Secret of Monkey Island Special Edition Cover — Print & Oil Painting

Everything here has an outline. The composition of the older painted cover has been redrawn in clean cartoon line and filled with flat bright colour, so that the jungle reads as separate leaves, the skull reads as one grey shape, and every character can be told apart at thumbnail size. It is a redraw made for screens rather than for a shop shelf.

The skull still dominates the middle, but the sockets are cleaner, the teeth are neater and the growth on its brow is arranged rather than tangled. Behind it on the right a ship sits in a green bay under lit cliffs, and at the left a stepped stone ruin climbs out of the foliage with a carved head at its foot.

The cast along the bottom has been recast as comedy. A blond young man with a tall swept quiff grins out over a cutlass held rather too casually; a red-haired woman in a purple bodice and gold hoops leans in at the left with a blade of her own; a bearded pirate and a man in a blue headscarf crowd the space between them, a small monkey looks up from below, and a scowling figure in red fills the right edge. Furthest left, a masked tribal figure with a spear and purple flowers watches the lot of them.

The title is set in gold with a banner beneath it, and the yellows and greens have been pushed hard enough to make the whole panel glow. Held against its predecessor it shows what nearly twenty years of changing technique does to one idea. It sits in our Monkey island collection, next to the original painting it redraws and the waterfront at night.