Baby Groot Reaches for the Detonator Button — Print & Oil Painting

One finger is doing all the work and it has not landed yet. The near arm comes forward over a metal case and a single twig of a forefinger hovers a centimetre or two above two red domed buttons, angled toward the left hand one. The hand is relaxed, the wrist is loose, and nothing about the gesture suggests that a decision has been made.

The device underneath has been painted with the attention normally given to a face. It is a scuffed olive case with a raised panel, two upright toggle levers standing at the centre, the pair of red domes to their left, a row of small fittings along the front and two crimson webbing straps buckled across the whole thing. Every scratch on the lid has been put there deliberately.

He is small behind it and made of wood. Bark grain runs the length of the arms and up the neck, the shoulders and crown carry a moss green fuzz, the chest is a pale tan, and the whole figure has been painted in thick oil on a canvas whose weave shows through the thinner passages. The eyes are two large black domes with a single catchlight each and the mouth is open a little, which is the only expression available to him.

Behind all this the ground is a wide swirl of teal, jade and cobalt turning slowly around the head like an aurora, and the case sits on a dark rippled blue surface that is never explained. Cyan leads the measurement with green cyan second at high saturation, and the wood is the only warm colour anywhere in the picture.

The scene being quoted is a gag about instructions: flick this switch, then this switch, then press this button, and whatever you do not touch that one, because that one kills everybody at once. It is worth remembering that the character began somewhere else entirely, arriving in a 1960 monster comic as the Monarch of Planet X, a talking tree who came to carry off an entire town for laboratory study and spoke in complete, rather formal sentences. From our Marvel collection, next to the raccoon who wrote those instructions, snarling over a cigarette and the captain of the same crew with his blaster drawn.