Thor Screams Beneath a Winged Helm in the Storm — Print & Oil Painting

The cloak takes two thirds of the canvas. It falls from his shoulders in enormous crimson masses, painted wet and dragged, and across all of it the artist has drawn a network of fine lighter red lines that loop and interlock like knotwork stitched into the cloth. It is the most worked surface in the picture and it holds almost all of the colour.

Above it he is shouting. The helm is silver with two large wings sweeping up and back from the temples, pale hair escapes below it, the beard is grey blond, and the mouth is open with the head tipped back. Three round silver bosses run down the centre of the breastplate and an articulated gauntlet closes at the wrist.

The hammer is at the lower right, held in the right hand and half swallowed by its own light. Blue white current wraps the head, climbs the forearm and jumps away in short forks, and the same colour appears again in the sky behind his shoulder. Everything else is storm painted in greys and blacks with no edges anywhere.

The measurement puts brightness very low with crimson as the leading hue, which is what happens when the only large lit area is red cloth in the dark.

The end of the world is a recurring appointment for these characters rather than a threat. Their mythology is written as a cycle in which the realm is destroyed, the gods die and the whole thing is rebuilt to run again, and the comics eventually let him do something about it: in 2004 he went to the root of the world tree and destroyed the loom that was weaving the story, which stopped the repetition by ending it. A picture of him shouting into a storm sits inside that loop. Part of our Marvel collection, alongside the same shout with lightning down both empty arms and his father seated between the two ravens.