A tall, narrow crop of a painted fantasy figure: a woman with wild, wind-blown red hair, chained at the wrists in a strange restraint bridging her chest, twists dramatically above a coiled green serpent baring its fangs at the bottom of the frame. The elongated, portrait-style composition emphasizes her upward, twisting pose, hair whipping upward as if caught in a sudden gust, giving the piece a sense of violent motion frozen at its peak. There's a real Klimt-adjacent quality to the color and pattern work in pieces like this one, and it's not a coincidence; Bisley has cited Gustav Klimt as a direct influence on his art, an unusual reference point for a comic-book and fantasy illustrator, alongside more expected touchstones like Frank Frazetta and Richard Corben. The decorative, almost ornamental restraint chain across the woman's chest and the stylized rendering of her hair both carry a whiff of that fine-art influence even within an unmistakably pulp-fantasy subject. The narrow, elongated format also suggests this piece may have been produced specifically as a spine-panel or a tall promotional illustration rather than a standard cover, the kind of format comics publishers occasionally commissioned for posters, bookmarks, or vertical display pieces. Whatever its original use, the combination of restrained, decorative detail and raw pulp-fantasy subject matter, a chained woman, a menacing serpent, is a good snapshot of how widely Bisley's influences ranged beyond just other comic artists, pulling as much from painters and illustrators working entirely outside the comics medium as from anyone working inside it.
Red head and a snake
