Iron Man Streaks Above Earth's Curved Horizon — Print & Oil Painting

The armour has no colours. Seen from behind and slightly below against a lit sky, the whole suit is charcoal and near black with a hard silver white line running along the top edge of every plate, and the faceplate catches the same cold light along its cheek. There is no red anywhere in this picture and no gold, and the chest lamp is not visible from the angle chosen.

He is flying almost flat. The body runs diagonally across the frame with the head forward and up to the right, the arms swept back along the flanks, the legs together and trailing, and the whole figure occupies perhaps a fifth of the width. One flame leaves the boots at the lower left, white at the core and orange at the edges, short and clean, with a scatter of small sparks shedding away behind it.

Beneath him is a planet. A dark curved mass fills the bottom of the canvas with a fine scatter of tiny amber points spread unevenly across it, which is a city seen from a very long way up at night, and pale blue white light streams in from the upper left across banded cloud.

Blue leads the measurement with cyan second at moderate saturation and low brightness, which is exactly what a black object over a dark planet under a cold sky produces. It is the most restrained treatment of this character anywhere in the catalogue.

Restraint was never the plan. The character was invented in 1963 as a deliberate provocation by an editor who wanted to find out whether he could make readers love somebody they had every reason to dislike: a rich industrialist manufacturing weapons for the army, aimed at a young audience that was against the war. Everything loud about the design comes from that dare. Stripping the suit back to a dark silhouette with one flame behind it quietly undoes the entire pitch. From our Marvel collection, next to the same flight held level in open space on two thrusters and a night crossing of a city with one palm pushed at the viewer.