Hulk Charges in Posterized Blue and Yellow — Print & Oil Painting

The image has been broken down into slabs. Every form in it, the figure and the space alike, is built from flat irregular patches of colour with hard cut edges and no gradient inside them, as though a photograph had been reduced to a dozen tones and printed from a stencil. Some of the patches are a centimetre across and some run half the width of the square.

He occupies the lower middle, head and shoulders, with both arms raised and cropped off by the side edges. The face survives the treatment better than the body does: a heavy brow in olive, the eyes as two dark wedges, the mouth open on a row of pale teeth, black hair blocked in above. Below the collarbone the chest dissolves almost completely into the pattern.

What has gone is the green. Cyan leads the measurement with yellow second, the brightness is the highest of the Hulk canvases here, and large parts of the body have been given over to pale blue, cream and lemon, with true green surviving only in the face and along one arm. The picture has recoloured its own subject.

It would not be the first time. He was grey in his first issue in 1962 and the printer could not hold the tone, returning it mottled and inconsistent from page to page, so the writer had the colourist change him to green for the second issue on the practical ground that nobody else in the line was using it. The most recognisable colour in comics is a workaround for a press that could not mix a neutral. Part of our Marvel collection, alongside the same green stated at full strength in crossed arms and the same figure rotted and lit by green fog.