Rocket Raccoon Flies Through Snow With a Glowing Vial — Print & Oil Painting

Everything in the picture runs on one diagonal from the lower left to the upper right, and he is travelling along it toward us. The body is twisted at the waist, one leg tucked and the other trailing, the tail streaming out behind, and snow crosses the whole frame in short white streaks that all lie parallel to that same line.

He is dressed for the weather in a way nothing else in this group is. A quilted coat in deep teal blue with thick white fur at the collar, the cuffs and the hem, rust red trousers gathered at the knee, and a broad leather strap crossing the chest to carry the load on his back. His head is thrown back and his mouth is open in a laugh with the tongue showing.

Both hands are full. The right is closed around the neck of a bulging sack slung over the shoulder, heavy enough to pull the arm straight. The left holds a glass vessel with a metal cage around it and a screw cap on top, and inside it a cold blue light burns with small pale flecks drifting in suspension. It is the only cool colour anywhere here, and it has been kept deliberately small.

The propulsion is strapped on. A red cylinder is lashed across his lower back with a plain metal ring at the business end, and a wide orange flame comes out of it, lighting the underside of the coat and the trailing leg. Behind all of this the background stays pale: a vast soft disc of a moon or a planet, a rock face at the left, a striped canvas awning cropped at the lower right, and a brightness measurement far up the scale at low saturation.

Improvised is the correct word for that engine. In the stories he is the one who builds the hardware, assembling and modifying weapons and equipment out of whatever the situation leaves lying around, and a lashed on cylinder with a flame at the back is exactly the standard he works to. Nothing on him came out of a factory. From our Marvel collection, alongside the same coat and the same vial, down among glowing eggs and a heavy gold vented cannon carried against a starfield.