Thor Stands Amid Crackling Lightning Bolts — Print & Oil Painting

He is standing still and everything around him is not. Branching bolts of cyan white fill the entire frame, in front of the figure as well as behind it, forking at every scale from thick trunks near the edges down to hair fine filaments, and behind them the sky is a grey green wall of storm cloud with no opening anywhere.

The head is bare. Cropped fair hair, a short beard, and both eyes burning a flat white blue with the light spilling out onto the cheekbones and the bridge of the nose, so the sockets read as two lamps rather than as eyes. The expression around them is completely calm.

The armour is dark and matte: black leather and dull bronze plate over the chest, cut into overlapping panels, with a large gold disc at the sternum and a smaller one on each shoulder. The arms are bare from the shoulder down and heavily modelled, and below the waist the plate breaks into hanging banded strips over dark trousers.

Both hands are empty. They hang open at his sides with the fingers slightly curled, doing nothing at all, and the artist has kept them low in the frame and in shadow so that the eye goes to the face and stays there. Cyan leads the measurement with blue behind it, saturation at half, brightness low.

An empty handed picture of this character is the accurate one. The weather is not a property of the hammer: the comics are consistent that the lightning belongs to him, that the hammer is a conduit which helps him aim and shape it rather than the thing that produces it, and that he was calling storms before it was ever put in his hand. Painting him with nothing to hold and lightning in every corner of the frame is stating the ownership correctly. From our Marvel collection, next to the same figure charging forward with the hammer alight and a roar with current running through both open hands.