A colorful, chaotic comic page featuring Simon Coldwater, a creator-owned character from Bisley's own personal strip, caught in a brawl against a group of grotesque, brightly colored attackers labeled in a bold caption as the Sassy Assassins. A tiger-striped, clawed creature lunges at the center of the panel while masked, painted-faced figures close in from both sides, dialogue balloons offering little more than a country and a sarcastic how's ya father, undercutting the violence with the same dry, absurdist humor found scattered throughout Bisley's other work. Simon Coldwater is one of Bisley's own creator-owned characters, developed outside his higher-profile work on licensed properties like Sláine, Judge Dredd and Lobo, and pages like this one show him applying the same dense, high-energy comic-page instincts to his own creation as he did to DC and 2000 AD's biggest names, garish color, tightly packed panels, oddball supporting cast and villains rendered with maximum grotesque exaggeration. The Sassy Assassins as a group name is a good example of the kind of tongue-in-cheek naming convention that runs through a lot of Bisley's less mainstream, more personal work, playing the whole scene for cartoonish spectacle rather than straight menace despite the violence on display. It's a useful counterpoint to the higher-profile licensed work that makes up most of this gallery, a reminder that alongside redesigning Lobo and drawing Sláine, Bisley was also building and drawing his own characters and stories on the side.
Simon Coldwater vs the Sassy Assassins
