless raises the stakes for the Sorcerer Supreme.  In a multi-part confrontation with the wizard Sise-neg, Strange and his archenemy Baron Mordo follow their antagonist back to the beginning of time, where Sise-neg plans to supplant all of creation with a new version made by him.  Along the way, Sise-neg attains godhood, reverses the spelling of his name to become “Genesis,” and realizes that the best thing he can do is “recreate the universe—exactly as it was before!” (Marvel Premiere 14).

Witnessing this event causes Mordo to go mad, but Strange merely muses on the paradox before realizing that, having returned to his own time, it is New Year’s Eve (1974). The revelation of the iterative, cyclical nature of all creation gets folded into the very human ritual that recognizes the iterative, cyclical nature of our calendar. This, in Englehart’s hands, is Stephen Strange’s greatest gift: his capacity to confront the ineffable and return to the human world, changed and yet the same. 

“Changed and yet the same” describes not just Strange, but the world itself:  by issue 10 of his own series, Strange will see the Earth destroyed and recreated, a perfect replica of the original that is somehow different for not being the original.  The metaphysics of Doctor Strange also resonates with the basic temporality of Marvel Comics:  the iterative present that Stan Lee referred to as “not change, but the illusion of change.”  Engelhart’s Doctor Strange is, perhaps in spite of itself, a perverse justification of Lee’s dictum, showing that even when the status quo is apparently regained, something is learned along the way.  And the hero can grow from it. 

This, in fact, is Englehart’s masterplot for Doctor Strange.  The first sequence of Strange’s new solo title has him nearly killed by a Christian, magic-wielding anti-magic zealot calling himself the Silver Dagger.  To escape death, Strange enters the Orb of Agamatto, the crystal ball that had featured prominently in many previous adventures.  Over the course of four issues (with a reprint in the middle), Strange find himself trapped in a realm of unreality, meeting Lewis Carroll's caterpillar, dining with bizarre simulacra of his fellow super-heroes, and having his very sanity challenged by what he sees. The only way for him to escape is to confront Death itself. The encounter does not go well; no matter what he does, there seems to be no escape from death (pictured as a giant skull hanging in space).  The only respite is provided by a humanoid hole in space, whose outline is that of Eternity. 

Death has no hold over Eternity, but the Eternity shape provides only a brief respite: Death distorts the space around Eternity, leaving Strange potentially vulnerable to Death’s touch. Typically for an Englehart Dr. Strange story, the hero’s victory comes not from violence, but from contemplation and wisdom. Strange thinks:

“Perhaps this is only the dulling of my will again—but I know it is not!  I have seldom felt so lucid!

“The Ancient One told me that no man ever believes his time has come—but I am forced to believe!

“Death is a part of life, just as life is a part of death.  Escape—attack—these are born of the instinctive fear and anger death breeds on his approach.

“But death though remorseless is not evil.  When the time comes, death is only an experience for the soul-=-one unlike any other,  but an experience nonetheless.  And fear and anger only confuse perception.

“I have feared death, deep inside, though my arts have taught me much about the mastery of my mind. Despite the arts, I am a man,  and men do not wish to die.  Thus, I have fought every step of the way!

“But I fight no longer!

“I fear death no longer!

“I am ready to die.” (Doctor Strange 4)

At that point, Dr. Strange expands his body to fill up the entirety of the Eternity-shaped hole in space, “to feel death’s touch on all of him at once,” and dies. 

Of course, this is comics, and mystical comics, at that.  Doctor Strange is not permanently dead; instead, he has yet another encounter with the floating head of the Ancient One, who explains that this was the greatest trial of the Sorcerer Supreme, and that he shall be reborn “with no physical fears to arrest your development,” and with an ankh symbol appearing on his forehead whenever he faces death.  

Stephen Strange has yet to defeat Silver Dagger; that’s a matter for the next issue.  What he has done, however, is confront the truth of his existence, experience annihilation, and be reborn as a new iteration of his previous self. In other words, the second iteration of the Englehart Doctor Strange enlightenment plot. 

After a four-issue battle with Dormammu, Lord of the Dark Dimension, and his sister, Umar (defeated by the combined mental engeries of every living being on earth, including the readers of that particular issue of Dr. Strange), Nightmare, Lord of Dreams, hatches a convoluted plan that threatens to destroy the world.  He has trapped Eternity in a nightmare, but Eternity’s nightmares have a way of becoming a reality.  Eternity forces Stephen to confront versions of himself from his past (the surgeon the drunk), as well as others that never existed (including one disguising himself as Richard Nixon). 

At first none of this makes any sense on the level of plot: Eternity has rendered himself visible to the people of Earth, and told Dr. Strange that our world is coming to an end.  Strange pleads on humanity's behalf, which then leads to Eternity’s arrangement of the doctor’s encounters with his various incarnations.   But, as Eternity reminds Strange in issue 13, he is Adam Qadmon, the blueprint of humanity, or the universe in anthropomophic form.  He embodies the very notion of “cosmos,” that is, of a universe that is understood as a homology between the human and the reality that contains it.  Strange’s exploration of his own multifaceted humanity is analogous to Eternity’s plight as he himself explains it: Eternity was subject to Nightmare’s influence because of the effect of the ever-growing human race on his own consciousness: he became introspective, and subject to dreaming.  He was behind the creation of plants, mammals, primates, and “man”:

“All this did I do, to advance myself…but as the distance between their level and mine lessened, and their numbers increased…

“Their effect on me grew more pronounced!"

Thus we see how a story that, on the surface, seems astonishingly egocentric (just how many times is Stephen Strange going to encounter someone wearing his face?), is, like the Ancient One’s ascension, about exploring the ego in order to move beyond it.  Just as Strange had to let death touch him “everywhere at once” in order to experience and transcend death, now he has to wallow in externalized self-absorption in order to learn more about the universe (that is, about Eternity).  For Stephen Strange, the way out is almost always through. 

But Strange is also at loggerheads with Eternity, because the anthropomorphic embodiment of the cosmos did, in fact, destroy the Earth at the end of Issue 12, and will not undo the damage done while under Nightmare’s sway.  Sorcerer Supreme or no, Stephen Strange is clearly out of his league.  Moreover, a “physical” confrontation with Eternity would be a step back from all the progress he has made (observing creation, meeting God, accepting Death). 

Engelhart finds a solution that is consistent with the central metaphors of the book while verging on a parody of fanboy expectations of superhero conflict. Out of nowhere, the a giant-sized version of the Ancient One appears, grabs Eternity by the hand, and then body-slams him into submission. The caption explain:

“By now, Dr. Strange has seen everything!

“Two titans grapple with each other, but not as they appear!

“There is no need of human form here—not for them! It is just what he sees!”

That is, once again, a metaphysical conflict plays out through human metaphors, abstraction rendered as the banal.  The captions tell us that this is about the limits of Dr. Strange’s perceptions, but it is also a clever concession to medium (comics are ill-suited to depict the abstract directly) and genre (superhero stories require a fight scene).

Yet there is another reason that this fight scene is not what it seems.  After the conflict is resolved, and after the Ancient One has, for the third time in Englehart’s run, explained the story to its protagonist, he shocks his disciple by stepping inside Eternity, his face replacing the one Eternity usually wears:

“But what is this your face betrays? Surprise?

“Did I not tell you that now—

“—I am one with the universe?”

The battle between the Ancient One and Eternity, like Stephen Strange’s confrontation of his doppelgängers, was a battle with his own self.  The story is a set of concentric circles: Eternity embodies the harmony between the human and the universe; Dr. Strange must learn about himself to understand the universe better; Eternity must fight himself (the Ancient One) in order to decide the fate of the earth.  This particular Dr. Strange storyline is designed like Eternity, collapsing the human and the cosmic into one. 

Though it is an unusually efficient summation of Englehart’s agenda for Doctor Strange, the end of the Eternity plot manages to be both familiar and novel.  Certainly, there is nothing new in Stephen’s confrontation with a cosmic abstraction followed by a post-game conversation with the Ancient One.  But where previously the lessons involved a fundamental advancement in Strange’s own consciousness, this time, the springboard for future stories is that Strange is the only thing that has not changed. Under Nightmare’s influence, Eternity destroyed the world (Issue 13 is even titled “Planet Earth Is No More!”)  Eternity will not undo the past, he agrees to “re-create the planet Earth,” from its earliest days up to the moment before its destruction:

“Now, it continues…without Mordo, without Death. It continues as the first Earth would…

“…for it is in all respects identical.

“No mortal knows of his first self’s demise—to them, there is still but one reality.”

"’Everything?' breathes Dr. Strange 'Everything is the same?””

“‘Everything!' rumbles Eternity. 

“…with one exception!

“I left no second Dr. Strange!”

After a brief crossover with Tomb of Dracula (Dr. Strange 14/Tomb of Dracula 44, in which Stephen Strange yet again dies and comes back to life), issues 15 and 16 deal with the fallout of the earth’s destruction and recreation.  Strange cannot forget that everything around him is a recreation:

“Everything is the same, and yet different! I cannot tell it is different—it looks and feels the same—

“But I know! I know so much that other men could never even suspect—and I worried before—

“—that I had opened myself too much!

“What sort of victory did I win, when Eternity re-created the world?

“I knew reality was an illusion, but to be reminded every moment, by everything I see—!

“The mind of man needs the illusion! I—“ (Doctor Strange 15)

Stephen is interrupted by Clea’s appearance, which is, in turn, a reminder that she herself is a recreation unaware of her strange ontological status. At first, Stephen cannot bring himself to tell Clea the truth; instead, he confesses to a pair of (older, male) magicians who had been staying at his house.  Even they have difficulty accepting that they are not “originals” (“I recall my life clearly—my childhood—“_ Their consternation allows Strange to regain some of his composure:

“What is memory, anyway? Yesterday’s reality is no more tangible—

“—than last night’s dream!

“Gentlemen, I fear for my sanity!”

“Then, Doctor, you have done the right thing in telling us—for sanity in its practical application is shared reality!  Keeping this to yourself only worsens the crisis!”

“But even you were shaken!  How can I tell those less advanced?

“How can I tell Clea?”

“The question, doctor, is how can you not?”

Predictably, Clea does, in fact, fall to pieces at the news (to be fair to Englehart, Strange paves the way with observations about her vulnerability to the news that are not based on her sex: “But though she was born to magic, she still has had little formal training! The concept could still be too much—“).  But her breakdown, combined with the intervention of a suicidal heroin addict whom Strange gave shelter earlier in the issue, literally drags Strange and Clea down to hell, to do battle with Satan himself.

After a series of torments, Strange manages to free himself and Clea not through power, but through a triumph of will, concentration, and self-discipline.  He essentially ignores Satan, refusing to grant him a foothold in his psyche (or, as Strange’s magician friends had put it, refusing to make Satan part of his “shared reality”).  On the last page of issue 16, Stephen explains to Clea that he had been vulnerable to Satan because of “having [his] self-confidence shattered when [he] failed to save the world!”  But Doctor Strange has now realized that “I was the one who insisted on seeing everything darkly, even when the world rolled on as bright as ever!”  From the moment of his return to his Sanctum Sanctorum after Eternity’s recreation of Earth, Strange had been hesitant, self-absorbed, and brooding.  Yes, he fought Satan, but the storyline, complete with Strange’s regaining of his former confidence, was the metaphorical rendition of Stephen Strange’s battle with depression.

Clea, too, has learned from her time in hell; in the following issue, she resolves to get on with her life: “Your example in defying Satan showed me the folly of such negative thinking. / The revelation of my death and resurrection was a shock, to be sure—but in the final analysis, I still exist! That is what matters.”

The battle with Satan is followed by one more (incomplete) storyline before Englehart’s abrupt departure, but by this point, the writer has already not just stated the comic’s thesis, but restated it several times:  enlightenment is a rite of passage as iterative process, involving revelation and disillusionment that inevitably require the hero’s return to his previous existence, changed by the experience yet obliged to reincorporate with the reality he had (temporarily) left behind.    Though Englehart never overtly gestures in the direction, Stephen Strange, with one foot in the mundane and one in the divine, could just as easily be Earth’s Shaman Supreme as Sorcerer Supreme.  

Earlier I called this approach “deconstructive” because it necessitates a dual consciousness unafflicteed by cognitive dissonance. The hero knows that his everyday reality is contingent, and that the insights he has achieved reveal the limitations of conventional understanding; but he is obliged nonetheless to live within that reality even after his enlightenment. This is no easy task, even for the Sorcerer Supreme; hence his very human bout of depression after the world has been destroyed and recreated.  Unlike the comic book heroes who achieve godhood and leave Earth behind (including some characters penned by Englehart himself), Dr. Strange must both transcend and remain.