An extreme close-up of a monstrous, fanged mouth thrown wide open in a roar, blood smeared across the lips and teeth, with a speech balloon overhead reading Show her red slaughter. The framing is claustrophobic and confrontational, filling almost the entire panel with gnashing canines and a black cavernous throat, forcing the viewer into uncomfortable proximity with pure animal rage. Bisley renders the skin in mottled ochre and brown with heavy cross-hatched shadow around the eyes, giving the creature a texture that feels closer to hide than human flesh, while the curved fangs catch a cold highlight that makes them read as freshly bloodied weapons rather than simple anatomy. This kind of maximalist, in-your-face horror panel is characteristic of the visceral energy Bisley brought to British comics after his 1987 breakthrough at 2000 AD, where editor Pat Mills, struck by an early painting of a robot cradling a baby, put him on the relaunched ABC Warriors and then Slaine, letting his taste for grotesque, painterly extremity run loose on the page. There's no wider scene to contextualise the image, no background, no other figures, just the mouth and the dialogue commanding violence, which is precisely the point: it isolates a single moment of pure menace and lets it fill the frame completely. The dialogue balloon supplies the only narrative information, suggesting this creature is being goaded or ordered into brutality by someone off-panel, adding a note of dread about what happens next once that mouth closes on its target.
Slaughter time
