The Forgotten and Undying Ones, Part 5: Dr. Strange and Spider-Man

One of the best easter eggs in the Dr. Strange movie is a Spider-Man reference (essentially, indirectly, if you fudge it a little), and one of the first superheroes to be mentioned by name in a Spider-Man movie is Dr. Strange, but Dr. Strange and Spider-Man have been crossing over since early in their mutual existence despite significant superficial dissimilarities. This is because they were both created by Steve Ditko, and putting them together is a nod to Ditko’s two greatest creations. In Spider-Man 2, Ted Raimi’s character briefly considers “Dr. Strange” as a name for Dr. Octopus, just a trivial throw away joke, but the more significant Spider-Man easter egg in the Dr. Strange movie comes in the form of the Wand of Watoomb, Wong’s weapon of choice in the final battle, which first appeared in Spider-Man Annual #2 in 1964. The oldest floppy issue of Dr. Strange I own is a reprint of this story under the Dr. Strange title that came out in 1969. It’s also the Dr. Strange floppy I spent the most for: a whopping $5. One of the greatest things about Dr. Strange is that most of his comics are very cheap. You can get some real masterpieces for a buck, and this classic was a steal for five bucks. This first meeting between the two great sons of Ditko sets the pattern for many meetings to come, most of which involve the Wand of Watoomb and Xandu as the villain.

The story itself is a standard maguffin quest for the Wand of Watoomb which enhances the wielder’s power, yadda yadda yadda, standard Dr. Strange business. As a Doc fan, you encounter a lot of magical maguffins and spells and deities, and part of the delight of hardcore Doc fandom is keeping track of all the functions of magical objects/spells/deities. For example, Watoomb is a weather deity (a member of a group of eight gods called the Octessence, and his horned head looks a little like the face on the wand), and the Winds of Watoomb spell can teleport Doc across the universe. However, part of the convenience of the repeated appearance of the Wand of Watoomb in Doc/Spider-Man crossovers is the relative simplicity of its function as merely a maguffin with no necessary foreknowledge of Octessence mythology for Spider-Man fans who have read about this wand gimmick just as many times as Doc fans. Xandu is a forgettable wizardy villain – which, in a way, is a shame since the much larger pool of Spider-Man fans don’t get a better version of a similar villain (like Mordo or Kaluu), but the whole thing seems to be designed to make Spider-Man look strong and Doc look relatively weak, so having the villain be weak/dumb/bland/generic and having the action center on a magic-endowing object instead of great power and skill (as with other wizardy villains), Spider-Man can more easily have a hand in defeating him. Doc gets knocked out a little too early in this story, and Spider-Man holds off Xandu solo a little too long for me, as a Doc fan, to buy into it. If this were a wrestling match, you’d say Doc put Spider-Man over strong, but it’s such a massive power disparity it seems a little ridiculous, like the Undertaker tagging with Rey Mysterio to fight the Acolytes and letting little Rey do most of the fighting. The booking is silly, but it’s a fun match up nonetheless. Dr. Strange stories shouldn’t be fun and funny (if you ask me, at least, though it seems to be the mandate of the Cinematic Universe that everybody sounds like Tony Stark), but Doc’s chemistry with Spider-Man marks the rare occasion when humor really does work for the character.

Most of their later encounters follow this same basic pattern with a few exceptions: Xandu or the Wand of Watoomb or some combination; Doc getting beaten or weakened a little too easily; and Spidey looking stronger than he should against a magical foe. This goes through a shared miniseries called The Way to Dusty Death (1992), written by longtime Dr. Strange writer Roy Thomas (who loved to continuously yoke Shakespeare and Dr. Strange since his first run in the sixties), where Xandu tries to use the Wand of Watoomb to resurrect a dead love interest, Melinda Morrison, the queen of the Death Dimension (but no relation to Mistress Death or her realm – which is just gratuitously confusing). Then a year later, in the early days of Secret Defenders (scripted again by Roy Thomas), a title premised on Dr. Strange calling together a ragtag team to tackle a special obstacle only they can tackle, Doc once again teams up with Spider-Man but adds two Avengers: Captain America and Scarlet Witch (his favorite Avenger which I’ll get around to discussing later). This time they battle an army of zombies…and also Xandu who has the Wand of Watoomb who is, again, dealing with his Death Dimension girlfriend (and, again, the chapter titles are Shakespeare references). Sure, Xandu is a little bland, but it’s fascinating to have the epic story of one character spread across so many different titles, a character who seems to show up only when two particular characters get together but never in any other circumstances.

Dr. Strange has shown up without Xandu on various occasions as a cameo in Spider-Man comics and occasionally in bigger crossovers, but rarely are they noteworthy interactions, and some of them are notoriously bad (as in various sloppy deus ex machina appearances like “One More Day” and in Brian Michael Bendis’ post-Civil War New Avengers run which utilizes Doc more heavily than Spider-Man but in a cringingly tone deaf way). It makes me appreciate the mediocre Xandu even more in comparison.

Doc fares even worse (if that’s possible) in his cameos in the Ultimate Spider-Man cartoon though Doc’s first animated appearance in Spider-Man: The Animated Series from the 90s is certainly better than his Ultimate appearances since it is the most respectful of the source material. Mercifully, Xandu is replaced by legit archenemies Mordo and Dormammu. A half hour cameo doesn’t quite cover the epic scope a Mordo/Dormammu story deserves, but it gives hints of what a bigger, longer, source-accurate cartoon might be (the animated Dr. Strange movie they put out years later has different issues I’ll discuss later). In contrast, Doc’s appearances in the Ultimate Spider-Man cartoon have basically zero interest in source material accuracy. For example, Spidey destroys the otherwise indestructible Mindless Ones by shooting webs at them – or whatever – even though the whole point of the existence of the Mindless Ones is that they’re indestructible. They’re so powerful even Dormammu is terrified by them. By that rationale, Spidey could defeat Dormammu by shooting webs at him – or whatever – and Doc’s existence becomes mildly pointless. Doc also gives Spidey the Cloak of Levitation and the Eye of Agamotto, and despite having zero training, Spidey just knows how to use them because, you know, writers have to write things sometimes. Dr. Strange had to train for years and didn’t even get the Cloak and Eye, the mantles of the station of the Sorcerer Supreme, for a couple dozen issues in the original Strange Tales run (one of the pacing problems in the movie is that the years of training get compressed into a montage, and Doc falls bass ackward into his two most important magical objects instead of earning them), but because we’re watching a Spider-Man cartoon, he can just automatically use them. Why? Because it’s kinda cool looking but doesn’t matter to anybody except the tiny and unimportant fan population who cares more about Doc than Spidey.

But I’m not complaining. The fact that these two characters keep crossing over is a monument to their only real connection, Steve Ditko. The fact that both of their costumes still look essentially like the Ditko original highlights Ditko’s costume design genius. I think Ditko gets so much more credit for Doc because of the creative freedom and visual richness of Doc’s extradimensional travel compared to Spidey’s repetitive and limited cityscapes. To see the rich creativity Ditko is capable of in designing whole worlds helps a reader appreciate the rich creativity packed into even a single webby costume.