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Today, in honor of their pairing being a prominent aspect of Spider-Man: No Way Home’s newest trailer, let’s take a look at the first time that Spider-Man and Doctor Strange teamed up together in the comics.
In “When We First Met”, we spotlight the various characters, phrases, objects or events that eventually became notable parts of comic lore, like the first time someone said, “Avengers Assemble!” or the first appearance of Batman’s giant penny or the first appearance of Alfred Pennyworth or the first time Spider-Man’s face was shown half-Spidey/half-Peter. Stuff like that.
The trailer for Spider-Man: No Way Home shows Steve Ditko’s two most prominent creations teaming up together and all heck breaking loose as a result. I thought it would be interesting, then, to go back to see how the two Ditko creations first met in the comics.
Something that I’ve discussed a few times recently with regards to the early days of Marvel Comics is that when there was no internet and there were few collections of old comic books, one of the steadiest ways for comic book companies to make money was to sell reprints of their classic comic books. Back issues obviously existed in the 1960s, but they were very hard to find unless you just happened to live near a place that sold them. So comic book companies would take advantage of the fact to do special reprint issues to let fans revisit classic stories. These would be known as Annuals. They sold very well for DC Comics, who had decades of Batman and Superman comic books to choose from for these Annuals, making them a cheap and easy way to make some big money. Comic books fans in the 1960s were a lot less interested in the concept of “continuity,” they just wanted cool stories featuring their heroes, so if you could pick out some of the best comics of the past, that was an easy sell.
The problem for Marvel in the 1960s, though, is that they did not yet really have enough material to warrant doing an annual filled with reprints right away, so Marvel came up with an alternative approach. When the company started doing annuals, the original annuals would be filled with MAJOR stories. The first three Fantastic Four Annuals were Atlantis declaring war on the surface world and invading New York, the origin of Doctor Doom and the wedding of Mister Fantastic and the Invisible Girl (all three of which landed on the list of our recent 60 Greatest Fantastic Four Stories Ever Told countdown).
For the Amazing Spider-Man Annuals, the first one pitted Spider-Man against six of his greatest enemies all teaming together to take on the webhead.
For the second annual, Ditko decided to finally team Spider-Man up with Ditko’s OTHER most notable creation at Marvel, Doctor Strange!
Unlike Spider-Man, who Ditko developed with Stan Lee, Ditko came up with the initial five-page Doctor Strange story all by himself and brought it to Lee to see if he would be interested in running the story in one of Marvel’s anthologies. Lee liked it and since he planned on using it in Strange Tales, they came up with the name Strange for the magician character, although there was some initial debate over whether he should be a Mister or a Doctor. Lee wrote into the Comics Reader in early 1963 to promote the new character in strange fashion, “Well, we have a new character in the works for Strange Tales, just a 5-page filler named Dr. Strange. Steve Ditko is gonna draw him. It has sort of a black magic theme. The first story is nothing great, but perhaps we can make something of him. ‘Twas Steve’s idea. I figured we’d give it a chance, although again, we had to rush the first one too much. Little sidelight: Originally, we decided to call him Mr. Strange, but thought the ‘Mr.’ was a bit too similar to Mr. Fantastic — Now, however, I remember we had a villain called Dr. Strange just recently in one of our mags. I hope it won’t be too confusing!”
As a lesser character appearing in an anthology where he barely even appeared on the cover of the series, Ditko had a lot more freedom to craft Doctor Strange’s world in Strange Tales than he did on Amazing Spider-Man, which, as Marvel’s top-selling book, had a lot more micro-managing involved in it. By early 1965, Ditko was so irritated by it all that he insisted that he and Lee just not talk during the production of the comic book. Ditko would just produce the comic pages, hand them to Sol Brodsky with extensive notes as to what was going in in the comic and Lee would script those pages without talking to Ditko. Marvel publisher Martin Goodman would still make Ditko make changes at times, and Lee, as well, but it would all be communicated through Brodsky. It was soon after this period began that Ditko wrote the lead story for the second Amazing Spider-Man Annual, where Ditko’s two creations would finally meet.
Interestingly, Doctor Strange DID appear in Amazing Spider-Man Annual #1 (one of the shticks of the issue is that Ditko worked all of the comic book heroes who were appearing in their own comic books at the time into the story, but all in the background of the tale), but he and Spider-Man do not meet. Flash Thompson just runs through Strange’s Astral form…
In Amazing Spider-Man Annual #2 (which finally did have reprints in it, after Ditko and Lee’s 20-page lead story), the villainous Xandu has one half of the powerful Wand of Watoomb. He hypnotizes two thugs and gives them super-strength and has them beat up Doctor Strange and steal Strange’s half of the wand. Spider-Man sees them leaving Strange’s home and he tails them, thinking that they are burglars. When he arrives at Xandu’s home, Xandu has combined the wand and now had a great deal of power. Spider-Man, knocked the wand out of his hand and when Xandu sent Spider-Man into another dimension, Spidey took the wand with him, allowing Ditko to draw the wonderfully psychedelic magical landscapes that he is so beloved for…
Since Xandu was now without the wand, a now awake Doctor Strange went to go take him down. Strange was winning the fight handedly when Xandu then brought Spider-Man back from the other dimension just in time, distracting Strange and getting a hold of the wand again. Strange was forced to give up his own body and work as an astral figure…
Strange then used his astral form to enlist Spider-Man’s help again and when Strange got back into his body, the two heroes took Xandu down together…
In the end, Strange vowed that Spider-Man had made a powerful friendship that day and the two have been close superhero friends ever since…
If anyone else has a suggestion for/question about a notable comic book first, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!
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