A comedic interior panel built almost entirely around dialogue rather than action: Lobo, mid-frame with his usual sneer and wild black mane, spits in disgust while grumbling that he's kind of busy right now. Around him a jester-hatted old woman scolds someone off-panel for making them angry too, another masked figure snaps zip it, you, and a row of red-tinted onlookers in the theater seats behind them watch the scene unfold. It's a good example of the comic register Bisley and his collaborators used for Lobo as often as they used outright carnage, character-actor bickering dressed up with exaggerated expressions and blunt dialogue. The elderly woman here, chains and jewelry dangling from a bony wrist, sharp-nosed and irritable, is drawn with the same grotesque exaggeration Bisley applied to monsters and villains elsewhere in his work, nobody in a Lobo comic gets drawn kindly. Lobo's design in this panel, the spiked black hair, the red eyes, the fanged sneer, is the version Bisley helped lock in when DC brought him on with writers Alan Grant and Keith Giffen to relaunch the character in the late 1980s and early 1990s; before that redesign Lobo had been a minor, mostly forgettable villain, and it was Bisley's harder, uglier, funnier take on the character that turned him into one of DC's signature cult properties through Lobo: The Last Czarnian and Lobo's Back. What sells this particular panel isn't spectacle, it's comic timing, a bounty hunter too tired to deal with an old lady's family drama, which is exactly the kind of self-aware absurdity that made the character work as satire and not just as another edgy antihero riding the era's grimdark trends.
Lobo’’s old lady
