10 Things Marvel Wants You To Forget About Doctor Strange
1. He Fought God
Steve Englehart's stories were incredibly high concept (in both senses of the word) and they didn't get much higher than that of Sise-Neg.
Sise-Neg was a wizard from the 31st Century who decided to become omnipotent by absorbing all the magic of time and space. He was opposed in his time-hopping journey by Doctor Strange, who teamed up with his rival Baron Mordo to save the universe.
They actually failed. Sise-Neg travelled back to the beginning of time and destroyed all of existence. However, by that point, he had become so powerful that he no longer cared about his quest to remake the universe in his own image and so just put things back to how they were.
For anyone who missed the subtext, Sise-Neg is totally God. Even his name is just genesis backwards.
It's a weird story, but not as weird as what happened outside of it. When Stan Lee read the issue, he demanded that Englehart publish a retraction in the next issue to explain that the Judeo-Christian deity was not actually an evil space wizard.
Englehart and his artist Frank Brunner got around this by creating a fake letter from a priest that praised the story. Nobody caught on and the letter was printed in the next issue, saving them from having to write a retraction.