Rocket Raccoon Snarls in Close-Up, Teeth Bared — Print & Oil Painting

The head fills the entire canvas and runs off three sides of it. This is thick opaque paint on a black ground, and the fur has been built one stroke at a time: hundreds of separate hairs in cream, rust, ochre and umber, each laid down as a single loaded pull of the brush, radiating outward from the muzzle and standing up along the brow. The whiskers are longer versions of the same mark, unbroken from root to tip.

The face is a snarl in progress. The lip has pulled back off the teeth on the near side, exposing one long canine and the dark line of the gum, the nose is a wet black brown mass carrying two hard highlights, and the eyes are a strong red orange with the pupils reduced to slits. The ears are laid back against the skull.

Light arrives from the lower right and it is warm. It rakes across the muzzle and the near cheek, catches the underside of every whisker, and dies out completely a few centimetres behind the ear so that the back of the head merges into the black. Along the very bottom edge a row of pale claws and dark angular shapes catches the same warm light, cropped too tightly to identify.

Red reads first and orange second, at moderate saturation, which is the fur and the light doing all of it, since there is no other colour in the picture at all.

It is worth noting that nothing in this frame is wearing anything. There is no flight suit, no harness, no weapon and no machinery: what is shown is an animal, and that is precisely the reading the character spends his published life refusing. In the stories he was taken as a specimen and rebuilt, genetically and surgically, into something upright that thinks, and he treats the words raccoon, rodent and vermin as insults from anyone who reaches for them. Part of our Marvel collection, next to the same snarl with a cigarette and a heavy gun and the same face drawn calm and smiling in coloured pencil.