Ah, reprints.

The one thing that stands out for me was a comic I picked up in the 1970s. By this time I was onto Marvel's reprint technique where I'd be reading something that already went by...

...I didn't care.

I was more into the artwork and didn't concern myself with the dislocated time frame or out of style fashions by buying in 1976 Strange Tales #187 which was in turn a 1965 reprint of Strange Tales #138 featuring Dr. Strange penciled and inked by Steve Ditko. He was clearly tapped into my mental state at the time with his dreamy stream-of-consciousness imagery of diaphonous gauzy protoplasmic layers of reality sliding and co-mingling in divergent places and spaces:

Absolutely positively not drawn by somebody on Acid!

The story line in this issue, where Dr. Strange must first defeat this mask-making foe Eternity before meeting his ultimate foe Dormammu. Dr. Strange wanders across a collection of faces (masks) wondering what they're about.

It was by serendipitous chance that Steve Ditko, an Ayn Rand supporting Relativist (read: Right Wing) person would have his artwork adopted by the radical LSD Psychedelic Hippie counter culture. People would ask him how he dreamed up his marvelous other-worldly dimensions, maybe trying to see if he used any recreational drugs to help him along.

"Doctor Strange's entire universe, with all these psychedelic floating mouths and cubes and spheres... ... you suspect that probably Ditko was investing an awful lot of his own personal symbology in just the odd floating shapes in the background."
-Alan Moore. 'In Search of Steve Ditko' on YouTube.

In truth he never dabbled in drugs, but would put thought into what he was drawing, as if solving a problem, as evident in one of his self-deprecating analysis on making a comic book page:

I liked 'the Mindless Ones'! Reminds me of some people I know...

10454 Lomita Ave #B, Felton
United States

FORWARD