Essential Doctor Strange #2
In "The Coming of... Dr. Strange," Stan Lee and Barry Smith launch a mind-bending origin with a twist: a young man named Strange, already haunted by unseen forces, narrowly avoids a fatal accident—only to find himself in a surreal confrontation with a doppelgänger who claims he’s already lost. As the Ancient One’s cryptic warnings echo, Strange’s reality fractures, revealing a hospital bed and a memory he must erase before the world learns what even he isn’t meant to know. The cover by Barry Windsor-Smith and Frank Giacoia captures the eerie stillness of a moment that changes everything.
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Sensing evil, Strange is so focused on seeking it out he's almost hit by a truck. He calls upon The Ancient One, who warns him of the nature of the evil, but is still mystified. Then he finds himself confronted by someone (or something) who takes his own form, and tells him he's "already defeated". Only when he discovers his oldest enemy is at the bottom of it does he also realize he was hit by the truck-- and has been in a hospital bed ever since! On recovering, he erases the memory of the night's events from the doctor's mind, as "Many things there are that mankind must not know..."
Plot details indexed by the Grand Comics Database (CC BY-SA).