An inked comic panel captioned with a wry editorial note: the next few pages of Ukko's manuscript are written in a frenzied scrawl and are almost illegible, setting up the image below as a piece of in-world, unreliable storytelling rather than straightforward narration. The art shows a wild-haired, wide-eyed figure gripping a knife, teeth bared, surrounded by scraps of scrawled parchment, while a speech balloon fills in what the illegible scribbling supposedly says: Hack... Slay... Screaming... Blood... Maim... Disembowel..., a blunt, escalating litany that undercuts its own narrator with dark comedy. Ukko is a supporting character from the Sláine strip, generally played as comic relief, a bard or storyteller whose tall tales run alongside Sláine's actual adventures, and this panel is a good example of how Pat Mills and his collaborators used Ukko to poke fun at the series' own conventions, undercutting the high mythic drama of Sláine's main story with a narrator who's clearly making at least some of it up as he goes. Bisley's linework here is loose and scratchy rather than fully painted, favoring wild, energetic scribbles that mirror the frenzied handwriting the caption describes, form matching content in a way that's easy to miss on a quick read. It's a small, self-aware joke embedded in a series that otherwise takes its Celtic-mythology world-building fairly seriously, and it shows the kind of tonal range Sláine as a strip, and Bisley as its signature artist through much of the late 1980s and early 1990s, was capable of within a single page.
Not all of Ukko’’s stories are great
