With this post, we come to the regrettably untimely end of writer Steve Englehart’s run on Doctor Strange.  But before we get into DS #18’s “The Dream Is Dead!”, we’ll first need to take a look at the previous issue, which presented the first installment of what was originally planned to be an ambitious, multi-part story arc organized around the American Bicentennial; and since the ultimately truncated storyline’s conclusion (such as it was) occurred in the following, Englehart-less #19, we’re going to be covering that one here today as well.  All of that’s to let you know that, well, we may be here for a while. 

Doctor Strange #17 leads off with a cover by the title’s regular artistic tram of Gene Colan (penciller) and Tom Palmer (inker) — one that intrigues with its hints (conveyed through both the Merlin-type wizard’s dialogue and the Elizabethan-style outfits worn by the two men assaulting Dr. Strange and his lover/protégé, Clea) that we’re about to be doing a bit of time-traveling, but doesn’t really tip us off to the full scope of what Englehart, Colan, and Palmer were embarking on with this issue… which was nothing more or less than a journey through “The Occult History of America”.

Decades later, in his 2013 introduction to Marvel Masterworks — Doctor Strange, Vol. 6, Englehart briefly outlined his intentions for what was to have been his “next epic”:

We had come out of 1975 into 1976, and 1976 was a big deal because it marked America’s bicentennial.  As it happens, there are a lot of mystical elements to the birth of America, and I proposed to wander through the best of them in these next four issues, which would come out in May, June, July, and August.

Before such wanderin’ could commence, however, there was one loose end from the past two issues’ storyline that needed to be wrapped up: namely, the fate of would-be sorcerer James Mandarin, whose shenanigans had resulted in getting not only himself, but Doc and Clea, imprisoned in Hell.  We’d seen the latter two escape Satan’s clutches and return to Earth in issue #16’s climax, but weren’t shown what had happened to Mandarin until the splash page of #17… where we find him being chased down a dark alley by the Sorcerer Supreme himself…

Unfortunately for Mandarin, his frantic flight leads him right to Clea…

Clea is of course referring to the fact that she, along with everyone else on Earth with the exception of Dr. Strange, was destroyed back in issue #12 and then recreated in #13, with no memory of any of it.  Her distress at learning this truth had figured into her and Doc’s temporary imprisonment in Hell, and so he now frets that she’s beginning to brood about it again; Clea, however, assures him that she’s put the whole business behind her.  Before they can discuss the topic further, the couple’s attention is diverted to another matter — namely, the imminent departure of Rama Kaliph and Lord Phyffe, two mystical adepts who had shown up to offer Dr. Strange their support against his enemies Umar and Dormammu back in issue #9, and had been his house guests ever since.

Unfortunately, Steve Englehart would no longer be writing Doctor Strange “in but a few short months“, so his plans for Lord Phyffe would never come to fruition; a few years later, however, he shared the gist of his intentions in an interview published in Comics Feature #5 (Sep., 1980):

What I wanted to do with Lord Phyffe was basically, hundreds of years before, the Phyffe family was cursed and the curse would affect the tenth generation.  Lord Phyffe was the ninth generation until the world was destroyed [by Eternity] and everybody was replaced.  Then he realized that he was the tenth and he was going back to England.  I would have done a British demon story.

Eventually, one of Englehart’s successors on Doctor Strange, Chris Claremont, came up with his own, different resolution to the Phyffe mystery — and since there’s at least a chance that I’ll be posting about that storyline come 2030, I’m going to avoid getting into the details now.  (Though, if you’re really keen to know, the Appendix to the Handbook of the Marvel Universe has got you covered right here.)

Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was of course a real-life English philosopher, author, and statesman, perhaps best remembered in standard academic history as one of the founders of the modern scientific method (though the Baconian theory of Shakespearean authorship is also a thing).  That said, much has been written over the years about Bacon’s possible involvement in secret, occult-oriented societies such as the Freemasons and Rosicrucians, and that’s obviously the kind of material Steve Englehart is drawing on here.

Your humble blogger is by no means an expert on this stuff; still, I have to confess that, based on the little I’ve actually read concerning these theories, I’m pretty skeptical concerning many of their claims.  But regardless of these ideas’ historical validity, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t serve as an inspiration for entertaining fantasy fiction; or, at least, that’s my view.

As they take leave of Sir Francis, Clea mentally signals Stephen concerning her (quite justifiable) frustration at lacking the context to understand the preceding conversation.  He puts her off until they’re outside, and then…

“The College of the Six Days’ Work”, aka “Salomon’s House” does indeed appear in Francis Bacon’s work of utopian fiction New Atlantis — but the phrase’s meaning basically amounts to “the College of the Natural World” (the “Six Days’ Work” being a reference to the Biblical account of God having created the world in six days), so one questions whether it really needs to be framed in the context of “western mysticism” as Stephen Strange (and Steve Englehart) do here.  Allowing for the fact that, for many 17th century thinkers, the distinctions between mysticism and science were probably less pronounced than they are for us today, Bacon’s imaginary institution can be understood at least as well in terms of conventional scientific study as in those of the mystic arts; as Wikipedia puts it, “Salomon’s House is credited with being the standard upon which 17th century scientific academies, including the French Académie des Sciences and the English Royal Society, are based.^“

Later, at the appointed time of 9:00, Strange and Clea arrive at Sir Francis’ mansion.  There, after some brief mental probing by their host and the other members of his “literary society”, the couple is deemed to have passed muster.  “My companions and I feel we may trust thee, Mister Strange,” announces Bacon.  “There be far more to thee than thou hast yet related.  Now, I shall speak freely!”

I don’t think there’s any direct historical connection between Nostradamus (1503-1566) and Francis Bacon, but hey, as long as we’re doing an “Occult History of America” here, why not include the famous alleged prophet’s alleged prophecy of the rise of the United States?

And as long as we’ve paused here, it’s worth noting that the concept espoused here by Bacon and his friends (and evidently endorsed by Dr. Strange) — that the “new world” of the Americas represents “virgin soil” ripe for well-meaning Europeans to build their personal idea of a utopian society, rather than a couple of continents already inhabited by a vast indigenous population with societies and cultures of their own — hasn’t aged very well at all in the last half century.

Bacon’s New Atlantis was indeed presented as being “A Worke unfinished” when it was published after his death. But the idea that he’d actually written the “second half” of it, as opposed to just having intended to do so — let alone the notion that copies of that second half might still be floating around — seems to be purely speculative.

To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time we’ve had someone other than either Stephen Strange or his immediate predecessor, the Ancient One, identified as having (maybe) been Earth’s Sorcerer Supreme in times past; for all we’d been told prior to this moment, the Ancient One might have held the title for hundreds, even thousands of years.

History does record that Francis Bacon played a role in England’s “colonization effort” in the Americas — though it seems to have been mostly limited to Virginia and Newfoundland (and of course the latter ultimately became part of Canada, rather than the U.S.).  So it seems a bit of stretch to posit that he hand-picked most of the early settlers of all thirteen original colonies, let alone that he chose them according to  their suitability for building his “New Atlantis”.  But who’s to say how things went down on Marvel-Earth, as opposed to our own?

We come now to June, 1976, and to the second chapter of Englehart’s planned four-part Bicentennial saga.  Doctor Strange #18’s cover by Gene Colan and Al Milgrom is one of my very favorite DS covers from this era, so if you didn’t take a good look at it before, I encourage you to scroll up and do so at this time.  And now, on to the book’s splash page:

In his Marvel Masterworks intro, Englehart noted that his sudden decision to quit working for Marvel (see our Avengers #150 post for the details) came in between his plotting DS #18 and his scripting of it:

…when I sat down to dialogue this issue before I went out the door, I titled it “The Dream Is Dead!”, which pretty accurately described how I felt about it all.

To be more precise, Stephen and Clea have landed in the London on March, 1775 — just in time to board a ship sailing for America, on which the man they’ve come to see — Benjamin Franklin — is also a passenger.

As best as I’ve been able to determine, there’s been considerably less written about the supposed occult inclinations of Benjamin Franklin than those of Francis Bacon; most of it seems to boil down to the fact of his having been a Freemason (as were several other Founding Fathers, including George Washington), as well as a possible association with the real-world Hellfire Club when he was in England.  For my money, it’s a considerable leap from there to the claim that Franklin was (as Englehart puts it in his Masterworks intro) “a wizard”.  But, again, that’s not to say that the idea can’t make for intriguing fiction.

The ship sets sail without further incident, and at mealtime that evening, Dr. Strange and Clea take the opportunity to introduce themselves to the object of their interest…

Dr. Strange may admire Ben Franklin’s resolve, but he’s well aware of the danger posed by Stygyro, and so he and Clea proceed to “search this ship from stem to stern!”  Despite their best efforts, however, no sign of the evil magician can be found.

Stygyro disappears into thin air before Strange even reaches the deck, but the Sorcerer Supreme doesn’t believe for a moment that they’re out of danger; rather, he believes that their foe simply intends to kill all three of them at his leisure.  His dark thoughts are mentally picked up on by Clea…

Dr. Strange hurriedly casts a spell that keeps the ship from toppling over the watery cliff, then seals Clea and Franklin in the latter’s cabin for safety…

In the 1980 Comics Feature interview with Steve Englehart that I quoted from earlier, when asked what the reasoning was behind Clea having an affair with Benjamin Franklin, the writer responded:

Because Benjamin Franklin had affairs with everybody he could get his hands on.  It seemed like an interesting bit.  And Clea was always in the background.  After Dr. Strange met Death, I had Dr. Strange meet Love, with Mother Nature, Dormammu and Umar, and that’s where Doc and Clea really solidified themselves as more equals and as being solidly in love.  But Strange is basically a loner and Clea didn’t appear a whole lot during that series and I figured she would probably get antsy about it.  Plus the fact that, while Franklin is a pot bellied guy who’s balding, at the same time he succeeded at having affairs.  He must have been a real good womanizer.  He must have had something that would get all these women to go to bed with him.  So in that last issue, which was written after I had quit, I’m sure it looked a little abrupt that she would go to bed with this guy.  But if I had continued on the series,  I would have expanded on that.  Clea was a princess.  She’s not prepared to sit around and be the little wife while Strange is out doing what ever.  Where it would have gone,  I don’t know.

My younger self was quite startled by this scene fifty years ago — less, I think, because of Franklin’s behavior (thanks to my enthusiasm for the Broadway musical 1776, I was already well-used to the idea of the great polymath being a “ladies’ man”), and more for the simple fact of Clea’s infidelity; fifty years ago, it was unheard of for a superhero’s girlfriend to cheat.  Even then, however, I recognized that Englehart had carefully laid the groundwork for this development, having subtly depicted the growing tension between Clea and Stephen over multiple recent installments of the series.

Strange magically hurls the Stygyro-serpent’s fiery breath back at it, causing the creature to thrash about wildly in agony, so that it knocks down stone pillars that threaten to crush it as well as Strange…

With that next-to-last panel’s “Huh?“, Steve Englehart has written his last line of dialogue for Doctor Stephen Strange in this series.  Perhaps it’s fitting that Doc’s final, questioning word is an echo of one many of this feature’s readers have probably found themselves silently uttering from time to time during the author’s run.

In 1980, Englehart shared with the readers of Comics Feature a few details about where “The Occult History of America” was intended to go next:

To the night they signed the Declaration of Independence…  The trip was that there’s an occult legend that the night they all sat down to write the Declaration of Independence, a mysterious man in black showed up and told them what they needed to know and then vanished from a locked room.  Just a legend, but decent material for Dr. Strange, and so I created Stygyro.  The third episode would have been the night of July 4th: mystical battles while they’re writing the Declaration.  The fourth episode would have been coming back to 1976 and finding Stygyro still around.  The trip was that he was living off American patriotism: the energy involved in that was what he hooked onto as a vampire.  So he was still around two hundred years later because America did get formed.  It’s a power source, and he’s a vampire.

At the risk of prejudicing this blog’s readers concerning the next (and final) comic we’re about to look at today, I still wish we’d all gotten to read that conclusion to the story, rather than what was actually delivered to us in July, 1976.

Not that the cover of Doctor Strange #19 — another fine Colan job, this time inked by Klaus Janson — gave any indication of the major changes in store for us once we opened up to the splash page:

To begin with, we’d had a complete turnover the book’s creative team, with Englehart, Colan, and Tom Palmer being replaced by Marv Wolfman and Alfredo Alcala — two talented creators, to be sure, but ones that immediately brought a very different vibe to what we’d grown used to, especially on the visual end of things.  (As a side note: in addition to taking over as writer with this issue, former Marvel editor-in-chief Wolfman also resumed editorial duties on the title, following Archie Goodwin’s one-issue stand in #18).

And then there were these brand-new characters and concepts.  Who the hell was Xander?  Or the Creators?  And what in the name of Oshtur wass a “Quadriverse”?  Had we all missed an issue, or something?

As it turned out, “Lo, the Powers Changeth” was a continuation of the ongoing storyline — though we’d have to wait for over another full page’s worth of dialogue between Xander and the Creators before the focus shifted from them to the crystal globe — or “star-stone” — held in the former’s hand…

Dr. Strange’s reference to himself as being the only “true human” following Eternity’s recreation of the Earth suggests — to me, anyway — that Marv Wolfman didn’t completely understand what happened in that story.

We saw Stephen, Clea, and Ben set sail from London in March, 1775 in the previous issue; if it’s now early May, does that mean they’ve been hanging out together for over a month?  And that Clea has actually been canoodling (at the very least) with Stygyro this whole time?  That’s… not good.

Dr. Strange manages to arrest the second destruction of the Earth (two hundred years prior to the first) by causing time to stop in its tracks — a tremendously demanding task that takes a proportionally heavy toll…

While it’s good to learn that Clea has not been sleeping (or whatever) with Stygyro unawares for more than a month, the idea that the whole Clea/Franklin affair has been illusory doesn’t make much sense.  After all, Dr. Strange was fighting Stygyro at the bottom of the Atlantic during the couple’s shipboard assignation in issue #18, so how could that incident have been a “shadow play” in Strange’s own mind?  Best we not think about it too much, since Marv Wolfman obviously wants to wrap this whole business up and get on to other things.

Among the other things Wolfman is more interested are Xander and the Creators, so he and Alcala give us another page of them conversing before returning to the main narrative to wrap things up…*

It takes Strange the best of another page to completely blast away the skeletons, but at last the job is done… or so he thinks…

Fifty years ago, Doctor Strange #19 was one of the greatest disappointments I’d ever experienced as a comic-book reader — and it still ranks pretty high on my all-time list of such.  Marv Wolfman’s resolution to Steve Englehart’s storyline doesn’t stop at simply abruptly truncating Strange and Clea’s quest to discover America’s secret origin, or even at returning the couple’s romantic relationship to its normal setting; rather, by framing everything that’s happened for the last nine issues or so as a “test” by the Ancient One, and then having our hero stripped of his status as Sorcerer Supreme, Wolfman has essentially rewound things back to where they stood at the beginning of Englehart’s run — and by doing so, implicitly suggests that the whole direction of the series for the last three years has been some sort of mistake.

An editorial by Wolfman that appeared on #19’s letters page offered further confirmation of his intent to take a “back to basics” approach in writing Doctor Strange; it also brought the news that the book was returning to a bimonthly publication schedule:

I don’t recall exactly what my younger self made of “A Memo from Marv” back in 1976, but re-reading it in 2026, I have to say that it rankles me more than a tad.  The whole idea that sales had been suffering due to the series’ recent direction seems somewhat spurious, given that the title had only just gone monthly with Doctor Strange #14, published a mere five months earlier, and complete sales figures for the most recent issues wouldn’t have been available yet.  And what’s this about there not having been enough villains in Englehart’s stories?  Working backwards from #18, we’ve had Stygyro, Satan, Dracula, Nightmare, Baton Mordo, Eternity (not exactly a villain, but an adversary nonetheless), Dormammu, Umar… and now we’re all the way back to Silver Dagger, mentioned in Wolfman’s editorial.  What am I missing here?

For his own part, Steve Englehart seems to have accepted the situation with rather more equanimity that your humble blogger. In his Marvel Masterworks intro, he provided the following annotation for Doctor Strange #19:

Okay, my departure was abrupt, and so, too, was the need to replace me.  Marv Wolfman, possibly because he’d just written Doc in the Doc/Drac crossover, was called upon to pick up the pieces, and the book immediately reverted to bi-monthly status to cut him some slack.  Marv is a consummate pro, and he took everything that had happened, married it to his own idea of the series, and produced a solid “conclusion” to the epic.  Is it what I had in mind?  Not at all.  But comics writers take on books all the time with no idea what the previous writer had in mind; it’s the nature of the business, and part of being a pro.  Was one path better or worse?  The question’s irrelevant.

“Irrelevant”?  Well, maybe it is for Mr. Englehart; as an ordinary reader, I’ll reserve the right to have my own opinion on the matter.  And so, while I’m not petty enough to assert that the author should have sucked it up back in the spring of ’76 for the sake of us faithful fans, and stuck it out at Marvel for just long enough to wrap up his already-in-progress Doctor Strange storyline, I figure I’m entitled to still have regrets regarding the path not traveled.

Going forward, Doctor Strange would continue to be a regular purchase for my younger self — after all, its titular star was my second favorite Marvel hero (after Thor).  Still, the book would never quite be the same for me following Steve Englehart’s departure.  While any number of talented writers would follow him on the feature, few if any brought the same combination of comics storytelling skill and genuine interest in/knowledge of “occult” subject matter that had made his collaboration with both Frank Brunner and Gene Colan so special.  Yes, there were still plenty of great Dr. Strange stories ahead — but they’d depend more and more on the talents of their illustrators to bring the magical milieu bequeathed them by Steve Ditko and Stan Lee to vibrant visual life.

One such story — scripted by none other than Marv Wolfman, but co-plotted as well as drawn by P. Craig Russell — would in fact be coming up in just a few months.  Naturally, we’ll be taking a look at it in this space; so, please make plans to return in October for our exploration of Doctor Strange Annual #1.

 

*All these years later, I have absolutely no recollection of what happened in regards to Doc’s new antagonists in the next storyline.  I do plan to re-read those issues in the near future, but I’m in no hurry — and in any case, I won’t be posting about them.  So, if you’re curious to see what Xander’s whole deal was, I will once again happily refer you to the Appendix to the Handbook of the Marvel Universe for the lowdown.