Star-Lord Stands on Stone Stairs in a Dim Ruin — Print & Oil Painting

This reads as costume design rather than as an event. The figure stands centred and full length, lit evenly from the front, with every strap, seam, buckle and stitch legible, while the room around him is brushed in loosely and left unresolved. It is the way clothing gets drawn when the drawing exists in order to specify the clothing.

The coat is the subject. Long, dark navy, split at the back and hanging almost to the ankle, it is worn open with a red lining showing along the front edges and at the raised collar. Under it is a panelled blue jacket with red piping, and over that a harness of pale webbing straps crossing the chest and clipping into a heavy brown belt with a rectangular buckle and a pouch at each hip. Red cuffs, dark gloves, grey trousers, worn boots.

He is doing nothing at all. Both hands hang loose and open at his sides, the shoulders are level, the head is turned a few degrees to his right, and the two red lenses of the mask look out without settling on anything. No weapon appears anywhere in the frame.

The room is cold and tall. Two windows behind him let in a flat pale light, broad stone steps climb away on the left, a fallen block sits in the lower left corner and the far end of the space dissolves into blue grey haze. Blue leads the measurement with cyan behind it at low brightness, so the red lining and the red cuffs are the only warm marks in the picture.

For a long stretch of his published life he did not have a crew, he had a ship, and the ship was a person. The vessel he travelled with was itself alive and answered to the name Ship, and the two of them worked their way across the galaxy together for years before any team existed to lead. A picture of one man standing alone in an empty hall with nothing in his hands is a fair portrait of that arrangement. From our Marvel collection, alongside the same mask with one fist raised in the fog and the helmet close up under streaking light.