Galactus Unleashes Cosmic Power Among the Stars — Print & Oil Painting

This is flat comic colour and it has been done properly. Every contour is a hard black line, the shading on the armour is laid in as two or three discrete tones with no gradient between them, and there is no rendered metal anywhere: the plating is described by drawing rather than by light.

The armour is magenta and deep violet, banded across the chest, cut into a wide belt with round bosses along it, and finished at the collar with the domed helmet and its two flared prongs. The face inside is a surprise every time. It is heavy, jowled, deeply lined and entirely human, the brow pulled low and the mouth turned down, and it belongs to an old man rather than to a force.

His near hand is raised open at chest height and full of light. A white pink core burns in the palm with lightning arcs curling out between and around the fingers, drawn as clean tapering ink strokes rather than as glow. Down at the lower right the other hand carries a smaller version of the same thing, quieter, almost an afterthought.

Behind him the space is black and densely starred, with lavender nebula clouds massed in soft irregular shapes on both sides. Those clouds are the only soft edges in the picture, which throws the hard drawn figure forward off its background.

That flat expression is the most accurate thing in the image. When the survivors of the worlds he had eaten brought the question to a tribunal, the ruler of Asgard testified that he was a test every planet must eventually face, and the living embodiment of the universe then linked every mind in the room and let them look out through his eyes, where they found no choice being made at all. A hand full of lightning under a face with nothing in it is that finding drawn. Part of our Marvel collection, next to the same helmet seen from a street between leaning towers and the open hand pushed close to the viewer under lightning.