Star-Lord Perches on a Cliff Beneath Distant Planets — Print & Oil Painting

Everything in this one is drawn before it is painted. Contours are firm and continuous, colour is laid in three or four flat steps inside them, shadow is handled as shape rather than as gradient, and there is no rendered texture on any surface. The artist has inked a signature into the rock at the lower right.

He is standing on the lip of a rock shelf that enters from the bottom right corner, one leg straight and the other bent, the feet well apart and the toe of the forward boot right at the edge. His right arm is raised beside the head with a stubby twin barrelled blaster held muzzle up, and his left arm is thrown out to the side with the hand open and the fingers spread.

The costume is red and grey. A red coat flares out behind him and reads almost as a cape, worn over a pale shirt open at the collar with a dark strap crossed over it, a wide studded belt at the waist, grey trousers wrapped at the calf and heavy boots. Orange hair stands up above the mask, and the two red lenses are the only lit points on the whole figure.

Behind him the sky is a starfield with two worlds in it. A small pale grey moon sits at the left at his shoulder height, and a much larger blue and white marbled planet fills the right side with its cloud bands drawn as flat interlocking swirls. Blue reads first and cyan second at moderate saturation.

The title was handed to him rather than chosen. In the earliest stories a being called the Master of the Sun selected him, equipped him and named him Star-Lord, so the order of events runs backwards from the way these things usually go: he was given the costume before the crew and the name before the reputation, and spent the following decades catching up with both. Part of our Marvel collection, next to the same coat and mask in a cold empty hall and one of the crew he eventually acquired, alone with a cannon.