Marvel's MYSTIC

Shown here is the cover of a U.K. edition of MYSTIC, published by L. Miller & Son in 1964. According to the Grand Comics Database, the series ran 66 issues from 1960 to 1966, consisting of reprints of US comics including a jumbled mix of Marvel's 1950s horror, post-Code giant monsters, and 1960s Silver Age superheroes.

     What makes this interesting is that MYSTIC was also the name of a long-running (61 issues) horror anthology series published by Marvel from 1951 to 1957. (The first issue debuted a few months before another, even-longer running series you may have heard of: STRANGE TALES.) The publisher Martin Goodman must have liked the name because there was even a (short-lived) MYSTICAL TALES series published concurrently, ending its run the same month as MYSTIC (Aug. 1957) due to the "Atlas implosion." Marvel had also published 14 issues of a MYSTIC COMICS during the early 1940s -- more evidence that Goodman must have thought the MYSTIC name had some selling power.

     (Coincidentally, there was another MYSTIC periodical on the stands in the 1950s, though not a comic book. From 1953 to 1956, Ray Palmer edited 16 issues of MYSTIC Magazine, which was similar in style to FATE Magazine, which he had founded in 1948. Palmer's MYSTIC was retitled SEARCH with issue #17 and continued until his death in 1977.)

     Given all that, it's a bit surprising that Marvel dumped the MYSTIC name after 1957. It's only an accident of history that STRANGE TALES was kept alive while MYSTIC was left to die. The covers of some of the later UK issues give us an idea of what a MYSTIC that survived into the "Marvel age" of the 1960s might have looked like.

     According to Steve Ditko, one of his Marvel characters "wound up being named Dr. Strange because he would appear in Strange Tales." If MYSTIC had survived into the 1960s instead of STRANGE TALES, perhaps the character would have been called Doctor Mystic instead!

     Or perhaps Doctor Strange's frequent description as "Master of the Mystic Arts" (which replaced an earlier tagline, "Master of the Black Arts") was Goodman's own suggestion, bringing back a word that he once felt had commercial appeal.