Spock Battling Giant Ants on an Alien World — Print & Oil Painting

The ground is alive and it takes the bottom third of the picture. A dozen black insect bodies crowd forward on long jointed legs, some the size of dogs, mandibles curved and open, small green eyes lit in every head, one climbing over the back of another to get closer. They are painted with a hard gloss on the carapace and they have been drawn as a crowd rather than as individuals.

Above them two figures stand back to back and slightly apart. He is in the centre in a blue tunic with a delta badge at the breast and dark trousers, the right arm extended with a small hand weapon aimed off to the right, the face set and turned toward us. A dark haired woman in a pale blue tunic dress and knee boots holds his left arm and points a second weapon the other way, her expression a good deal less composed than his.

The sky behind is the giveaway that this is pulp cover work: a smooth gradient from deep blue at the top through violet into rose and orange at the horizon, two moons of different sizes hanging in it, a scatter of stars, and a low city skyline drawn in a few flat strokes across the far distance. The printing is coarse and slightly out of register, which is part of the charm rather than a fault.

Blue leads the measurement with pink red second at moderate saturation, and the picture is arranged as a triangle: the two figures make the upright and the swarm makes the base, with the empty sky given more room than either.

The character's most famous encounter with something like this went the other way. In a 1967 episode he was sent into a mine after a creature nobody could describe that had been killing the men working there, and instead of using the weapon he put his hands on it and listened: it was the last of its kind, tending a chamber of a million eggs the miners had been breaking up as worthless rock. The episode ends with everybody putting the phasers away. Part of our Star Trek collection, beside the same figure in Victorian dress at a card table and the ship's doctor painted in front of a spiral galaxy.