Deadpool Relaxes in a Bathtub with a Rubber Duck — Print & Oil Painting

He has got into the bath fully dressed. The suit is on, the boots are on, the harness and the belt are still buckled, and the water has closed over his lap without any of it coming off. He is slouched back against the near end of an old enamelled tub with one arm draped along the rim, and his shins and feet hang out over the far end.

In his right hand, raised and resting against the tub edge, there is a pistol. It is held loosely and pointed up and away, the way somebody holds a glass they have not decided to drink from. The sword strapped to his back has been left where it was: hilt and a length of dark scabbard rise past his right shoulder and out of the top of the frame.

Two things are floating with him. A yellow rubber duck sits near his elbow and a small white horse with a combed mane bobs against his thigh, both given the same care as the weapon. The belt buckle showing through the water carries his own emblem in red and black, and the water surface distorts the leg plates beneath it.

The room has seen use. Cracked tiles, a stained wall, a rusted pipe, warm light arriving from the upper right, and a dark red pool spreading across the floor in the lower left corner. Measured brightness is low and the strongest hue sits in the red range, spread evenly between the suit, the wall and the floor.

The joke only works because of what the character is. He was given a healing factor that will not let him die, and a face he keeps covered because of what the same treatment did to it, which is why none of this reads as threat. A man sitting in warm water, armed, with a rubber duck at his elbow and blood already on the tiles, is simply somebody who cannot be hurt in any way that lasts. From our Marvel collection, next to the same bathroom seen from above, a toy horse left in the tub and the same suit sat on the toilet with a comic.