LeChuck Piercing a Voodoo Doll with a Pin — Print & Oil Painting

Bones have been braided into the beard. Work along that black mass and you find a rib, a knuckle, a length of something longer, and a scatter of loose pins, all knotted into hair that has plainly not been out of the water very long. It is the single best decision in the picture.

Above it sits a skull with just enough skin left to be worse than a skull would be: yellow-green stretched over the cheekbone, no nose, a lipless mouth full of stained teeth, two blank white eyes set deep under the brow. The hat is enormous, black, gold-braided, badged with a skull and crossbones, with a dark plume trailing off the back.

The doll is given the same attention. Sackcloth head, one large button eye, a stitched cross on the cheek and a stitched line for a mouth, straggling yellow yarn for hair, a small white shirt. One pin with a skull for a head is already driven in through the crown, and a green hand with long cracked nails is pushing a second in beneath it.

Everything is rendered down to the pore, which is a very different tradition from the flat cartoon this character comes from, and the pale misty green behind, with bare branching trees dissolving into it, is what stops the whole thing tipping over into straight horror illustration. From our Monkey island collection, alongside the standing portrait with the pin held up and the painted cover this figure comes from.