A dense black-and-white ink illustration, likely a cover or pin-up piece, showing Sláine at the center of a full-tilt melee. He plants his feet atop a pile of skulls and fallen bodies, an axe raised in one fist and a long dagger in the other, hair standing on end in wild, electrified spikes. Two grotesque, tusked or horned attackers close in from either side, one already sprawled beneath his boots, while a flock of birds wheels overhead against a ruined, crumbling tower in the far background. The linework is dense and confident, built from thick contour strokes and cross-hatched shadow rather than color, which forces every ounce of drama into pure composition and gesture. Bisley trained himself largely without formal art school, drawing obsessively from childhood and citing Frank Frazetta, Richard Corben and Bill Sienkiewicz among his influences, and a piece like this shows that lineage plainly: a mythic barbarian hero rendered with the same heroic, over-muscled bravado as a Frazetta paperback cover, but pushed further into grotesque exaggeration. The skull pile beneath his feet is a recurring motif across the Sláine strip, a visual shorthand for the character existing constantly among the dead, whether his enemies or, in some of the darker stories, his own tribe. Uncolored pieces like this circulated widely as pin-ups and poster art in their own right, prized by readers for showing Bisleys draftsmanship without any of the atmospheric softening that paint could introduce, and it remains one of the most reproduced single images from his years on the strip.
Slaine fights with an axe
