A grubby, blackly comic war-comic page unfolds across six panels. A battered, skull-faced robot trooper raises a dented mug in a mocking toast - King and Country! - while grimy liquid sloshes into tin cups held by a scarred, half-wrecked companion. The mood curdles fast: a fist crashes down with a jagged BAM as gunfire erupts, and by the final, largest panel the scene has opened into a full-page reveal - a hulking, heavily plated war-machine strides forward through a blast of sickly yellow light, a massive twin-barrelled cannon braced across its chest, while a soldier in the foreground bellows a very British oath - Oy! Queens knickers!! You there - stand back laddy!! The palette is filthy and industrial, all rust, khaki and gunmetal, broken by hot flashes of muzzle-fire. This is the register Simon Bisley made his name in: he broke into 2000 AD in 1987 after editor Pat Mills spotted a painting Bisley had done of a battered robot cradling a baby and put him straight onto the relaunched ABC Warriors, the strip that first paired his loose, painterly linework with the comic's grim, blackly funny war-machines before he moved on to Sláine and Judge Dredd. The dialogue balloons here carry that same ABC Warriors sensibility - stiff-upper-lip bravado dropped into a scene of total carnage - and the art itself shows the transitional style of that era, ink and wash giving way to fuller painted colour as panels get bigger and the violence gets louder. It is a page built for momentum, small character beats detonating into one huge, cannon-wielding image that needs no caption to explain what is coming next.
They need a tank
