A painted comic splash page titled King of Kings, showing Slaine towering over a sea of tribesmen with a huge sword raised in one hand and a spear tipped in gold light in the other. Speech balloons around the crowd all carry the same chant, Slaine, Slaine, Slaine, as spearpoints and raised fists fill the lower third of the panel and a war banner flaps behind the throng. The composition is classic hero-worship staging, low angle, backlit sun, a single towering figure framed against a mass of followers, the sort of coronation image that closes out a major arc rather than opens one. Simon Bisley's run on Sláine for 2000 AD is what made this kind of image possible in the first place. He joined the weekly in 1987 after editor Pat Mills saw a painting he had done of a robot cradling a baby and offered him work on the relaunched ABC Warriors; Sláine followed soon after, and it was there that Bisley moved decisively away from the flat, linear house style of British comics toward painted, muscular, almost sculptural figures closer in spirit to Frank Frazetta than to anything else running in the anthology at the time. That shift is exactly what a page like this one is built on: Slaine isn't drawn as a slim adventure-strip hero, he's rendered as an oversized, sun-gilded mass of muscle and hair that reads as myth before it reads as narrative. Pat Mills' Sláine was already steeped in Celtic and pseudo-historical mythology, warrior kings, druids, earth goddesses, tribal politics, and Bisley's painted approach gave that mythology a texture that pencil-and-ink work struggled to match. Whatever specific storyline this King of Kings page belongs to, the image itself is doing the job Bisley's Sláine art always did: turning a barbarian-fantasy plot beat into something that looks like it belongs on a record sleeve or a poster, not just a comic page.
King Slaine meets his subjects
