This is Strange Tales 167, from April of 1968. The cover is a straight up classic by Jim Steranko, who also wrote and illustrated the Nicky Fury section. The Doctor Strange story was penned by Denny O’Neil and drawn by Dan Atkins.

I haven’t a clue who discovered it (I’m not much for message boards, and I believe the discovery was made on one) but it turns out Greg Bell, who contributed illustrations to the original Dungeons & Dragons box set was, uh, extremely inspired by some panels of this comic when penning some of his most iconic drawings. Now, I generally think it is crummy when artists swipe the work of other pro artists, but this feels a bit different. Bell was a teenager when some crazy shoemaker hired him (for peanuts, probably) to illustrate a weird game about killing dragons that, in 1973, must have seemed destined for obscurity. I’m not super worried about the ethics here, especially since Bell dropped off the face not long after.

Anyway, you could do a lot worse than lifting from Steranko. You can tell they are copies because Bell’s other illustrations don’t have a fraction of the energy and movement without that Steranko zip. You can see in some of the spot illustrations though (last slide), that Bell was learning from his copying and building some technique. 

The reason I love this is because most kids that gets into D&D (or comics) do this at some point. I copied stuff out of the Monster Manual and then drew it over and over again in my school notebooks (lots of Russ Nicholson stuff, but I was also a big fan of the MMII Gambado illustration for some reason. And Hobgoblin from Spider-Man). Old school zines are full of stuff like this – Bell just happened to do it in one of the most important games ever produced. And the fact that the very first Dungeons & Dragons box ever made has traced drawings by a kid in it feels so cosmically perfect. As above, so below.