DOCUMENT

UFD030 Tristan Garcia

Dr Strange: A Hero of the Mind

By the Hoary Hosts of Hoggoth, true believers! Tristan
Garcia dons his cloak of levitation and enters the dazzling
world of the Master of the Mystic Arts to tell the strangest
tale of all, as Steve Ditko’s greatest creation confronts the
outer limits of the comic form itself

Of all the great characters invented by Stan Lee,

Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko at the dawn of Marvel’s
Silver Age, Doctor Strange has always garnered the
URBANOMIC / DOCUMENTS

least attention. Perhaps the recent movie adap-

URBANOMIC.COM
tation will alter the fortunes of the ‘Master of the
Mystic Arts’, and we will see children playing with
action figures of the sorceror draped in his red lev-
itation cloak, battling his arch-enemies Dormammu
and Mordo. Yet this seems an unlikely prospect.
Firstly, because the Doctor is a superhero of the
shadows—not, like Batman, a brash footsoldier of
the dark side of the world and of the heart of men,
but an educated man whose weapon is the mind,
and who inhabits the primitive faultlines of modern
life, where reality is just one illusion among others;
and secondly, because the Doctor is a pure creature
of the comic medium.1
***

Like all the great superheros of the comic art form,

the Doctor is a startling amalgam of the archaic
and the contemporary. In his case we have a sort
of magic formula, a bizarre equation, linking oriental
esotericism to the most uptight Western rationality,
but also to the animism of Greenwich Village (where
the Doctor lives) and finally to the colonial imaginary of the romantic hero who stands apart from those
of the pulps and the unbridled psychedelicism of six- whom he saves, the original Doctor never chose to
ties counterculture. be famous. His work was destined to remain un-
known, or to be immediately forgotten. In one of the
Like Osamu Tezuka’s Black Jack, with whom he rare jokes to feature in the original series, in Strange
shares the long cape and various characteristics Tales #129 the Doctor is invited to take part in a tel-
evised debate with a group of scientists, but refuses
1. Originally published in L. de Sutter (ed.), Vies et morts des
super-héros (Paris: PUF, 2016).
1
 planet Mongo, and Mandrake the Magician hidden
Doctor Strange is a startling amalgam away in his ultra-technological mansion of Xanadu.
of the archaic and the contemporary Little by little, the great Western hero has ceased to
fear and battle against the ‘Yellow Peril’, instead pur-
to participate. Midway through the broadcast, the suing oriental spirituality and realising the prediction
studio is suddenly plunged into darkness, and the of Schopenhauer, who saw in Europe’s discovery of
four hardline rationalists, who were determined to the Upanishads, of Brahmanism, of the Vedanta and
mock the supposed existence of black magic and the Buddhist texts, the intellectual equivalent of the
to ridicule Doctor Strange, disappear without trace. Renaissance’s rediscovery of the great works of an-
cient Greece. On the thresh-
old of the counterculture and
the hippy movement, Doctor
Strange is also the precursor
of Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey,
the acid test, the work of San
Francisco’s Big Five poster
artists for the Grateful Dead
at Fillmore, the covers for J.G.
Ballard’s speculative fiction
painted by Richard M. Powers,
the sonic epics of Hawkwind,
URBANOMIC / DOCUMENTS

and Western popular culture’s

URBANOMIC.COM
The Doctor is summoned—the four professors exploration of the thousand forgotten continents of
have been imprisoned by ‘Tiboro, the Tyrant of the the psyche. He is quite precisely the missing link be-
Sixth Dimension’. The ‘Master of the Mystic Arts’ tween the outdated, exoticist strand of spirituality
saves them from the clutches of this
redoubtable enemy come from else-
where. Upon returning to our world,
the overwhelmed scientists prepare
to reveal the truth to the public; but
Strange, with a single gesture, makes
them lose all memory of the events.
Thus they return to the studio to mock
the irrational and the charlatan Doctor,
under the somewhat ironic gaze of
the Master of Black Magic who, alone,
knows—yet draws from his knowledge
neither glory nor a sense of superiority.

And there we have the Doctor: a man

who treats reality as one treats an
oversized, yet still unconscious infant.
A man who, at odds the most obtuse brand of reason, that emanates from the colonised Orient, and six-
shelters this reality from the absolutely irrational with ties youth’s stupefying discovery of what was hid-
the indirect weapons of a noble and learned unrea- den behind the doors of perception that had been
son: in this case, magic learnt from beyond the West. kept firmly shut by modernity, but were reopened by
psychotropics, meditation, and ‘spiritual disciplines’.
First appearing in the pages of Strange Tales in
1964, the Doctor is the distant heir to the world From this point of view Strange is perhaps the first
of Fu Manchu, the adventures of Flash Gordon on postcolonial superhero, the first who taught the

2
 youth to ‘provincialise the West’, to paraphrase A new hero figure for whom the Orient
Dipresh Chakrabarty’s slogan.
is not the Other of reality, but the West
Xanadu, Shangri-La, and Psychedelia: a mere province of that reality
A Decolonising Hero
in stereotypes here, in the fixed and recycled imag-
This will be our first working hypothesis. es of popular literature. And yet, little by little, Doctor
Strange will bring these faded images to life, trans-
In Strange Tales #115, we learn of the Doctor’s ori- form them, and invent a new hero figure for whom
gins. As his title already suggests, he is an eminent the Orient is not the Other of reality, but the West a
representative of Western science; but he is also mere province of that reality.
a caricature of it. Wealthy, haughty, and calculat-
ing, Stephen Strange is a playboy with a fine Errol
Flynn-style moustache, who, lighting up a cigarette
following an successful operation, refuses to speak
to the patient who wants to thank him: ‘I can’t be
bothered! Just be sure he pays his bill!’, he snaps
to the young nurse. But the Doctor is punished for
his hubris: he drinks too much and loses control of
his vehicle. In the resulting accident, he partly los-
es the use of his hands and can no longer operate.
URBANOMIC / DOCUMENTS

Handicapped, Stephen Strange cannot accept be-

URBANOMIC.COM
coming good for nothing. ‘I must be the best…the
greatest!! Or else…Nothing!’ Alas for him, Strange is
now nothing more than a useless surgeon, a mere The former surgeon’s initiation is as classic as can
aimless worker of the West. Disoriented, he drifts be. In the first stage, Strange asks the Ancient One
through the rainy streets of the modern world, wan- for instrumental teachings: he wishes to regain the
dering onto the docks of a port city where he hears use of his hands through the powerful spirit of the
talk of The Ancient One, a sorceror who can cure old sage. But he quickly learns his lesson. In the
anything. Stephen Strange takes off for the East, popular culture of the second half of the twentieth
leaving for the Himalayas. Not the real Himalayas, century, it is the same lesson that will be dispensed
but the Tibet dreamt of by poets and travellers, the by Master Po to Kwai Chang Chan (‘Grasshopper’)
region where Coleridge sited Xanadu, the ‘stately in Kung Fu, and by Master Yoda to Luke Skywalker
pleasure-dome’ of Kubla Khan, inspired by the sum- in Star Wars: that of the impatience of the white
mer palace of Shangdu as described by Marco Polo; man who does not recognise that material causality
and subsequently—since all distant things tend to prevents him from seeing and mastering the force,
slide from reality into fantasy, and from fantasy into which opens up a far broader world.
cliché—the region where the English popular im-
agery of the colonial era would place Shangri-La. Strange comes out of this experience a changed
Perched among the inaccessible heights of Tibet, man. He has not lost his arrogance; but he has
this lamasery is in a certain sense late orientalism’s turned his desire away from what Western society
‘Land of Cockaigne’: an verdant isle of fresh water, has to offer, in order to discover, as his power grows,
a utopia of the spirituality that had heretofore been a world that is vaster than reality. In the Orient he
prohibited in the Enlightenment West, the West of has learnt magic and penetrated into unknown uni-
industry and reason. In the lands of ‘the Orient as verses. From this point of view, he is not so different
the Other, invented by Europe’ studied by Edward to Tony Stark, the arms dealer who, in Vietnam with
Saïd, Stephen Strange seeks The Ancient One, a Professor Yinsen, sees the error of his irresponsi-
paternal monklike figure who has attained enlight- ble ways, and goes on to transform himself into Iron
enment and will be able to set the white man on the Man. Stan Lee loves to tell us how men become
road to an authentic life. Of course, we are dealing heroes by changing the object of their desire, while

3
 remaining the same person. Strange does not learn evocations of a Reader’s Digest theosophy.2 By
to become modest, but he discovers that the world virtue of Stan Lee’s ragtag culture, he in fact lives
that his science, his intelligence, and his money in a disorderly assemblage of phantasms compiled
opened up to him was but a tiny part of all that ex- for the busy Western reader, a compendium of all
ists. He learns that the West is not the world—and non-Western spiritual traditions.
all because he loses the use of his hands.
Guardian of the frontier which, within pop culture,
Having vanquished Baron Mordo, the evil disciple of separates the West from the fascinating jumble (to
the Ancient One, Strange in some sense ‘converts’ Western eyes) of all the rest, Doctor Strange watch-
to the Orient. And yet the series very quickly ceases es over the province of the ‘real world’. But in whose
to be orientalist. Once the lesson has been assimilat- name? If Strange seeks to decolonise the occidental
ed, the Master of the Mystic Arts returns to America, imaginary, thenm why does he continue to protect
and discovers that it is only one dimension among supposedly ‘modern reality’ from a sort of exotic
others of all possible dreams, nightmares, strange- chaos that presses at its doors?
nesses. Back in his homeland Strange becomes a
chimerical silhouette of a sorceror, recognisable by Rereading the issues on which Lee and Ditko closely
his moustache, his salt-and-pepper beard, his blue collaborated in the sixties, the reader cannot help
(and later red, horned) cape. From within the ‘civi- asking: Who is the Doctor fighting for? What is his
lised world’ he keeps watch over other worlds, the cause, his homeland? Who are his companions?
multiple dimensions of the spirit, parallel universes, Later, of course, he will found the Defenders, along
the obscure counterparts of that rationalised reali- with the Hulk, Namor, and Silver Surfer—three
URBANOMIC / DOCUMENTS

ty modern man has ended up taking for everything more archaic, mystic, and solitary creatures, lost in

URBANOMIC.COM
there is. the modern world. However, throughout the period
mentioned above, the Doctor is still a Marvel hapax,
Strange enters gradually into a turbu- who is not included in the original Avengers, and who
only comes across Thor and Loki once. This version
lent syncretic world traversed by
of the Doctor is not straightforwardly depicted as a
pagan formulae dispenser of justice, a defender of America, of the
human race, or of the earth. When he meets Clea, a
Taking up residence, at the end of the ‘cycle of young woman from another dimension whose world
Eternity’, in the ‘Santum sanctorum’, Strange mas- is pincered between the ‘Mindless Ones’ and the
ters the powers revealed to him by the Tibetan tyrannical power of fiery-faced Dormammu, the
Ancient One, but also those to which magical ob- Doctor naturally takes the side of the young wom-
jects such as his amulet of the Eye of Agamotto an, in the traditional style of all pulp heroes whose
grant him access. The Orient was only the first de- sense of justice is indexed to the desire to save the
tour to be taken in order to accede to all that is not damsel in distress. Nevertheless, Strange never ex-
of the Christian faith, Enlightenment reason, positiv- plains the reasons for his combat. Is he a paradoxical
ist order and progress, and the civilisation defended guardian of the West, making use of the weapons
by colonisation. Strange enters gradually into a tur- of the Orient? He lives in New York, but remains
bulent syncretic world traversed by pagan formulae, far from the skyscrapers, between the walls of a
incantations, creatures Babylonian (Marduk, previ- Greenwich Village manor in the antique district. Is he
ous owner of the ‘book of Vishanti’ possessed by a solitary mystic who protects materialist civilisation,
the Doctor) and Sumerian (the Hosts of Hoggoth), with which he has broken and for which he can feel
and by the gods of ancient Egypt and Vedic cul- only disgust?
ture (as seen in the beautiful graphic novel of the
70s, Into Shambala); a world of Buddhist and Sufi In truth, and contrary to the other creations of Marvel
wisdom, of characters displaced from Arab-Muslim who remain meticulously anchored in contemporary
culture (the servant Hamir), of Jungian archetypes,
of astral projection, of extraterrestrial magicians, 2. Only some of the influences catalogued by Jeffrey J. Kripal in
Mutants and Mystics: Science-fiction, Superhero Comics and
of Swedenborgian hallucinations and the fevered the Paranormal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

4
 urban reality, Doctor Strange is a desdichado who to cut up piece by piece, so as to give form to things;
mixes very little with his peers. He seems diligent- and to let flows, variations, and the intensitites of
ly to avoid the commercial streets of the financial colours and forms proliferate, all the way to the limit
district. One might search his adventures in vain for of the indistinct.
the steel-and-glass fetishes of modernity, the sky-
line of New York, advertising and mass media (with Outline, Cut-out, and a Catalogue Raisonné of
the exception, that is, of the adventure cited above, the Formless: A Hero of Perception
in #129). His enemies are not the mafiosi and thugs
who haunt the dark backstreets of the city protect-
ed by the Avengers. Doctor Strange’s world some-
times features haunted houses and wax museums;
yet it is not explicitly gothic. Nor is his arena that of
the cherished adolescents of the consumer society,
the protagonists of Spiderman and X-Men. In ad-
dition, we note the absence of Marvel’s usual mad
scientist’s laboratories. Here there is little technolo-
gy, not the least trace of a family life, and no sign of
American everyday existence.

In short, in the original baroque, psychedelic adven-

tures of the Doctor, it is difficult to find any counter-
URBANOMIC / DOCUMENTS

point to the hallucinated worlds into which a deliri-

URBANOMIC.COM
ous Orient has initiated him. From this perspective, the superficial opposition be-
tween Occident and Orient is a mere pretext that
Where, then, in Doctor Strange, do we find the rea- sets the stage for a more profound conflict, not only
son that would oppose the mystical, the ineffable, cultural and historical but ontological, which had al-
the pure power and unquantifiable energies of the ways haunted Steve Ditko’s work.
spirit? Where do we find the West?
For as long as Ditko drew it, the world of Doctor
The reason of Dr Strange is the line; Strange was the theatre of a flamboyant conflict be-
tween form and the formless. Now, in comics one al-
not so much the West as the
ways finds a double articulation, which is not the tra-
comic itself ditional one of language: firstly, outlined forms within
the image, which appear and reappear from panel to
Nowhere else, we believe, than in the spirit of his panel; and then the forms that cut out the image itself,
creator, Steve Ditko, and in the hand of this mas- framing and distinguishing one portion of space-time
ter draftsman. The reason of Dr Strange is the line; from another. Every comic is an articulation between
it is the contours of the firmly outlined figures and what we might call a cutting-out [découpage] (the line
the meticulous cutting-up of the layouts; it is the ‘from outside’ which delimits a panel) and an outlining
permanent activity of this cutting-up, image by im- [découpe] (the line ‘from inside’ which gives us the
age, of the world. It is not so much the West as the contour of figures, objects, and ground). The outline
comic itself. gives us characters and scenes, the line of the draw-
ing. The cut-out gives us the frame of the drawing.
This will be our second hypothesis: not only is the
Doctor a point of contact between the phantasms The outlining and cutting-out of Doctor Strange are
of the Occident and the Orient, he is a pure exercise highly classical: we are not yet in the realm of Neal
in drawing. A challenge to the very possibility of rep- Adams’s X-Men. The panels are always organised
resentation. Under cover of colonial and postcolonial into regular grids. The inking, and the colouring in
clichés, Doctor Strange articulates the struggle be- flat tones, also respond to an outlining of figures by
tween the two drives that inhabit every draftsman: a firm line. The world is in good order.

5
 And yet the world drawn
and contained within this
twofold limit (within the
panels, and then with-
in the line) is something
like a catalogue raison-
né of the formless. We
might say that Ditko and
Lee sought to catalogue
all possible modes of ap-
pearance of the formless,
the malleable, the vague,
the almost, precisely so as
to feel out the very solidity
of the comic’s system of
outlining and cutting-out,
and the reason that lies
behind them.

For what the Doctor

ceaselessly confronts, or
URBANOMIC / DOCUMENTS

rather attempts to mas-

URBANOMIC.COM
ter, is the power of the
formless.

Through the increasingly crazy adventures of the

***
Doctor, this power takes on the aspect of hallucinat-
ed landscapes, which to sixties readers constituted Let’s clarify our hypothesis: it is as a draftsman, a
irrefutable proof that the Marvel authors were writ- comic artist trying to test the limits of the cutting-up
ing and drawing under the influence of prohibited of things by the line, that Ditko, almost by chance,
substances. The anecdote is well known: many hip- ended up creating figures that evoked hallucina-
pies used pages from Doctor Strange to accompany tions, figures that challenged the usual cutting-up
their trips, certain that Ditko’s images were a faithful of visual perception.
representation of LSD experiences. But Ditko was a
man of extreme moral and intellectual rectitude, who Why was Doctor Strange liable to be read as the re-
had doubtless never touched the drugs popular with sult of psychotropic visions? Because Dr Strange’s
the counterculture. Remember how Robert Heinlein, images endlessly tested the cutting-up of the draw-
who dedicated Starship Troopers ‘to all sergeants ing. It’s not that Ditko makes abstract art, or lyri-
everywhere who have labored to make men out cal expressionism. He continues to work within the
of boys’, became the idol of every American freak strict framework of the double articulation of the
by writing, despite himself, Stranger in a Strange comic: panels distinct one from another, in which
Land, a book which describes the ‘sharing of water’ recognisable forms are repeated, ‘silhouetted’ by a
by a sort of Martian Christ. This Christian sharing line. The line can be seen as the representative, in
became a symbol of communion for thousands of the image, of the structures of human perception.
stoned hippies. Similarly, Steve Ditko inadvertently If perception’s cutting-up of the environment into
created a faithful image of psychedelic experience, apparently stable entities is thrown into question by
even though he was a sober admirer of Ayn Rand, psychotropic experience, then the analogy is quite
a voluntarist who admired only the force of thought, valid: in Strange the very borders of things, within
and who despised the sloppiness of the long-haired each image, are continually on the point of giving
hippies. way, even while they remain in place.

6
 whose silhouette is never clear very often indicates
In Strange the very borders of things, the irruption of a force foreign to reality. We might
within each image, are continually on think in particular of the ‘Vapors of Valtorr’ in #115
the point of giving way, even while they and #125.
remain in place

What Ditko’s drawing represents, therefore, is the

least determinate, the least distinct depiction pos-
sible while continuing to use firm lines to create a
succession of images—the minimal forms of the
formless.

***

Let’s run through some of Ditko’s visual repertoire.

Of course, there are the recurrent devices of the Sometimes the fog is confused with a quasi-liquid
comic artist. For instance, he frequently employs a form. In the zones of turbulence between sublimation,
confusion between the infinitely small and the in- condensation, and deposition, when the nature of
matter in transformation
URBANOMIC / DOCUMENTS

is uncertain, the read-

URBANOMIC.COM
er cannot tell exactly in
what state (solid, liquid,
or gaseous) are the violet,
red, or yellow forms that
spread around Strange, or
towards what state they
are moving. The fog be-
comes in one case a sort
of scintillating foam, ‘a
mystic glow’ of embed-
ded abstract forms, of
abstract circles and ara-
finitely large: spirals that recall the strands of DNA besques. Is this still matter, or mere geometry? We
or crystalline structures submerged in vast galactic cannot tell. This is what interests Ditko: to represent,
panoramas. But these effects of scale are not the
most original of his devices. What grabs the atten-
tion when Ditko’s pen is at work is his talent for things
that are vague, blurry, and visually disconcerting. He
experiments with the faculty which, from Kant to
Gestalt Theory, distinguishes form and ground and
establishes that, in order to identify an entity, one
must cut it up in space and time, thus rendering it
separable from its environment. On the contrary, in
his scenes Ditko seeks out the possibilities of the al-
most perceptual, those which allow one to confuse
in front and behind, under and over, end and begin-
ning. Every effort is made to render the perception
of forms possible, yet uncertain. Thus a fog or mist

7
 to distinguish things from panel to panel, Ditko never
For Ditko and Lee, minimal determina- yields to the ‘cosmic soup’: he continues to outline
tion is also maximal force everything that presents itself to his mind. We have
to represent light? Well then, we will have to use a
with a line, the border that separates indistinction few lines organised in a ray pattern, so as to figure
and the minimal determination of an identity. Why? it, to outline it. Even the absolute has need of some
Because, for Ditko and Lee, minimal determination is form. Of course, Ditko, who draws every day, does
also maximal force. not always quite manage to be original. How many
times do we find, floating in a sort of acidulous red,
We might state this as follows: the more, the better yellow, or violet ether, those aberrant reticulations,
it is outlined, clear and distinct, the less powerful it is. those anamorphic grids that Ditko uses and abuses?
Inversely, the more powerful it is, the less it is clearly His vocabulary is sometimes limited. And too often
outlined. It may be gaseous, or it may be fiery like the landscape of the mind ends up being arrayed
Dormammu’s face, a permanent inferno in which according to a well-known vocabulary, that invented
we cannot make out his facial features but only the by surrealism in painting; in Ditko’s visions we can
approximate shadows of eyes and a mouth behind make out reminders of the dream representations of
the haze of the endless combustion of his own face. Dalì, Delvaux, and de Chirico. But then a few panels
Now, Dormammu is very powerful. Why? Because later we will find something original: halves or thirds
his face is at the limits of distinction: it ceaselessly of objects traversed by passageways that lead no-
goes up in smoke. where, truncated staircases. In the corners of the
great surrealist landscapes he draws, the delimita-
URBANOMIC / DOCUMENTS

tion of things seems incomplete. On one side, we

URBANOMIC.COM
seem to guess at the beginning of an object. But
we cannot manage to make it out either because
it is missing a dimension, or because it is set into a
paradoxical Escher-like perspective. This is a weird
universe of aborted entities. Everything begins as
almost what it is—but it never ends up being com-
pletely something.

This is the tension that governs all the illustrations in

Strange: to represent confusion clearly, but without
annulling it. Without a line there is no longer anything,
the panel is empty. But as soon as there is a line,
something is distinguished, and loses in power. We
sense how Ditko’s rationalist, well-ordered spirit is
drawn to a sort of primordial fusion, a kind of Greek
apeiron inaccessible to sensibility yet which would
explain all to the intellect. Sometimes the read-
er hopes to lose himself with the same straitlaced We can then understand that the power of the
dignity as the Doctor when he loses himself in the worlds visited by Strange is also the Greek dynamis.
‘mystic gaze of infinity’, drawn in by the multitude of If matter is pure power and pure indetermination in
stars, blurry, blank, auratic forms that are scattered Aristotle, the worlds of Strange are worlds of almost
across the strip: ‘Every emotion I possess is drawing pure power, which test out the capacity of rep-
me toward that shimmering light at the end of this resentation to be engulfed by indetermination. Ditko
fantastic corridor!’ And yet, restricted by the need peoples the environment with entities that have

8
 But in the last pages drawn by Ditko, Strange’s
quest suddenly makes sense. In what remains one
of the greatest narratives arcs of Marvel, the Master
of the Mystic Arts learns, in #134, that the last word
murmured by the Ancient One before he fell into a
deep coma was: ‘Eternity’. ‘What, eternity?’, to re-
peat Rimbaud’s words. But here the question be-
comes instead: Who? In search of Eternity, in #138
Strange ends up penetrating into the ultimate world,
the world of all worlds. And here Ditko touches on
the endgame of his internal conflict as a draftsman.
This is ‘a world that defies description’—a phrase
that sums up marvelously the intention of the au-
thors: to defy description, but within the most con-
ventional limits of representation (the outline and
cutting-out of the comic).

begun to appear as actualities, but which remain At this point a great monstrosity appears: the entire
partly potential. We might think of half-sculpted clay world, cracking and distorting, comes back togeth-
forms which emerge from the earth but remain still er and takes on a form. ‘It is an actual universe…in
attached to it, and thus retain the capacity to be- microcosm! A world within a world!’ In other words,
URBANOMIC / DOCUMENTS

come almost anything whatsoever. the form of all things—the world—receives in its

URBANOMIC.COM

turn a form, becomes an object. This gives us the

*** key to all of Doctor Strange, which is summed up
In the course of his early adventures, Strange wan- in the phrase: ‘It is assuming a form!’ This ‘it’ which
ders from dimension to dimension as we, the read- assumes a form is Strange’s obsession. This object
ers, follow him from panel to panel. With him we has the contours of a man, or almost. It is the sil-
watch, from birth to extinction, forms at the limits of houette of a giant, adorned with flourishes and sinu-
the formless. But there is no totality of these forms, osities like the flagella of insects. Inside it the entire
no overall design. The idea remains unfinished. universe is held, figured by an inky interstellar black-
ness within which a thousand galaxies shine.

9
 The limits touched on by Ditko are the
limits of his art
It is supposed to be ‘eternity’ incarnate. But in truth
the response is more disappointing: the form of
everything that Ditko had drawn—and he knows
it—is the comic. The limits touched on by Ditko are
the limits of his art: the cutting-out of panels. And
Eternity is like a gigantic comic panel in human form,
one that contains the entire universe.

On Disruption and Continuous Creation:

A Hero of Comics

Let’s push our investigation a little further: Of what

is Strange really the hero? Is he the hero of the
limits of perception in general, or only the limits of
the comic?

At this point of our inquiry, we can guess how, in the

URBANOMIC / DOCUMENTS

tortured mind of Ditko, the structure of the comic

URBANOMIC.COM
ended up fusing with the structure of the cosmos:
the cutting-out of images, that which takes place
between images, gives us the general form of the
Man is in the universe, which endows him with form; world. It is the transcendental. Now, the comic fig-
and the universe is in man, who endows it with form ures an essentially discontinuous world: namely, a
in return. serial assemblage of portions of space-time, gener-
ally called panels. The very principle of the comic is
Strange has done battle with the absolutely form- to repeat the world as many times as necessary in
less, using every power at his disposal; but he has order to tell its story. Each time, the world is framed,
always done so within the conventional framework and we see only one aspect of it—one image. And
of the cut-out. This has remained the framework of then another. Strange does not go beyond the com-
the world of all the worlds he has traversed, that of ic: he is imprisoned in a world made up of a series of
the ultimate form common to all things. Suddenly, cells which never communicate immediately.
like a gnostic, he discovers that the cosmos has a
human form. He is confronted with that which en- From one image to another, the reader’s eye must,
dows form: with man, with himself, with what he like the hand of the draftsman, pass over an abyss of
thought he was going to escape, but into which nothingness which separates the world from its reit-
everything has entered. eration under a different aspect. But now this white
abyss which surrounds the whole image-world of
Shortly after this, Ditko would stop drawing Strange. the comic has passed into the panel itself: here is
He had understood. It seems that the author, to- Eternity, the transcendental, the between-panels in
gether with his hero, had reached the endpoint of human form.
his quest: to face up to his desire for the formless
that lies at the limit of the distinct and the indistinct, In Ditko’s visions, this white which separates one
to represent chaos in what is most evanescent, to panel from the next is a fathomless gulf, a thin strip
the point of exhausting the resources afforded by of nothingness which in fact separates one moment
moving from panel to panel with pen, ink, and paper; from another. Every comic recounts, from differ-
and then discovering the form of all that is. ence to difference, the adventure of an identity:

10
 introduction, between two blocs, of a little uncross-
Every comic recounts, from able nothingness, which prevents causality from
difference to difference, the adventure absolutely linking one moment to the next, which
of an identity breaks the chain of being, blocks the dreamt-of flux
of becoming. It is that which makes it so that the
world is first of all composed of solitary outlines.
a character, most often. In any case, a recognisable Obviously, they may communicate with one another,
silhouette. What is given in the comic is pure differ- and we can go from one to the other; but nothing
ence: the gap between one state of the world and guarantees the continuous existence of what was
another, separated either by a movement in space there nor what will be there a little further down
or by the passage of a little time. The work of the the page.
comic consists in constructing a minimum of identi-
ty capable of traversing all the differences. And this This world figured by the comic, a world cut up into
identity in transit makes up the story. blocs, could well be mistaken for that of Cartesian
‘continuous creation’, the most radical conception
In Doctor Strange, Ditko and Lee figured their own of an ontology cut-out part by part. That which
adventure as artists who, working within a popu- the comic is the image of, continuous creation is
lar artform, attained the limits of that artform. For, the concept of. The expression does not occur in
childishly, they desired the formless, pure power, the Descartes himself, although the theme appears in
flux of unlimited becoming—which they perhaps his letter to Hyperaspsiste of August 1641, in the
identified with some sort of gimcrack Orient, kick- Discourse, and in the Pensées, where ‘concursu dei’
URBANOMIC / DOCUMENTS

ing against their modern education and their rea- is discussed. Spinoza reprised the concept, trans-

URBANOMIC.COM
son’s cutting-up of the world. But they could only lating the term as ‘creatione continua’ during the
desire and figure this absolute within the frame of course of his exchanges with Blyenbergh. By ‘con-
the piece by piece cut-outs of their comic, which tinuous creation’ we understand the representation
imposed upon them an absoutely discontinuous of a world where that which exists could not subsist
conception of the world. without being maintained by the creative activity of
God. At every instant, I must be recreated by God,
Most of the time, the world in the comic is stable extirpated from the nothingness into which I dwin-
from one image to another: it does not change, or dle, just as I was created the first time: having been
it changes only enough to permit the action to take created does not exempt one from having to be
place. But in Doctor Strange, as was already the created once again, unflaggingly, in order to persist
case in Flash Gordon and Blake et Mortimer (cer- through time. Time separates and destroys: every
tainly the only Franco-Belgian equivalent of these creature can be supposed a priori to be annihilated
‘disruptive’ comics), in each panel the world threat- by its passage through time; the exercise of a supe-
ens to transform radically, to become entirely other. rior power is necessary in order to maintain it. This
And it is this that torments Ditko’s character. This conception, of course, supposes a discontinuous
is what he confronts: sudden fractures of worlds. cutting-up of time, in which every moment is sepa-
There is no a priori principle of continuity of being rated from the preceding moment and the following
in the comic. The landscape of one panel has no one by a gulf of non-being that no thing is powerful
reason to be carried over into the next: it could per- enough to cross, to cause itself, and to persist: it
fectly well be different. Now, if everything were to takes as much power to continue to be as it does for
become radically other from one image to the next, something to appear in the first place, since every
it would be impossible to identify a minimal identi- thing is entirely new, at every instant.
ty from panel to panel, the order of images would
therefore collapse, and the comic with it: there The best possible image of ‘continuous creation’ is
would no longer be a world whose tale could be told. the comic. And this is what Doctor Strange ulti-
mately reveals to the thoughtful reader. The world
Let us say that it is this radical disruption that the must be tirelessly redrawn, re-viewed and re-read,
Doctor battles against. Radical disruption is the so that each time is like the first, even when it forms

11
 most singular heroism of Doctor Strange. Not only
The best possible image of ‘continuous is he the one who ‘provincialises the Occident’, even
creation’ is the comic while defending the existence of this province of
the world. It’s true, he accedes to a superior world,
one of a succession of moments. All images are greater, more immense, a world of which scientific,
ceaselessly doomed to disappearance, and to give technical, and rational reality is but a part. He is also
birth to one does not exempt one from having to the great psychedelic master who liberates ordinary
continually rebirth it in perpetuity. For this reason, perception from its constraints, who treats halluci-
to recreate is as important as to create, to re-read natory entities as objects of lucid sensation. And he
as important as to read, to re-view as important as is the hero of the comic, who discovers that a sys-
to see for the first time, to redraw as important as tem of cut-out images brings about disruptions, in-
to draw. For without this repetition, unsupported terruptions by nothingness through which the hand
images would of themselves collapse, in a universe of the draftsman and the eye of the reader must
where each occurrence of a being is separated from always transit, undergoing the stupefying experi-
its reiteration by a void. ence of a universe that must remain stable in order
to remain readable, but which might, at any instant,
*** become entirely other. He is the guide who teach-
es the amateur of comics to transit from one panel
Doctor Strange is none other than the cosmic met- to another as from one dimension to another. He is
aphor of this discontinuous world that the comic the great explorer who discovers that the world of
supposes: states of space-time which follow one continuous creation is that of which the contempo-
URBANOMIC / DOCUMENTS

another but which are radically disjoint—a world rary comic is both the purest and the most childish

URBANOMIC.COM
where everything must be recreated and sustained. image.

This is why Strange is a marginal within the Marvel But Doctor Strange is not only the hero of a
pantheon. Of all the paper heroes, Dr Strange is self-conscious form of the comic. He does not live
the one who truly lives in the world of the comic. in the pleasant but somewhat vain metaphor of a
And the Doctor travels through dimensions just as vast comic. He belongs to a world beyond panels,
he travels from panel to panel. He transits via noth- layouts, and paper.
ingness, coming out of one world and into another,
without knowing what—rules, laws, forms or fig- This world, which always mattered to Steve Ditko,
ures—will be conserved in the process of passage. the most cerebral of all draftsmen, is that of thought.
Just as Eternity is the entire universe finally con-
Doctor Strange is the waking nightmare of the com- tained within the silhouette of a man, Strange is a
ic, as it discovers that it is founded on the reiteration paper hero contained in panels, themselves con-
of the world by a system of cutting-up, a system tained within the (tormented) brain of Steve Ditko.
that affords it no certainty as to the permanence of
the being of things. Certain readers of Ditko have long remarked on the
importance, in his drawing, of faces and hands: for
The Hand and the Brain: A Hero of Thought him, all humanity is concentrated in the face and in
the folds of the hands. Throughout his life, from the
But this is neither sufficient nor entirely satisfying. short stories published in Creepy to the conceptual
characters of Mr A and The Question, Ditko tried to
Strange is not the hero of a purely formalist work, put his brain into his hands.
of a comic that would be the mise en abyme of it-
self. When he fears, when he marvels, the Doctor is Now, before setting out to meet the Ancient One,
facing something other than his own condition as a the surgeon Stephen Strange is indeed a man of
character in a comic-book world. hands, a technician who does not believe in the
power of thought. He has heard tell of men who
We must therefore deliver a final hypothesis on the had ‘such powers’—but he lives, and lives well, in

12
 the material reality that his hands provide for him.
Perhaps Steve Ditko considered himself, also, to
be a man of the hands, a draftsman rather than a
cynical surgeon, who tried to think with his fingers:
for drawing opened up to Ditko a concrete universe
of abstract thought, one that Stephen Strange was
only able to envisage after having lost the use of
his hands, when he became destitute. This world,
which can be envisaged if one thinks about it, is a
world in which there appears everything that is pos-
sible, one where the constraints of reality no longer
prohibit the formless from taking on a minimal form,
one where the determination of things is so weak
that a luxuriant ontological jungle springs up. It is
what David Lewis called the ‘Philosophers’ Paradise’.

By way of a phantasm of oriental philosophy,

Strange discovers the existence of the possible, and of a more vast ensemble. Just as Eternity reveals
of all-possibility through thought, which distances itself to him as a ‘world within a world’, Strange is
one from the real and from the hands. And then initiated into the fundamental form of thought by
Strange tries to plunge into this Paradise, or this Hell, comprehending that which comprehends him, by
URBANOMIC / DOCUMENTS

without losing himself in it. making his own world part of a vaster totality. For

URBANOMIC.COM
this reason, his career as ‘Master of Black Magic’
Drawing opened up to Ditko a concrete is the illustration of an initiatory voyage upon which
universe of abstract thought, one anyone who starts to think has embarked, whatev-
er their discipline, their school, or their references.
where the determination of things is so
First he enters into dreams, nightmares, representa-
weak that a luxuriant ontological tions of men, into their images— and he does not
jungle springs up see them only as illusions or as the cognitive ef-
fects of creatures embedded in material reality, he
The naïve fable recounted in Strange’s origin story also considers them as products of the independ-
does indeed indicate that one may live without ever ent thoughts of those who think them, ceaselessly
penetrating into the world of thought. One may de- threatening to encompass and swallow up the sub-
cide to exist as a real being in the real, or indeed to jects of which they are the mere creations. This is
believe in a revealed truth. It is possible, it is even what Strange is confronted with: the autonomisa-
probable, that one will live better under condition of tion of the products of thought. At this stage, one
reality, or of some belief. But Strange discovers that, can become a materialist or realist, taking the side of
like biting into the fruit of knowledge, when you en- that which truly exists, of that which exists as prima-
ter into thought, you will never get out again. From ry. In which case one must fight, in thought, against
the point of view of thought, the ordinary reality of the thought that invents its own fantasies. But then
men can no longer figure as anything other than one one loses the sense of the strange, the evil spell of
region among others; it can never more pass for the thought. And let’s not forget that Strange is a hero
integral whole of what exists. Impossible to take the of black magic. Resolutely antimaterialist and antire-
West, science, technique, matter, for all that there is alist, the Doctor Strange of 1964–1965 is perhaps
—even if, perhaps, like Strange, we start out believ- Lee and Ditko’s philosophical masterpiece: a vertig-
ing that it is. Once he started to think, thanks to the inous plunge into the world of independent thought
Ancient One and the detour via the Orient, Strange detached from those who think. For to think is—in
learned to treat what seemed to him to be the to- spite of the efforts of all idealisms and all realisms—
tality—all that he believed was absolutely the world, to necessarily accord as much reality to thought as
outside of which nothing existed—as but a tiny part to reality, no more and no less: once in the realm of

13
 thought, the one who thinks cannot but treat the is born, and on the other the imaginary worlds to
entities of perception, dreams and nightmares, vi- which thought flies.
sions, hallucinations, images, and thought itself, as
characters just as worthy of being as their effective The Doctor’s obsession is always the
and material conditions of production. Or else one definitive victory of the formless over
betrays thought. form; being swallowed up by the pure
power of unbridled thought, the power
And the Doctor does not.
of dreams and nightmares
Matter, the real, and reason do not vanish into irra-
tionalism, but become possibilities among others. For Perpetually between two worlds, Strange is some-
the watcher of the universal night, Doctor Strange, times fatigued. Who knows him? Who celebrates
all that remains is to defend reality as if it were his him? He is not a public man. At the beginning of
homeland, against a threat posed particularly by #122, he sleeps, exhausted. And above all, at the end
Dormammu, a tyrant from another dimension who of #141, the last issue drawn by Ditko, the Doctor
ceaselessly oversteps the frontier of worlds. What speaks a monologue in the dark: ‘my limbs grow
threat? That the real and reason should disappear weary! Too long have I been without rest––without
entirely, destroyed by the very products of an im- sleep––! The time is come to shut my eyes––to
agination that has become autonomous and deliri- seek respite in the shadow world of dreams! Then,
ous. The Doctor’s obsession is always the definitive when I awake—I shall begin the struggle anew!’ In
victory of the form- this speech with its
URBANOMIC / DOCUMENTS

less over form; being Shakespearian ac-

URBANOMIC.COM
swallowed up by the cents, Strange is
pure power of un- tempted by the eter-
bridled thought, the nal sleep. But once
power of dreams again, for him the
and nightmares, the night’s repose will be
enfants terribles of one full of thoughts:
the mind, of that the Nervalian ac-
fundamental lev- cess to the other
el of being where world, behind ‘the
fantasies take root: doors of ivory and
the actual world, of horn that sepa-
Strange’s original rate us from the in-
world, the homeland visible world’, that of
of existence—that dreams, which we
is to say, material know never cease
reality. But Strange to rattle their chains,
took leave of this to claim their inde-
province of the pendence, and to
enormous universe of the possible. And therefore, win it over in the human sleeper who believes he
against realism, of which the rationalist West is here can domesticate them. Strange does not wait hope-
the incarnation, he defends the equal dignity of all lessly to sink into the numbing of unconsciousness.
the dimensions discovered and invented by thought, He rests, gets up, and takes up arms once more.
those dimensions to which the Ancient One had
opened the doors wide for him. And in the burden of his mission he finds an intense
Solitary and loveless before meeting Clea, Strange joy. This joy is quite simply the contemplation, for
is the romantic hero who defends form against the the passenger of possible worlds, of the magnifi-
formless, and vice versa; he is the Atlas who carries cence of all that can take form—a joy of which the
on one shoulder the real world from which thought man of reality deprives himself.

14
URBANOMIC / DOCUMENTS

URBANOMIC.COM
‘No sooner does his bewitched amulet fade into It is not the truth that recompenses Strange, but
nothingness, than Dr Strange beholds…for the first instead an aesthetic sentiment: marvel before the
time…the dazzling description defying dimension of… possibility of seeing that which escapes perception,
Eternity!’ And strange then exclaims, with that al- imagination, and even conception. It is the pleasure
most juvenile emphasis characteristic of the series: of he who thinks.
‘I have finally reached my goal! But what inconceiv-
able wonder awaits me now? For Doctor Strange is, ultimately, the superhero of
thought.

15