This cover painting for Slaine: The Horned God Book 1 is one of Simon Bisley's definitive statements on the character. Slaine stands mid-stride in tartan-wrapped armour, antlers rising from a helmet fused to his skull, a bone-white sword raised over his head trailing lightning while a red-bladed dagger drips gore in his other fist. Behind him a skull-faced spectre looms with its own vast rack of antlers, echoing and doubling his silhouette, as if the Horned God itself walks at his shoulder. The palette is almost entirely blood-red and iron-grey, broken only by scattered wildflowers at his feet and, at the bottom of the frame, a green cauldron holding a small sleeping lion cub, a quiet, strange detail amid the carnage. Bisley, born in Lincolnshire in 1962 and self-taught as an artist from childhood, got his start at 2000 AD in 1987 after editor Pat Mills saw a painting of a robot cradling a baby and put him straight onto the relaunched ABC Warriors before handing him Slaine. It was Bisley's painted, mythic, hyper-muscular style that redefined how the character looked on the page, and this Horned God run, built on Mills's Celtic and pseudo-historical mythology of tribes, druids and the Earth Goddess, is widely considered the high point of that collaboration. The composition pushes the reader's eye upward along the twin blades toward the antlers, a triangular thrust of violence and ritual that turns a comic cover into a piece of full-blown fantasy iconography. The lettering and Book 1 badge in the corner root it as packaging, but the painting itself stands on its own as one of Bisley's most iconic single images of the warrior-king.
Slaine The Horned God
