Great stories. Just fantastic. All interview-time joking aside, my kids just ate these up. My wife, too. (There's a reason she chose Dr. Strange for the book to hold in her avatar pic…) And they absolutely insisted that we read the second half of this story immediately after finishing the first, so I've presented the commentaries to both parts here as a single unit. Actually, that's how I first read them myself back in the Fireside "Bring on the Bad Guys" TPB in the 1970s.

Up till now the series has been a little hit-or-miss (though more often the former than the latter). With these issues, Ditko crystallized his vision. In fact, when I think "Dr. Strange", this two-parter is what I picture. Like VisualFiction said, a real "tour de force." (And yes, I'm sooo glad Ditko got to ink his own pencils here!) If not as sweeping as the extended Mordo/Dormammu/Eternity arc that will occupy the bulk of Ditko's final tenure on the series, 126/127 might pack a bit more punch (and my wife thought this story has a better resolution, too, but we'll get to that comparison in about a dozen issue or so…)

I've really enjoyed the posts about these issues over the past two months, too. Maybe the best extended Marathon discussion yet. I liked VF's observation that Strange had only visited two other realms before--Nightmare and Purple Veil (had never noticed that!), and I totally bought into profh0011's theory that the initial story's were created entirely by Ditko "on spec", but then Stan "recast" them a la the Ronald Colman film Lost Horizon. Does anyone have the Blake Bell biography of Ditko? Does Bell mention whether the original stories were done by Ditko on his own?

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