Captain America Holds Shield and Mjolnir Amid Blue Lightning — Print & Oil Painting

Two different kinds of image are stacked here and it is worth saying so. The figure is photographic, with a camera's tonal range in the skin and a real woven texture in the fabric, and everything luminous has been drawn on top of it afterwards: the lightning has hard vector edges, the glow blooms in perfect circles, and the two surfaces never quite agree with one another.

He stands frontally with the weight even and the head turned a few degrees, and the suit is dark blue scale mail with a white star at the chest, a harness over both shoulders and a small mark on the left shoulder plate. The A on the brow of the helmet is lit from behind so that it burns white, which is the brightest point on the whole figure.

Each hand has something in it. The shield hangs low in his right hand, turned toward us, its rings red, white and blue with a large silver star at the centre and thin filaments of current crawling across the paint. In his left hand, held down beside the thigh with the wrapped grip barely visible, is a short square headed hammer in plain grey metal, the least illuminated object anywhere in the canvas.

An enormous cyan white bolt occupies the left third of the frame and forks up into the sky above his shoulder, more filaments run over the shield and down both legs, and along the very bottom a black band of broken silhouettes suggests rubble. Blue leads with cyan second at high saturation and very low brightness, which is a black sky lit by one colour.

Those two objects have met before and the hammer won. In a 2011 story the disc was caught by an opponent who broke it in half with his bare hands, and what put it back together was his colleague in the metal armour working alongside the dwarf smiths who had originally made the hammer, using the same Asgardian alloy. One crack across the face could not be closed and he turned down the offer to have it hidden. Holding the pair in a single frame is showing two objects that now share a metal. From our Marvel collection, alongside the same hammer in cold blue lightning without the shield and the two carried together in a different pose.