Amazing Adventures #1 (1961)
written by Stan Lee & Larry Lieber
pencils and cover by Jack Kirby
Marvel is still in its monster era…
…but the backup feature is the origin of a new hero with an almost familiar name.
To my absolute delight, modern reprints DO preserve the original name: you might know him with his future name of Doctor Druid.
Our protagonist oeverhears a discussion about some Tibetan lama looking for an American doctor, and he decides to volunteer.
The lama is really tightfisted, but our protagonist proves that he’s enough of a big guy to accept curing him for no money.
In order to meet the lama, you have to walk on hot coals…
…face a lionrilla…
…and use an antigravity rope.
The reason why the doctor has been summoned here is to take the place of the dying lama.
The doctor accepts, becoming a master of the mystic arts and Asian.
Wait, WHAT!?
And with that INCREDIBLY well-aged moment, the story is already over.
Historical significance: 0/10
You can probably avoid this even if you’re one of the two last surviving Doctor Druid superfans, since what actually DOES end up being slightly significant is retold later.
Silver Age-ness: 10/10
One of the main reasons why you SHOULD avoid this. 
Does it stand the test of time? 0/10
These 5 pages are BARELY a story, even without that finale.
The artwork is fine, but it doesn’t bring the spectacle you’d expect by the fact that it has both Jack Kirby pencils AND Steve Ditko as the inker.
How close is this to the modern character? 0/10
“Doctor Droom” would appear in 4 issues of Amazing Adventures, establishing that his main areas of expertise are hypnotism and mind control.
As well as making you uncomfortable.
Amazing Adventures would be renamed Amazing Adult Fantasy from issue 7, and then Amazing Fantasy with a last issue you’ve probably heard about.
Stan Lee and Jack Kirby definitely didn’t think much of Doctor Droom, but it must have stuck a chord with Steve Ditko (who, as mentioned, was the inker).
Because in 1963 he pitched to Stan an idea of what would grow into Doctor Strange… who, to highlight the parallel, was often drawn by Ditko with slightly Asian features.
More directly, when Strange’s origin story was told, it was also remarkably similar to Droom’s.
Thankfully without the whole “making him Asian” bit.
And his predecessor would have been relegated to a historical footnote if it wasn’t for Roger Stern, who in 1976 was a Marvel editor overseeing Weird Wonder Tales, an anthology series that reprinted old stories with new artwork. Issue 19 featured an updated version of the Doctor Droom story, now calling him Doctor Druid.
By some sources, the new name was suggested by Len Wein.
For all intents and purposes, this version has completely replaced Amazing Adventures #1.
This version mercilessly discards the whole “turning him Asian” bit, but for some reason granting him powers means making his eyebrows grow.
The series ended with issue 22, whose cover (by Dave Cockrum) gave Druid a proper costume.
The “Weird Wonder Tales” were just retold versions of previous stories, or sometimes Druid was just there to introduce unrelated stories.
His first TRUE new stories were two issues of Incredible Hulk in 1977, written by Len Wein (giving credence to the idea that the new name was his suggestion).
Also in 1977, Jim Shooter used him in an issue of Ghost Rider.
He would next pop up on Avengers in 1982…
…and in 1985 he drops by Power Man and Iron Fist as the go-to guy for superheroes who needed help with the supernatural… if Doctor Strange was either not available or would break the story by being too powerful.
That’s a role that Druid will play a lot in the future.
Doctor Druid’s moment of glory came in 1987 at the apex of the Roger Stern run on Avengers, in the MASTERPIECE “Avengers Under Siege” storyline.
He shows up to help the team against the Masters of Evil, in order to thank them for helping out in the previously mentioned 1982 story.
Doctor Druid would join the team 2 issues later. This was my first introduction to Doctor Druid (as I assume it was for most people, since he was a very obscure character).
Stern seems to be the only person who DOESN’T write him as a Doctor Strange ripoff.
He also played a very unusual role in the team, with the Avengers feeling uneasy about him… and with the doctor not being entirely a good guy.
You also couldn’t POSSIBLY mistake him for ANY other superhero.
Whatever Stern had in mind for Doctor Druid, especially with those “I shall bide my time” thoughts, it probably wasn’t what Walt Simonson did when he replaced him on Avengers.
Doctor Druid was seduced by Nebula (who would later confusingly be revealed to be a completely unrelated time-traveler) to mentally manipulate the Avengers into making him the leader.
Despite the AMAZING Buscema art, this is a very confusing storyline that basically made Doctor Druid into a villain.
The storyline would eventually lead to one of the earliest dissolutions of the Avengers, and it ends with Doctor Druid being lost in the timestream with Nebula.
Don’t ask why she has Kang’s armor and pink skin, there are so many retcons involved with this story that it would double the length of this post.
Roy and Dann Thomas attempted to rescue his character in 1990 on the pages of Avengers Spotlight #37.
Which, after convoluted time travel shenanigans, has Doctor Druid re-live his origin story… and in typical Roy Thomas fashion, reveals that the lama from his origin is actually The Ancient One, a.k.a. Doctor Strange’s mentor.
Thomas goes surprisingly meta here, considering Druid is revealed to have LITERALLY been the test run for Doctor Strange!!!
He is weirdly okay with this.
The story ends with Druid gaining new magic powers (this time literally related to druids), and is rejuvenated in the process.
He has a few adventures and cameos in this period… notably on Doctor Strange (written again by Roy Thomas) and on Secret Defenders in 1994.
Where he gets an especially terrible new costume.
I am shocked that Deadpool doesn’t occasionally make jokes about having been part of this team.
In 1994 he receives a 4-issue miniseries, titled simply “Druid”, written by Warren Ellis.
It’s truly a fever dream of a story. Doctor Druid becomes entirely unrecognizable as his life is twisted by some very disturbing creatures.
I could not understand anything that was going on, but if you like horror stories… read better ones, but you might enjoy Leonardo Manco’s creepy artwork.
The series ends with Druid’s death and Daimon Hellstrom giving an unceremoniously harsh elegy.
He was briefly resurrected in 2010 on the “Chaos War: Dead Avengers” miniseries, who had no right being as good as it was.
I mean it turned Deathcry into a good character too! DEATHCRY!!!
After some magic shenanigans, Doctor Druid managed to fully resurrect in 2020.
I should point out that at SOME point (possibly in the Druid miniseries?), it had been revealed that “Druid” is not even his real name.
He’s not interested in being a hero anymore…
…and he’s no fan of Strange anymore.
He’s still around, doing what he does best: taking Doctor Strange’s place when he’s too busy or would be powerful enough to break the story…
…or getting himself brainwashed by supervillains.
What else was in Amazing Adventures #1?
The cover monster is not particularly interesting.
It does allow Kirby to go absolutely WILD with showcasing hallucinations!
It also has a GREAT story with Steve Ditko artwork, about a guy who tries to rob a wax museum…
…until he’s killed by the statues, which I guess have always been alive.
I am not the only one noticing that the first panel with Droom looks a lot like Charles Xavier smoking a pipe, right?
The “turning asian” thing has probably overstayed its welcome, but it was not necessarily malicious or even racist at the time. By my reading it was meant to be taken as a reward of sorts, a necessary change for Droom to be capable of dealing with his new gifts.
But I can see how that can be read in another, far less charitable or maybe just less benign way – the ancient culture of remarkable achievements finds itself unable to go forward until someone has the idea of recruiting a middle-aged, unsuspecting “intern” of sorts from across the ocean.
So that he can daringly hypnotize and mind-control people in order to protect people from the threat of the day. Something that, presumably, the people who trained him could not or would not do on their own.
If you ask me, either reading is just trying way too hard to see logic and reason in an origin that is just not capable of sustaining that effort. Early Droom/Druid is ultimately just a guy who found the exotic East interesting and was rewarded for having that interest, a healthy amount of ethics and selflessness, and a bit of courage and sheer luck.
Yes, he is presenting himself as a big thing in the last panel of his origin story and that is not very humble of him. But give the guy a break. In what appears to be the passage of just a few pages and minutes he has been pressured into accepting to travel and work for free without prior warning; letting go of the very tools that he would need for the “pro bono” work that he was asked to do in the first place, with no choice on the matter; walking on hot coals and entering into the lair of an exotic and dangerous beast for no obvious reason; and lost his very face and identity without any real warning. While being congratulated by the very people who did those things to him.
If nothing else, he is entitled to behave a bit oddly for a while.
This is actually a very interesting origin, even though most of the nuance is lost to the accelerated pace. All the elements are in place for Droom to become sincere yet resentful or unstable, and a more ambitious time (with more pages to work with) could make great stories out of the need to work through that emotional turmoil.
That was not what they did in the early 1960s, but the pieces were perfectly placed.
In an entry in my Deck Log blog, I postulated that Doctor Droom was Marvel’s first Silver-Age super-hero.
https://captaincomics.ning.com/forum/topics/deck-log-entry-247-marvel-s-first-silver-age-super-hero?context=category-Deck+Log