Thanos in Profile Wearing His Golden War Helmet — Print & Oil Painting

The weave of the canvas comes up through the paint everywhere and the handling is blunt on purpose. Broad acrylic strokes are laid in first, black contour lines are drawn back over the top of them, and the highlights go in last as single confident white marks along the brow, the lower lip and the edge of the shoulder. Nothing has been smoothed.

The profile is strict and the crop is tight. He faces left, cut off at the top of the helmet and at the collarbone, and the head takes up most of the sheet. The face is blue violet, the vertical ridges of the chin are stated as three heavy black lines, the brow is one overhanging mass, and the eye sits deep in a socket that has been left almost empty of detail.

The helmet is two separate objects. Over the temple the front section is black with three white bands running down it, and behind that a large tan gold dome covers the back of the skull with its panels marked out in dark line. Below, the shoulder armour is black with a single white edge catching light from somewhere off frame.

The ground is a violet to purple gradient with blue creeping in at the right, brushed on flatly and left alone. Blue leads the measurement with purple second at low saturation, so the whole picture runs on two colours and a contour.

That silhouette was drawn twice. The character came out of a sketchbook belonging to a young artist who had been sitting in a psychology class about the death drive, and the figure in those first drawings was lean. The editor who bought him for a 1973 issue looked at them and told the artist to beef him up, which is how a thin cosmic philosopher turned into the block of a body everybody now recognises. The profile in this painting is the editor's note rather than the artist's first idea. Part of our Marvel collection, next to the same head painted front on in thick oil and the full figure in gold above a smoking field.