A vertical painted figure study of Sláine mid-transformation, his body swollen and knotted with grotesquely exaggerated muscle, veins bulging along straining forearms as he hoists a stone axe overhead with both fists. His face has gone feral, red-eyed, teeth bared in a rictus grin beneath a wild black mane, and a tusked, silver boar or wolf-head buckle glints at his waist. The background dissolves into a rough, splattered wash of grey and white, evoking either mist, spray or sheer painterly abstraction, so that nothing distracts from the sheer mass of the figure filling the frame. This is Sláine mid-warp-spasm, the strips signature berserker transformation in which the hero channels the power of the Earth Goddess and grows monstrously in size and strength, a device co-creator Pat Mills built directly into the character from the start as a way to escalate the strips violence to operatic extremes. Bisleys painted style was purpose-built for exactly this kind of image: thick, sculptural brushwork that makes muscle read like carved stone, and a willingness to push proportion into the genuinely monstrous rather than merely heroic, which is a large part of why his run redefined how the character looked to readers. He arrived on the strip in the late 1980s after Pat Mills, then editing 2000 AD, put him on the newly relaunched ABC Warriors on the strength of an early painting of a robot cradling a baby, and it was on Sláine, more than any other title, that his taste for pushing anatomy past realism into full mythic exaggeration found its natural home.
Slaine grows
