Captain America Snarls Beside Crackling Lightning — Print & Oil Painting

The drawing idiom here is hard comic ink. Contours are cut rather than modelled, the shadow on the costume is laid down as flat interlocking shapes, and the whole figure sits against a plain sage green field with no depth in it at all. There is no horizon, no floor and no background event of any kind.

He is caught low and forward, weight over the front leg, torso twisted, the right fist clenched and drawn back behind the hip. The mouth is open and the teeth are showing. It is not a shout so much as the face somebody makes while getting up off the ground, and the artist has kept the eyes in deep shadow under the mask so that the mouth carries the entire expression.

The shield is on his back and it is enormous. Seen face on behind his shoulders it takes up most of the upper right of the picture, its rings weathered into dull brick and pale sage, its surface chipped and pocked with grey craters, the star at the centre worn to bare metal. It has been painted as equipment that has been used, not as a badge.

Down the left edge two lightning shapes enter the frame. They are pure white, cut with hard angular edges and no glow whatsoever, and they come from somewhere outside the picture. Nothing in his hands is producing them. The measured saturation is low and the brightness moderate, which is exactly what a limited palette of drab green, muted red and off white produces.

An empty fist is the honest way to draw this man. Whatever the treatment did to him, it stopped at the ceiling of what a human body can reach, and the doctor who developed it was shot dead within hours of the only successful trial, so the process was never repeated and there has never been a second of him. He is the one member of the group with nothing to fall back on when the weapon is on his back instead of in his hand. From our Marvel collection, alongside the same shield in the air, mid throw and a leap away from a blast with troops behind.