Star-Lord Draws Twin Blasters Under Streaking Comets — Print & Oil Painting

The crop is aggressive and it decides everything. We get the head and the upper chest only, the mask filling the middle of the frame, and both arms running out of the picture on either side within a hand's width of the shoulders. The composition is a triangle with the point at the top of the helmet.

The mask is the best rendered object in the group. Two large round lenses burn a deep even red, a ribbed circular grille covers the mouth, the brow plate is cut with vents and small fittings, and above the open crown a shock of brown hair stands up untidily. Nothing of the face beneath is visible.

What is in his hands has been left outside the picture. Both arms are thrown wide and cut by the frame edges, and a dark shape with a hard metallic highlight enters at each side at shoulder height, but neither of them resolves into anything: the weapons named in the title are not in the image. What the frame does hold is the strap work of a heavy leather coat and, at the centre of the chest, hanging from a studded leather sling, a small blue and silver personal cassette player with its window open on a yellow labelled tape, its maker's name printed down the side and a thin black lead running up out of it toward the helmet.

The rest is light. Gold and white beams streak across the whole canvas on a steep diagonal from the lower left, a teal green nebula fills the upper corners and a dull orange glow rises at the bottom. Red leads the measurement with a spring green second, at moderate saturation and moderate brightness.

Everything human on him is deliberate. He was born on Earth to a human mother and grew up there, and his father turned out to be the heir to a galactic throne whose ship had come down in the Rocky Mountains. When that father later took the throne, one of his acts was to declare Earth closed to outside contact altogether. A man in an alien helmet with a piece of ordinary Earth electronics strapped to his chest is carrying that argument around with him. From our Marvel collection, beside the same yellow lead trailing from a raised fist and both blasters visible, aimed into a nebula.