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Can I be honest? My Christian faith has always meant that I was nervous when dealing with the various "magic" based characters in comics, and in my younger more legalistic days I avoided Marvel's leading Mage - Doctor Strange like the plague. However, we are looking at The Defenders and Strange is the pivotal character in that team.

Dr. Stephen Strange is a character, like so many of the Silver Age, from the mind of Stan Lee, but in this case not the pencil of Jack Kirby. Like Spider-man, this Lee creation was from the pencil of Steve Ditko, but unlike Spider-man, I like very much the way Ditko draws him.

In this top picture, you see what may be one of the best ideas, and images from Marvel, ever. Dormannu, arch-nemesis of Strange, has conjured the personification of Eternity himself and now does battle with that entity. This is one of those comic images that has stuck with me for decades - the idea of personifying eternity itself is mind-blowing and I think Ditko dreamed up just how he should look.

As I have grow older I have read more of this and other magical characters, but they still make me nervous. I have; however, grown to love the imagery produced with those characters.
Strange's "Cloak of Levitation" makes a marvelous visual element in almost any panel, and in the mystical realms the character so often inhabits, it can billow about with effect that has only ever been achieved elsewhere by some Batman artists.

Dr. Stephen Strange was a renowned surgeon, who in a fit of pique lost the use of his hands for surgery; becoming a stumblebum drunk who went on a pilgammage to seek enlightenment and at the top of the Himalaya's was trained by his Master, along with he ho would become Dormannu as the "Sorceror Supreme." It was when this title was bestowed upon Strange over Dormannu that Dormannu finally lost it altogher and "turned to the dark side" gaining his flaming head.

But never have I liked the character better than as he is depicted here from the Neil Gaiman written miniseries 1602. These stories find the Marvel stable of characters emerging not in the 20th Century, but in the 17th and 18th, in Elizabethan England. In this setting Strange seems not the mage out of place that he does in modern times, but seems instead to simply belong as both his powers and those of say Charles Xavier seems equally mysterious, yet acceptable. While his garb in the series lacks the visual impact of his original, so was true for all the Marvel characters, there simply was no spandex then.

But it is in The Defenders that Strange has been most frequently enjoyable to me. In part because of the relationships he has had with so many characters in that series, and in part because the nemesis of the team have been less directly mystical, making the stories more accessible to me.

Of recent years, Strange has been reduced to something of a "mystical consultant" called in by other heroes on an as needed basis. I have come to have a fondness for the character that makes me want to reinvent him somehow so he can again stand on his own in the comicverse. Magical characters today are so dark, that Strange is actually refreshing.

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