An extreme close-up of a monstrous, horned head, rendered in wet, glistening reds and browns, the flesh around its jaw torn and raw, jagged teeth bared in a expression somewhere between grimace and grin. A speech balloon has it declaring eyes without life, sundered heads, piles of carcasses, these are pleasing words to me, framing the figure as a creature that draws pleasure from slaughter rather than one recoiling from it. The teal-striped background flattens the space around the head, forcing total attention onto the wound-like texture of the face itself, curved horns sweeping back like a rams, skin painted with the same thick, almost sculptural brushwork Bisley uses for muscle elsewhere, here turned toward pure grotesquerie instead. Whether read as villain or as Sláine himself transfigured by violence into something monstrous, the image sits comfortably within the strips recurring interest in bodies pushed past ordinary human limits, whether through the warp-spasm berserker transformation or through outright corruption, and it shows Bisleys range beyond heroic figure painting into something closer to horror illustration, a register he would lean into further in his 1990s work for Glenn Danzigs Verotik line. That later collaboration, ongoing since 1994, pushed Bisley deeper into explicit horror and body-transformation imagery, and a close study like this, all wound and tooth and no surrounding context, shows the same fascination with flesh under stress that runs through both his mainstream comics work and his more adult-oriented projects.
Slaine starts to come back to life
