A close, intimate portrait of Sláine crouched or seated against a flat sea-green background, his black hair standing in a wild spiked crest above a face marked with a bright red war-stripe. He wears a heavy fur mantle over a loose white shirt, one arm draped across his knee, a silvered wolf or boar skull worked into his shoulder harness catching cool light against the warm ochre of his skin. At his feet, partially cropped by the panel edge, sit at least two human skulls, one threaded with a cord as though carried as a grim souvenir. The pose is relaxed rather than aggressive, more a study of the character at rest than in battle, letting Bisleys color and texture work carry the image: the shaggy, individually stroked fur of the mantle, the smooth painted metal of the skull ornament, the softer flat wash of the background all playing off one another. Its a good example of how much of the Sláine strips visual identity rested on accessories and trophies, skulls, bone jewelry, animal-skull armor pieces, as much as on the figure of Sláine himself, each object a small piece of narrative shorthand about the violence of his world. The flat, saturated green backdrop is typical of the pin-up and cover work Bisley produced alongside the ongoing strip, stripping away setting entirely so the figure and its trophies can be studied in isolation, functioning almost as a character sheet for readers encountering this particular design of Sláine, tattoos, jewelry, fur and bone, for the first time.
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