The trippiest of all the incredible series Marvel Comics introduced in the 1960s was “Doctor Strange.”

On Nov. 4, former hotshot surgeon turned Master of the Mystic Arts Stephen Strange, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, enters the thriving Marvel Cinematic Universe. And director Scott Derrickson (“Sinister,” “The Exorcism of Emily Rose”) assures fans of the comics that the movie will indeed be a trip.

“It’s pretty psychedelic,” the filmmaker says. “If your love for the early Stan Lee-Steve Ditko comics was that visual, psychedelic ambition, I think you’ll be pretty satisfied. The primary resource for the visual design of the whole movie came from those comics.”

A fan as a kid, Derrickson says Strange spoke to him more than other comic books he read. When he was competing heavily for this gig — there were eight meetings with Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige and others before he got the job — Derrickson emphasized how he wanted to use big-budget visual effects for creating fundamentally Strangeian other dimensions rather than the usual movie mayhem.

“I told them it should take a bold left turn, like the ’60s comics,” Derrickson recalls. “And I think they liked how I gravitate toward real actors, talented actors who are grounded in performances that are real, while dealing with the supernatural. That’s why I’ve had great actors in genre films, which they usually don’t do. And that was certainly the case with ‘Doctor Strange.’ ”

Production’s start date was delayed in order to get Cumberbatch, who was committed to “Hamlet” on the London stage when initially approached.

“He is perfect casting,” Derrickson says of the English actor, who’s played everything from Sherlock Holmes to a Middle-earth dragon. “Myself and Kevin Feige and the other producers involved came to a consensus very quickly that Benedict was the right guy for the role. There’s just an overlap between his work and the comics that you can see and feel. You feel that he can play the intelligence, the arrogance, the unlikability and yet intrigue of Stephen Strange, and that the massive arc that the character goes through in those early comics is something that he would be able to portray.”

That includes losing his doctoring skills in a horrific accident and subsequently learning the secrets of the mystical universe from the Ancient One. Strange’s mentor in the comics was an old Himalayan man. In the movie, the Ancient One is played by Tilda Swinton, who is none of those things. Another of her acolytes, Baron Mordo, who in the comics was a Central European not-so-nobleman, is portrayed by “12 Years a Slave” star Chiwetel Ejiofor. Yet another British actor, “Marco Polo” star Benedict Wong, is a character just named Wong, who has been completely reimagined from his subservient role in the books.

Complaints about Swinton’s casting in an Asian role have, nonetheless, understandably arisen. Derrickson acknowledges them while defending his efforts to mitigate the early comics’ stereotyping.

“Diversity in movies is absolutely the responsibility of producers and directors,” he affirms. “In this movie, we have about as diverse a cast as I think you can get, and that was a very conscious decision. Tilda was a way of adding diversity in terms of not just an ethereal, enigmatic, otherworldly actress playing an ethereal, enigmatic, otherworldly character, but we’re bringing a middle-aged woman who’s not 28 years old in leather pants into the Marvel Universe in a major role.

“I was very happy with that, but I was also very conscious that in doing that I was erasing a significant potential Asian role. I was going to leave Wong out of the movie at first; he was an Asian sidekick manservant, what was I supposed to do with that? But once the decision was made to cast Tilda, we brought Wong back because, unlike the Ancient One, he could be completely subverted as a character and reworked into something that didn’t fall into any of the stereotypes of the comics.”