Roger Stern

Doctor Strange by Roger Stern – The #48 Most-Wanted Marvel Omnibus of 2017

May 16, 2017 by krisis

Doctor Strange by Roger Stern is the #48 Most-Wanted Marvel Omnibus of 2017 on Tigereyes’s Secret Ballot.

What’s it about? Should you read it? What issues does it include? Can you get them right now? Read on to learn the answers! And, visit the Marvel Masterworks Message Board to view the original posting of results by Tigereyes.

What Is It? Roger Stern first wrote Doctor Strange (1974) with #27 in February 1978 and departed after #37 in October 1979. He later return for a longer run with #46 in April 1981 to #75 in February 1986.

Stern’s lengthier run was marked by several distinct periods of Strange – one focused on his relationship to Clea, a second where his connections to reality proved to be a weakness to be exploited, and a third mostly comprised of one shot stories that ended with the resolution of the Clea relationship.

The title would continue for another six issues until #81 under author Peter Gillis at which point Doctor Strange was relaunched as half of Strange Tales (1987), still under Gillis.

Past Ranking: This volume debuted at #19 in 2014, disappeared in 2015, and returned at #28 in 2016.

Creators: Written by Roger Stern with pencils by Tom Sutton, Alan Kupperberg, Gene Colan, Michael Golden, Marshall Rogers, Brent Anderson, Paul Smith, Kevin Nowlan, Steve Leialoha, Bret Blevins, and Sal Buscema, and inks by Sutton, Smith, Leialoha, Ernie Chua, Rudy D. Nebres, Pablo Marcos, Dan Green, P. Craig Russell, Terry Austin, Joe Rubenstein, Rick Magyar, and Mark Badger

Probable Contents: None!

I think this omnibus is wishful thinking and would never be produced as imagined by voters, which would presumably contain Doctor Strange (1974) #27-37, 46 (b-story, 47-75 (though Stern doesn’t write #63-64 & 74), Chamber of Chills (1972) #3-4 (and maybe material from Fantastic Four #267-277 leading into #75).

Instead, I think this ought to be rethought as a vote for a volume titled “by Roger Stern & Peter Gillis” AKA Doctor Strange, Volume 4, which begins with the b-story of #46 and 47 and finishes his 1974 series. [Read more…] about Doctor Strange by Roger Stern – The #48 Most-Wanted Marvel Omnibus of 2017

New Collecting Guide: Doctor Strange (plus, 5 suggestions for new fans)

July 11, 2016 by krisis

I’m happy to share The Definitive Doctor Strange Collecting Guide and Reading Order! It includes every Doctor Strange issue ever published with notes on trade-reading order and guest appearances.

Agamatto-eyed readers may have spotted it last week, but as of today the guide is officially out of its beta-release phase and ready to help you collect Marvel’s most-famous mystic.

This is the first of several new and revised collection pages I’ll be highlighting over the next few weeks; you can already see several of them in action in Crushing Comics.

Doctor Strange was one of Marvel’s original Silver Age heroes, debuting in 1963 in Strange Tales, a title he split with Nick Fury. He is a brilliant-but-prideful surgeon whose career is ruined when his hands are injured in an accident, and in his quest to repair them he stumbles into the world of mysticism.

Like Fury, he was one of the few freshly-invented Silver Age solo heroes not to be hoovered up by The Avengers. This was exploited by his inclusion in The Defenders, a team of relative outcasts that also included The Hulk, Namor, and Silver Surfer.

Aside from a brief blip at the beginning of the 70s, Strange starred in an ongoing book in continuous publication through 1996, when his third volume was cancelled with no replacement.

Unlike fellow hot-in-the-90s hero Ghost Rider, Strange got no ongoing revival in the 00s, although he was finally absorbed by the Avengers under Brian Bendis’s tenure (partially due to his participation in The Illuminati).

After playing a critical (some may say “starring”) role in Jonathan Hickman’s Avengers mega-story that began in 2013, Doctor Strange finally found his way back into an ongoing title from Jason Aaron and Chris Bachalo in the fall of 2015 in anticipation of his big screen debut in 2016.

I’ve always had affection for the good doctor, but I did some foot-dragging on giving him his own guide due to his relatively low profile in past years. However, with his movie coming up this fall, it was finally time to attack his guide – no small feat, since he’s had over a dozen series and one-shots to call his own plus a starring role in most incarnations of The Defenders.

If that all sound great but you’re kind of new to this comics game, what should you sample to find out of you like Doctor Strange? Here’s a few books to try: [Read more…] about New Collecting Guide: Doctor Strange (plus, 5 suggestions for new fans)

Doctor Strange – Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order

Updated Mar 22, 2025! The definitive, chronological, and up-to-date guide and trade reading-order on collecting Doctor Strange & Strange Academy comic books via omnibuses, hardcovers, trade paperback graphic novels, and digital. Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated March 2025 with titles scheduled for release through November 2025.

Collecting Doctor Strange

Doctor Strange has had several ongoing titles over the years collected in a variety of formats – plus, his own magic school with Strange Academy.

At this point, every Doctor Strange issue has been collected! However, there are a few specific formats of books that cover large portions of this title, and I’ll cover those first – Omnibuses, Masterworks, Epics, and Essentials.

Do you need a quick introduction with a few suggested reads? Head to my blog post announcing this guide.
[Read more…] about Doctor Strange – Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order

Marvel’s Most-Wanted Omnibuses of 2016 – #30 to 26

June 10, 2016 by krisis

Omnibus on Shelf We’ve reached the halfway point of the 2016 Secret Ballot for Marvel’s Most-Wanted Omnibus by Tigereyes. I covered #35-31 in the last installment.

Here’s your early warning: this batch of books includes not one but three X-Men titles, and boy do I have opinions about those! Also, all five of these books placed lower in previous years.

I’ve failed to say this previously, but if you have any extra intelligence to add about the probable runs or opinions about the comics therein, please leave a comment! Even when ti comes to X-Men, I don’t know (or remember!) everything about these books – and you might.

Want to learn more about the Marvel Omnibus editions that already exist and the issues they cover? My Marvel Omnibus & Oversized Hardcover Guide is the most comprehensive tool on the web for tracking Marvel’s hugest releases – it features every book, plus release dates, contents, and even breakdowns of $/page and what movies the books were released to support.

Now that you’ve been adequately warned, let’s x-amine what I have to say about #30 through 26! [Read more…] about Marvel’s Most-Wanted Omnibuses of 2016 – #30 to 26

Marvel’s Most-Wanted Omnibuses of 2016 – #50 to 45

June 6, 2016 by krisis

rsz_2016-06-06_095604 One of my favorite comic community happenings of each year is when a message board member named TigerEyes announces that it’s time for the “Annual Secret Ballot: Marvel’s Most-Wanted Omnibus.”

For the uninitiated, what this means is that over a hundred of the biggest Marvel fans and collectors who like to chat each other up on the internet send in their picks for what Marvel material is most worthy of compiling into an oversize Marvel Omnibus Edition, massive tomes that sometimes run over 1,000 pages and up to 50 issues of collected comics.

Whether it’s causation or correlation, books from the secret ballot tend to get printed by Marvel. Here’s the breakdown from the first three years of the survey:

2013 survey: 10 of 29 books were later printed as Omnibus (or are solicited).
2014 survey: 12 of 52 books were later printed as Omnibus (or are solicited).
2015 survey: 7 of 52 books were later printed as Omnibus (or are solicited).

That makes the secret ballot not only a fun exercise, but a useful straw poll to get an idea of what could be coming our way. In fact, the majority of omnibuses released in 2016 that are not from the past three years of comics are from the poll.

I’ll be tackling the results of the 2016 poll starting with this post, complete with likely contents, explanations, how to read the material right now, and the likelihood we’ll ever see the books in print.

Let’s get started! And, if you want to know more about all of the books that have been released to date, my Marvel Omnibus & Oversized Hardcover Guide is built on a database full of all of the information about these massive tomes so you can sort and filter them. It’s the only tool of its kind on the web!