Star-Lord Poses With Blaster Drawn and Walkman Trailing — Print & Oil Painting

The colour has been taken almost entirely out of this one. It carries the lowest saturation reading of any canvas in its group and the picture explains itself immediately: the background is a pale mauve grey fog with an enormous dim sphere hanging behind the shoulders and a scatter of dark rubble suspended in it, and nothing anywhere in the frame is strongly coloured except two small red points set in the mask.

The pose belongs to a stage rather than to a fight. He stands with the legs braced wide, the right arm punched straight up above the head with the fist closed and empty, and the left arm hanging loose at his side with a blaster in it, muzzle pointed at the ground and a small cold blue glow burning in its vents. Nothing is aimed at anything.

The clothes are ordinary and worn. A battered leather coat hangs open with the sleeves gone, over a dark sleeveless top, plain trousers and a belt, and the boots go dark before they reach the ground. The mask is the only manufactured looking object on him: two round lenses and a ribbed plate across the lower face, with grey hair swept back over the crown.

One yellow line crosses the whole figure. It leaves a small pale device clipped to his right hip, loops out and around behind his back in a wide curve and comes forward again past the leg. In a picture built entirely from soft grey masses it is the only continuous edge, and the artist has painted it brighter than anything he is wearing.

He came out of a black and white magazine. The character first appeared in January 1976 in the fourth issue of a monochrome anthology title rather than in a colour comic, put together by Steve Englehart with Bob McLeod and Steve Gan, and he spent years being printed in grey wash before anybody gave him a palette. A canvas with almost all the colour drained out of it sits closer to where he started than the rest of this group does. From our Marvel collection, next to the same mask at close range with the cassette player in shot and the same coat, both blasters out against a nebula.