Dr. Otto Octavius Triumphs over Spider-Man — Print & Oil Painting

Read the signs first, because the painting has put them where the sky should be. A green overhead gantry board carries NORTH and a route shield beside it, a second board reads LAST EXIT with an arrow pointing off to the right, and a third hangs broken further back. A street lamp has been bent over above them. Whatever this junction used to be, the wording is now doing double duty.

He stands in the middle of the composition on a heap of wreckage, hands loose at his sides, in a long tan coat over a russet harness and heavy boots. Round goggles with green lenses sit across his eyes, the hair is a flat brown fringe, and the face carries no expression that could be called triumph: it is closer to the look of a man waiting for somebody to arrive.

Four segmented arms fan out around him and they organise the whole picture. Two are painted a corroded green and two a rusted orange brown, each built from dozens of ribbed collars, and they run off the left and right edges of the canvas so that their real length is never given. They are drawn with more care than the coat is.

Along the bottom, in red and blue, lies the other one. The body is face down and turned away across the rubble, one arm folded underneath it, the masked head at the lower right with the webbing on the fabric picked out in fine black line. Rain is falling over everything and a bank of orange fire burns in the buildings at the right. This is oil on a visibly woven canvas, worked thickly, red leading the measurement with orange behind it.

He beat him in their first meeting in 1963, threw him out of a window and left him wondering in the next issue whether to give it up. But the real victory came fifty years later: dying, he swapped minds with him, left the other man in a failing body to expire, and then went out and wore the suit, the name and the life for more than a year, holding down the job with a competence that was in several respects an improvement. Part of our Marvel collection, alongside the same costume turning black down one side of the body and the same hero against another of his opponents.