Rocket Raccoon Stands Among Glowing Eggs in a Cave — Print & Oil Painting

The whole floor of this cave is alive with light. Dozens of large eggs are packed edge to edge in every direction, lit from inside in amber, orange, red and a few in green and teal, and they recede into the dark until they become nothing but dots. Pink red tendrils hang down from the roof, and away on the left a pale grey creature lies slumped among the shells.

He is bent forward at the centre, one clawed foot braced on the nearest egg, working. His hands are on a thin tripod stand carrying a glass cylinder with a metal cap, and the cylinder is filling with a cold violet white liquid drawn up through a fine tube pushed into the shell beneath it. The head is down and the eyes are on the job.

The garment is the one seen elsewhere in this group: quilted teal blue, deep white fur banding the collar and the cuffs, over rust red trousers. Against the heat of the eggs that blue reads almost as a cut out, and the artist has let the reflected orange climb the underside of the fur.

The measurement returns red as the leading hue with crimson behind it, moderate on both saturation and brightness, and the reason for that moderation is the amount of near black in the roof and the far distance holding the fire down.

Being small is the qualification here. In the stories his size is treated as an operational asset rather than a joke: he is the one sent into the ducting, the crawlspace and the nest, because he is the only member of any team he has served on who fits, and because the work needs hands rather than strength. A picture of him crouched alone in a chamber nobody else could enter is a picture of the job description. Part of our Marvel collection, alongside the same coat and vial, laughing his way out through snow and a gold vented cannon carried against a blue starfield.