Spider-Man Scales a Fire Escape Near Oscorp Tower — Print & Oil Painting

We are standing at the bottom of an alley looking almost straight up, and the whole picture leans with that angle. Brick walls converge toward the top corners, a black iron fire escape climbs the left edge in receding flights, and a bright wedge of blue sky with white cloud opens between the buildings. Two or three sheets of loose paper hang in the air, caught mid fall.

He is on the ironwork at centre right, seen from below and behind, his weight on one bent leg with the other stretched down and his left arm reaching out into the gap. The suit is red and dark navy with white boots and white piping along the arms, and across the back and chest the long legged white spider is stretched over the curve of the body.

The city has been painted with an unusual amount of attention for a background. Orange brick, fire escapes on every facade, a water tower silhouette, painted signs on the walls, and a tall building rising behind him with a long vertical banner hanging down its face. The lettering on that banner is weathered and only partly legible, but the name it carries is Osborn.

Colour is split between the two halves of the frame. Warm orange brick and rust fill the left and bottom, cold blue sky and glass fill the upper right, and the figure lands precisely on the join with red on one side of him and navy on the other. The hue reading leans red overall, which is the brickwork rather than the suit.

That name in the background is not neutral decoration. It belongs to the industrialist whose company has produced more of this hero's enemies than any other source, and to the man who put on the Green Goblin mask himself, and in one widely told version of the story he is standing for public office at the time, which is what a banner that size is usually for. Painting a small figure climbing a back alley underneath it gets the scale of that relationship right. Part of our Marvel collection, alongside the same white spider emblem worked in loose watercolour and the same hero in a hoodie under a red spider emblem.