Another vertical study of Sláine locked in full warp-spasm, arms flung overhead gripping a heavy axe, every muscle group rendered as an over-inflated knot of sinew beneath torn, blood-darkened skin. His face has curdled into something closer to a demon than a man, black hair standing on end, eyes reduced to two burning red points, mouth wrenched into a snarl. A pale tusked buckle sits at his hip, one of the few calm, detailed passages in an otherwise churning, almost molten composition, with the grey-white background dissolving into rough spattered texture that could be snow, ash or simply raw unblended paint. This is the culmination of the warp-spasm device that writer Pat Mills built into the Sláine strip from its earliest 2000 AD installments, letting the ordinarily merely huge hero swell further into a genuinely monstrous killing machine whenever he draws on the Earth Goddesss power. Bisleys painted style, thick, almost sculptural layers of pigment built up to model muscle like carved rock, arrived on the strip in the late 1980s and permanently shifted its visual identity away from cleaner, more traditional adventure-comic art toward something closer to a Frank Frazetta painting brought to violent, moving life. That shift proved formative for the character going forward, this warp-spasm silhouette, hulking, red-eyed, barely contained by the panel border, became the image most readers associate with Sláine at his most dangerous, eclipsing the comparatively restrained earlier art the strip had used before Bisleys arrival.
Slaine has fully transformed into a monster
