With his renewed exposure in Marvel Feature from late 1971 to mid-1972 as one of the Defenders, followed almost immediately by a prominent appearance in Amazing Spider-Man, it certainly seemed that steps were being taken to test the waters of Dr. Strange returning to his own series. What sealed the deal for the character was a string of well-received (if bi-monthly) issues by Steve Englehart and Frank Brunner in the pages of Marvel Premiere, at the end of which Strange segued to the 1974 Doctor Strange #1.
But prior to that, it was the first six issues of Premiere which reintroduced Strange as a character in his own right (albeit a character who by then had received a considerable bump from his association with the Hulk and the Sub-Mariner as one-third of their informal team).
At first, however, it appeared that little thought had been given to how Strange would be handled in these new stories beyond getting him back in circulation, if the revolving door of writers and artists we were greeted with were any indication. Strange's stock-in-trade was the eerie and the mysterious; yet the month following Strange's solo debut, Englehart's The Defenders #1 would hit the stands, where Strange would be hobnobbing with Marvel's mainstream super-heroes and super-villains. Which Dr. Strange would readers expect to see? Until Englehart would take over the character in Premiere and provide a measure of coherency for Strange in these two separate worlds, it was a struggle to take an interest in the character appearing in Premiere, where Strange himself seemed to be struggling under the yoke of different writers and artists who weren't quite suited to him, as a letters page response acknowledges in so many words.
But in this first appearance, the character's original writer, Stan Lee, does an excellent job of reigniting our interest in Dr. Strange--helped in no small part by artist Barry Smith (who also plotted this story), whose work I've at times taken issue with but whose style seems suited to the realms and situations which Strange often finds himself in (a style that's at times reminiscent of Craig Russell). With Smith's work here embellished by Dan Adkins, who's no *ahem* stranger to this character by any means, the story works out to be a fine first step back into the limelight for Dr. Strange.
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