I enjoy exploring Steve Ditko’s 1950s work to trace the development of those mystical elements that would culminate in the creation of Dr. Strange in 1963.
One such tale is Arise, Oh Geni… in Marvel’s World of Fantasy 16. (For some eccentric reason, the djinn here is called a “geni,” not the common anglicized spelling “genie”). The Jinn were said to be a race of free-willed supernatural entities from pre-Islamic Arabian mythology who were created out of “smokeless fire.”
The five-page story from 1959 has a witty premise — the idea that the “three wishes” nonsense was just PR put out by an evil genie so that somebody would be foolish enough to free him. The ending is borrowed from H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds — after centuries of imprisonment in a lamp, the sniffling djinn has lost all resistance to common human ailments, and finally begs to be sealed up again.
In American Comic Book Chronicles, Bill Schelly noted that horror was “…the primary genre where Ditko made his reputation in the 1950s. Many of the hallmarks of Ditko’s style — showing the influences of Will Eisner, Jerry Robinson, Joe Kubert and Mort Meskin — were apparent from the beginning, including the particular weirdness of his imagery.”
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