Doctor Strange, Sorcerer Supreme

Doctor Strange
Doctor Strange #177 (February 1969), the debut of Strange's short-lived new look. Cover art by Gene Colan and Tom Palmer
Publication information
Publisher	Marvel Comics
Format	Ongoing series
Genre	Superhero
Main character(s)	Doctor Strange

Doctor Strange is the name of several comic book titles featuring the character Doctor Strange and published by Marvel Comics, beginning with the original Doctor Strange comic book series which debuted in 1968.

The original Strange Tales series ended with issue #168 (May 1968). The following month, Doctor Strange's adventures continued in the full-length Doctor Strange #169, with Nick Fury moving to the newly launched Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Expanded to 20 pages per issue, the Doctor Strange solo series ran 15 issues, #169-183 (June 1968 – November 1969), continuing the numbering of Strange Tales. Thomas wrote the run of new stories, joined after the first three issues by the art team of penciler Gene Colan and inker Tom Palmer through the end. Colan drastically altered the look of the series, as Thomas recounted: "…he had his own view of what these other worlds should look like. Everyone else sort of copied Ditko's versions of those extra dimensions, which were great and wonderful. When Gene came on, he didn't feel a real rapport with that, I guess, so his extra dimensions tended to be just blackness and smoke and things of that sort… Sometimes it was a little strange for a dimension Doc Strange had been to before to look different when drawn by Gene, but nobody complained." Thomas recalled in 2000 that he returned to work a day late from a weekend comic book convention to find that Marvel production manager Sol Brodsky had assigned Doctor Strange to writer Archie Goodwin, newly ensconced at Marvel and writing Iron Man. Thomas convinced Brodsky to allow him to continue writing the title. "I got very possessive about Doctor Strange," Thomas recalled. "It wasn't a huge seller, but [by the time it was canceled] we were selling the low 40 percent range of more than 400,000 print run, so it was actually selling a couple hundred thousand copies [but] at the time you needed to sell even more."