A painted fantasy piece rendered in murky greens and purples, unmistakably indebted to Frank Frazetta's brand of pulp fantasy art: a horned, fanged demon warrior wielding a curved red blade looms over a pile of writhing, grappling figures, muscular bodies tangled together in combat at the base of the composition. The atmosphere, hazy purple sky, sickly green ground, single dramatic light source, is straight out of the paperback-cover fantasy tradition Frazetta more or less invented, and Bisley leans into it fully here rather than departing into his own more cartoonish register. Frazetta is, by Bisley's own account, one of his most direct artistic influences, alongside figures as different from each other as Gustav Klimt, Salvador Dalí, Richard Corben, Bill Sienkiewicz and Egon Schiele, a genuinely eclectic mix spanning pulp fantasy illustration, fine-art painting and underground comics. Pieces like this one make the Frazetta connection the most obvious of the bunch: the horned demon's pose, the composition's diagonal thrust from top-left to bottom-right, the sense of frozen mid-battle chaos rather than a clean single moment, all echo the sword-and-sorcery cover art Frazetta produced for decades before Bisley came up. It's worth noting how directly this kind of painted, muscular fantasy work fed into Bisley's comics career too; the same visual instincts that produced covers like this one are what made his Sláine work for 2000 AD land so differently from anything else running in the anthology at the time, treating a Celtic-myth barbarian strip with the same painterly weight usually reserved for standalone fantasy illustration rather than serialized comics.
Lord Tyler battled over a female
