A painted battle scene rendered in Bisleys signature acid palette of ochre, olive and bruised purple. Slaine rides a rattling wooden war chariot, his tusked, spike-crested helmet thrown back to reveal a snarling, war-painted face as he drives a bare fist into an oncoming horseman. The rearing horse fills the right side of the frame, teeth bared and eyes wild, while a grinning skull-helmed charioteer hauls the reins beside him, his own face more skeletal grotesque than human. The caption reads to strike terror into the enemy, and the composition delivers exactly that: a tangle of straining muscle, tack and harness rendered with an almost sculptural thickness of paint. This kind of image is where Bisleys reputation was forged. After a self-taught childhood spent drawing constantly in Lincolnshire, he was spotted by 2000 AD editor Pat Mills on the strength of a single painting of a robot cradling a baby, and within a couple of years his muscular, painterly take on Sláine had replaced the strips earlier, more cartoonish look entirely. The chariot itself is a nod to the strips pseudo-historical Celtic setting, where Sláines tribe wages war from horse and wheel against rival kings and the monstrous Fomorians. Bisley leans into pure physical violence here rather than sorcery or myth, using foreshortening and a low, chaotic vantage point to put the viewer directly in the crush of the melee, spattered blood and dust rendered as loose, almost abstract flecks of pigment across the horses flank.
Slaine fights horsemen
