Doctor Strange Leaps Through Cosmic Space with Fire — Print & Oil Painting

The cloak is the largest object in the painting and it behaves like a wing. It leaves his shoulders in a broad red mass, swings out to the right almost to the frame edge and turns over on itself, and its inner face is worked in a fine diamond quilting that the artist has drawn scale by scale. The hem is cut into deep points and every one of them is moving.

Beneath it the figure is walking on nothing. One leg is forward and bent, the other trails behind with the toe pointed, and the layered blue grey tunic, the wrapped skirt and the wide belt with its oval buckle all lift as though he had just stepped off something solid. Tall laced boots go to the knee. There is no ground anywhere in the picture.

Both hands are alight. The right is raised above the head holding a burning knot of orange white light from which half a dozen fine tendrils of fire whip outward and curl back over his shoulder; the left is lower, at the hip, holding a smaller one that spills flame down over the fingers. They are the only warm colours in the canvas and they light the underside of the jaw.

Everything behind is deep space worked in teal, indigo and dull magenta with a scatter of small stars, and the brightness reading is the lowest of the six pictures of this character here. Red leads the measurement with cyan second, which is one figure and one enormous cold room.

In the comics that garment is a character. It was handed to him by his teacher as a reward rather than issued as a uniform, it is more or less awake, and it has been written for decades as a second pair of hands: it catches people who are falling, wraps itself round an opponent without being asked, and occasionally acts against the wishes of the man wearing it. Painting it larger than he is comes closer to the truth than a cape usually does. Part of our Marvel collection, next to the same hands opened into a long river of fire and the same figure given six arms and red lightning.