AUTHOR EXCLUSIVE
Doctor Strange’s rise to Sorcerer Supreme is revisited in new novel Dimension War
AFTER HIS TWO recent big-screen outings, Stephen Strange is now making the transition to novels with James Lovegrove’s Dimension War, which is based on the original ’60s stories by Stan Lee, Steve Ditko and Roy Thomas. Lovegrove admits that it wasn’t easy recreating the Master of Mystic Arts’ formative comic book adventures without the all-important visuals.
“Writing superhero stories in prose words, without the art for support, is doable but not easy,” he tells Red Alert. “The trick, for me, was making the narrative as dynamic and visual as I could, so as to replicate the pace and feel of a good superhero comic, while at the same time relying on all the elements that prose fiction does best – such as internal monologues, point of view narrative and long exchanges of dialogue. What wasn’t easy was conveying a sense of Ditko’s art with its hallucinatory imagery, spooky angles, mangled anatomy and overall downright oddness. My solution was to play with typography in a couple of sections of the book, to show that text could be twisted about and messed with just as, in Ditko’s hands, the content of a comic book panel could.”
Lovegrove reshaped over 30 individual comics, initially published over the course of three years, into a single, overarching storyline. “It wouldn’t be unfair to say that in those early issues, brilliant and ground-breaking as they were, Stan and Steve were pretty much making it up as they went along,” he says, before Roy Thomas established a larger plot arc after taking over scripting from Lee with Strange Tales 146.
“Roy managed to pull the strands together into quite a satisfying conclusion,” continues Lo
