STRANGE TALES - QUITE LITERALLY...

Copyright MARVEL COMICS

Compulsion is a strange thing, don't you think?  It's a 'force' that comics collectors (or collectors of anything, come to that) suffer from, driving them to acquire items they already have in slightly different form, and which they don't really need.  Case in point, the above MARVEL MILESTONE EDITION of DOCTOR STRANGE from 1995, which arrived this morning.  I already have a similar issue given away with a Doctor Strange articulated figure, the only divergence being a different cover and the pages being printed on more traditional comics paper.  However, the story pages are the exact same, printed from the same source as the one above.

I've also got got around another eight different printings of the above tales in different formats, so I needed the Milestone Edition like a hole in the head, but I couldn't resist the siren call to purchase this version when I saw it on ebay recently, and add it to my other issues in this particular series.  Although I'm usually a great believer in reprints being exactly as they were first presented, I must say that the re-colouring by ANDY YANCHUS (done originally for the first edition of the MASTERWORKS volume) on these four tales is probably far more 'atmospheric' than the original colouring, though there's some overly-thick panel border 'restoration' in places by unskilled hands, which is slightly annoying.

Anyway, there it is - another comic that I don't really need, but am no less glad to have.  No, I can't quite explain it either - just put it down to that strange thing known as compulsion, which we probably all have in some form or other.  I never saw this issue 24 years ago when it first came out otherwise I'd have bought it then, so perhaps I'm only putting right something that didn't happen - but should have - nearly a quarter of a century back.  One for the philosophers to ponder perhaps?

Posted in: Cartoons