By James Lovegrove (MARVEL)
ISBN: 978-1-8033-6257-1 (HB/Digital edition/Audio book)
Modern Marvel is a multimedia entertainment colossus but all those multitudinous branches and subdivisions ultimately derive from stories in comic books. Thanks to recent on-screen exposure, ultimate Marvel outsider Stephen Strange is now a popular hot property, which no doubt inspired this prose reinterpretation based on his founding exploits as originally detailed by Steve Ditko and Stan Lee…
Marvel’s sustained presence on non-graphic bookshelves really began in the 1990s with a string of hardback novels. Since then, those who want to supply their own pictures to MU exploits have basked in a procession of text-based thrills in all book formats. Of late, Titan Books has been supplying powerhouse prose publications and here addresses the interests of fans brought in by the recent movies as well as those lifelong devotees of the ever-enlarging continuity who can’t bear to miss a single instance of their fave raves.
Written by British author/designer/illustrator James Lovegrove (Hope, Redlaw, Age of Odin, The Clouded World, Untied Kingdom, Pantheon series, Firefly), Dimension War takes Ditko & Lee’s early episodic exploits of the “Master of Black Magic”: tweaking and shuffling them into one cohesive story arc detailing the coming of the mage and his accession to the role of Sorcerer Supreme.
By downplaying more esoteric episodes – such as battling Asgardian god Loki and stealing Thor’s hammer, rescuing Queen Cleopatra, banishing a sentient predatory house, evicting body-stealing aliens, battling decadence demon Tiborro and saving human burglars from enslavement in the Purple Dimension – the author delineates and extrapolates an intriguing ongoing war from Strange’s frequent clashes with rival student Baron Karl Mordo.
The origin is included and expanded upon as morally bankrupt, crippled superstar surgeon Dr. Stephen Strange finds new purpose after losing everything he thought mattered. By saving aged Tibetan mystic The Ancient One from his ambitious murderous disciple Mordo Strange dedicates himself to become a magical adept: resolved to save humanity from diabolical and extradimensional threats.
Focussing on the many battles with dream demon Nightmare, implacable Mordo and his extradimensional tyrant god patron Dread Dormammu as well as the start of a prolonged but doomed romance with beguiling alien witch-with-a secret Clea, the saga traces a far hipper and less aloof mage than most comics fans will be used to: one who tirelessly strives to keep Earth safe and frustrate demonic schemes of monsters consumed by avarice and arrogance and who ultimately learn there’s always someone bigger and stronger and that pride invariably goes before a great fall…
Reprocessing material from Strange Tales #110, 111 and 114-146, spanning July 1963 to July 1966, as an added treat, the epic ends in an epilogue as first seen in pictures in Amazing Spider-Man Annual #2 (October 1965). There and then the Good Doctor first fully entered the glamourous, bright and shiny superhero universe, joining the wondrous wallcrawler to defeat thieving wizard Xandu who ensorcelled thugs to make invulnerable zombies and purloined the terrifying Wand of Watoomb…
Slick and fast paced at the cost of much of the mood of the comics, the tale will certainly please movie converts and apostles, and should you wish to see the way it all began and unfolded in pictorial terms, the basis for all this arcane armageddon action can be found in Doctor Strange Epic Collection volume 1 (1963-1966): Master of the Mystic Arts.
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