Loki Wreathed in Swirling Green Magic Flames — Print & Oil Painting

Very little of this canvas is lit, and what light there is has been rationed to one side of one face. The measurement puts it at the bottom of the brightness scale in its group with green leading the hue reading, and the picture earns both numbers honestly: the ground behind the figure is a near black wall of deep pine and charcoal with no edge, no horizon and no architecture in it whatsoever.

The helmet is the drawing. Two long horns rise from the temples in black lacquer, thin at the base and swelling as they curve up and outward, and the brow plate below them is cut into hard angular facets with a pointed centre coming down over the forehead. The face inside is turned three quarters to his left, calm, the mouth closed, one green eye catching a cold highlight and the other in shadow.

His right arm comes across the chest and the hand is held flat with the fingers together, palm down, pointing off to the right. It is not a fist, not a claw and not a casting gesture from any illustrated tradition. It is closer to the movement somebody makes when they are levelling something, and the silver vambrace on that forearm is the brightest object in the picture.

The green does the rest. Curling ribbons of it climb the right side of the canvas and gather in a dense bank behind his shoulder, thinner wisps drift across the armour on the left, and the whole effect sits somewhere between smoke and fire without committing to either. Notably it throws no light onto him at all: it passes in front of and behind the figure without illuminating a single surface.

The trickery in the stories is usually smaller and more domestic than a wall of flame. In the comics' retelling of one of the oldest tales attached to him, he cut the hair off a sleeping goddess for no better reason than that he could, then had to go down to the dwarf smiths Eitri and Brokk and commission a replacement, and it was in that same forge, on that same errand, that his brother's hammer came to be made. His worst behaviour has a habit of producing the weapon that is later used on him. From our Marvel collection, beside the same green worked as mist around a full length figure and white fire breaking out of a raised hand.