Storytime Comics wrote:

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?

According to Ditko in an essay in Robin Snyder's The Comics, Ditko brought the first story to Stan on his own, as a new idea that could be used as a back up. Lee put it in Strange Tales, thus the name Dr. Strange. Ditko says he drew the first complete story and provided panel/page descriptions on a seperate paper as a rough outline for Stan (Ditko never wrote margin notes on the original art). Stan then wrote the dialougue. Ditko may have plotted the first few stories, but Stan provided some of the early plots. Ditko mentions Lee's ideas as Haunted House, Aliens and Loki. Ditko also claims Stan was having problems coming up with ideas for the strip and was going to cancel it, but Ditko told him he could make it work and should plot and ink. This probably occured with ST # 126, the stories you are discussing. The strip went full gear at this point and Lee should be commended for letting Ditko do the strip his way, with Stan providng complementary dialogue throughout the run.

Nick C.