"Doctor Strange: Fall Sunrise" is a miniseries written and illustrated by creator Trad Moore and Heather Moore. It was released as a four issue miniseries in 2022, and released as a graphic novel in 2024. It features the Marvel Comics character Doctor Strange, but from a perspective outside of the normal scope and style of Marvel comics.
How do I describe what is going on here? The basic plot is that a woman comes to the Sanctum Sanctorum of Doctor Strange, and asks his help in giving birth. But this is not just any woman, this is Sophia, in the sense of the gnostic entity, Sophia, and her child is going to be one of the Aeons, ruling spirits of the cosmos. She is being persecuted by her brother/consort Bythos, and needs the help of Strange to give birth. Doctor Strange transports himself to the astral plane, where he must fight a series of entities in a cosmic battle.
As weird as that sounds, it in no way does justice to what is going on here. Because this is an artistic statement formed around a Marvel Comics storyline. The detail, style, and execution of the art is beyond my ability to describe. Everything from double splashpages to thin sequential slivers is illustrated using involuted, convoluted, grotesque and fractal depictions, of people and buildings and other amorphous shapes. The word "psychedelic" gets thrown around a lot, but that is the best word to describe what is going on here. And all of this helps build up an atmosphere that is immersive and disturbing, and could never be done with Marvel's house style and its guides to proportion, line and color. Even in the last few decades, as comic book art for the Big 2 has been allowed to be more diverse, this goes outside of what Marvel is doing. Even when I had trouble following the story (and I certainly did have trouble following the story), the atmosphere was gripping.
So the question is: how does this work with the characters we know? Six years ago, when reviewing a different Doctor Strange story, I mentioned that one of the problems with Doctor Strange is that Marvel had to base his character in their shared universe, and that Doctor Strange shooting mystic bolts was not that different than Iron Man firing repulsor beams. This story overcomes that, because it creates a story that has a tone, narratively and artistically, so far outside of the Marvel Universe. It separates Doctor Strange and lets him act like a character on his own. And just as it was six years ago, it is another Horror Quest, and so I can answer the question affirmatively, whether Doctor Strange can really be a horror character. While not full of extranteous gore or violence, this story does create a disturbing atmosphere with its misshapen figures and weird geometries. When they allow artists to be free, Marvel can indeed create stories in other idioms.