Writer / Penciller: Tradd Moore / Colour Artist: Heather Moore/ Letterers: VC's Clayton Cowles, Tradd Moore / Collects: Doctor Strange: Fall Sunrise #1-#4 / Marvel / Treasury Edition (SC)
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Review by Paul Dunne
25th September 2023 (Released: 2nd August 2023)
The Pitch: Brace yourself for a Doctor Strange story like you've never seen! From the uncanny mind of Tradd Moore (SILVER SURFER: BLACK), the Master of the Mystic Arts stars in one of his most mind-bending adventures - now wilder than ever on the oversized pages of a Treasury Edition! Doctor Strange awakens alone in a distant world not his own. Lost of purpose and surrounded by danger, the wandering sorcerer must explore this land of blades and mystery to unravel arcane secrets and escape the deadly horrors that lie in wait! Strange is pulled in every direction by powerful figures while millions of lives rest in the balance - including his own! Who can he trust? Can this world's deadly ritual be stopped? Or is the answer simply: Blood? Heaven help us, it must be blood!
Before we go on, I want you to understand how difficult it was to write this review. How to encapsulate, in mere words, the experience? Like a voyage you took as a child and now only clings to your subconscious with no sufficiently tangible Proustian trigger to help you remember clearly, Fall Sunrise dances in the back of your eyelids when you try to reduce it to just syntax. The visual experience is, however, an eyes wide open, slit-screen cruise through the ether, that outdoes cinematic try-hards like Gaspar Noe's Enter The Void. This is like entering your own neurons and swimming inside the liquids that keep your body working. If you've ever watched the last 30 minutes of Kubrick's 2001 and felt dismayed that nothing ever quite lived up to it... well, prepare yourself. A contender is here! Stephen Strange finds himself detached from his body, but on a plane he's never encountered. Seems simple so far, right? Hold on though. The dream space - or is it death space? - that Stephen finds himself in could momentarily almost be the same pastoral English fields of The Sandman's Midsummer Night's Dream. Now there's an inter-company crossover to die for! Perhaps we can get John Constantine in there too for a juxtaposition of sorcerers? The first figure that speaks to Stephen is reminiscent of The Silver Surfer, another transcendent cosmic being whose Tradd Moore treatment deserves to be seen as seminal. So it all seems familiar at first if more than a little visually extravagant. With, at times, sixteen-panel pages, Fall Sunrise could have only been made for the treasury format.
A transcendency that only could have been made for the Treasury format.
The dilemma for Stephen is at first, this: is he part of this world he finds himself in, or trapped in it? And going further, Does having the abilities he has separate him from humanity? Like a skilled surgeon who might wonder if they're God... Is Dr. Strange a servant of otherworldly forces or truly a master of the mystic arts? For a while, we could be in the Marvel of yore, the Silver sixties of stupendous Stan and Battlin' Jack: Stephen's broken thought captions recall those earlier books: "Energy... Fading.. must... Go on!"As you go on you begin to wonder if rather than a journey through the mind, perhaps Fall Sunrise is a journey through fiction... Poe, Shakespeare, the cosmic fears of H. P. Lovecraft. And the art! Moore's outrageous compositions sometimes make it hard for you to get your bearings on the page. Like Strange, you are adrift in the world Moore creates. A world that flirts with darkness, despite it's visual beauty.
Adrift in fiction: Poe, Lovecraft and Stephen Strange.
Death seems to cling to Stephen, even though the landscape is alive and verdant. Imagination is the fruit of its wellspring. Faces rise from the earth speaking to the ego of man, whilst showing Stephen just how small he really is. Soon, the good doctor is taken into bondage and the book begins to take on shape and plot, as the panels and objects within those panels, take on geometric edges and the look plays with graphic design. Arrows that point the way to doom, perhaps? As we go deeper in, Fall Sunrise takes on a denser form - more prose but also with it, more context. Stephen is straddling both worlds, trying to safeguard two realms, one real and one metaphysical. His responsibilities as both Sorcerer Supreme and a Doctor who has taken the Hippocratic oath come into play. The land Stephen finds himself in recalls a tarot deck of possibility and impossibility, where the ephemeral natures are flesh.
Stephen must become an agent of change.
Stephen finds purpose here. Unlike the tales of heroes we are used to, where the mission is to protect life and limb, here Stephen must be an agent of change. The journey becomes Dantean in its challenges, giving Strange something that all great arcs must contain: a birth and a death... Just perhaps not his own. We witness again the accident that set him on the journey to becoming who he must be: an unbreakable man in a foldable world. He must be the Doctor rather than a magician and deliver a child. Or retrieve one, it seems. All whilst his very existence becomes pliable. Panic sets in for Strange, as begs to be returned to the solid dimensionality of his own world. More than any other, this comic captures the same feeling you get watching a mirror bleed into Nero's mouth in The Matrix, buildings move into new addresses in Alex Proyas' Dark City, and architecture fold into kaleidoscopic spaces in the film version of Doctor Strange.
An emotional, instinctual experience.
Perhaps the best way to experience this is on an instinctual, emotional level, rather than a rational one, processed through words. And with that I find myself, like a child, back at the beginning, trying to match the shapes even as those shapes change in my hands. Let's be clear: Moore isn't working within normal constraints of things like time and pacing. He's chronicling eons in panels. Clayton Cowles’ letters help keep us anchored, yet bend voices and sound in an amazing way. And of course, the book would be nothing without Heather Moore's colours delineating the new shapes and worlds created for you here. She makes the trip even more sumptuous than you could imagine. By the end, you feel bruised, and breathless, like you yourself have been on the journey. And you should. You've just read one of the greatest Doctor Strange stories ever created by one of the top artists gracing the medium today, Want a second opinion? Go on the journey yourself. I'll see you down river, when you get into the weeds. Don't get lost.
Doctor Strange: Fall Sunrise Treasury Edition is available at your local comic shop now. Buy comics from The Comic Crush here.