Photo: Maarten Zeehandelaar
As a kid, growing up in the eighties, Marvel Comics were my bible.
I was enthralled by the adventures of gods and men alike.
Mighty Thor, the incredible Hulk, characters whose incredible superpowers made them heroes.
On the other side of the spectrum were heroes like the Punisher and Black Widow, normal people that trained themselves, pushing their own boundaries to be heroes.
A hero that I’ve always found impossible to categorize was Dr. Strange, average human turned sorcerer supreme.
The difficulty wasn’t as much caused by the fact that he acquired magical powers later in life; a large amount of heroes acquired their powers later on.
What made it difficult was the fact that he was the only defender against mystical threats, a category apart rather than a part of one.
Dr. Strange was cool, though. He was always portrayed living in his dark, gloomy mansion, a meditating, unsmiling monk.
It was always night in Dr. Strange comics, and they had an oriental mystique, as if a toothless old Japanese comic-writer drew them in an opium den.
As a kid, I always wondered what his mansion would look like in broad daylight, and it probably must look a lot like this; stately and friendly, but slightly off.
I bet if you’d see Dr. Strange in the daytime, he’d be stately and friendly, too.
He’d wear a smile, and it’d probably be slightly off, too.
Text by: Wibo Kosters
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