Strange Tales #116: Return to the Nightmare World!

This is part of an ongoing series where I will be reviewing Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s Doctor Strange, covering his appearances in Strange Tales #110-111 and #114-146. 

Return to the Nightmare World! is a sequel story to Strange Tales #110, as Strange once again must go into the dream realm and battle Nightmare. These dimensional stories give Ditko free reign to create arresting, kaleidescopic imagery, without the constraints of anything resembling the real world. There’s a suitable eerieness to it. Here, Ditko begins to use bigger panels to tell the story, taking advantage of the less restrictive page count. It’s a cross between 6-panel and 9-panel grids, opening with a 6 to set the stage and often alternating between rows of 2 and 3 for the rest of the issue, while sticking to 3 columns. The closeup on Nightmare on the first page is especially unsettling.

Spider-Man and Dr. Strange, together at last!

 The term “Lovecraftian” gets thrown around a lot when it comes to godlike alien beings, generally referring to influences of the godlike alien entities of the Cthulhu Mythos, and while there are elements of that with the pit creature, The Dream Cycle is a bigger point of reference here, with an entire realm populated by strange creatures, only accessible through dreaming. The plot is a bit more straightforwardly heroic than #110, with Strange delving into the nightmare realm in order to save innocent civilians from Nightmare’s clutches. It’s a bit of a change in characterization for Nightmare, who seemingly haunted the dreams of guilty men in a Dickens sort of way in his first appearance, even dressing up like the Ghost of Christmas Past.

 We get the second appearance of Wong, again shown as a passive man-servant who answers the door for Strange. There’s a brief panel showing the Ancient One, who is also portrayed with yellow skin, unlike in previous issues. Strange is contacted by the police here, as several people have slipped into unexplained comas around New York. Like in #110, Strange doesn’t actually fight Nightmare, instead avoiding him long enough to accomplish his goal and then escaping. It gives the feeling that Strange is out of his depth, and unlike with Mordo, he can’t win through a head-on fight. There’s not much in the way of overall character growth or progression, it’s just a good-old fashioned monster of the week type story that lets Ditko’s artwork do the talking, and is all the better for it. Honestly. the hardest part of writing these is trying to stop myself from just posting every single panel of Ditko's art.