A savage single image, all crimson spatter and coiled muscle. A wild-maned blonde warrior woman - bare but for a strip of red loincloth - drives her whole body downward, axe raised overhead a beat before impact, her face twisted into a war-scream. Beneath her a hulking green-skinned orc, horned and tusked, is already crumpling, blood blooming from a wound on its skull as it lets out a strangled RGH! A severed, staring head lies half-buried at the bottom of the frame, and a fallen sword hilt pokes from the gore-streaked ground. The palette is almost monochrome - dried-blood maroon and dirty ochre - so the one bright note is the woman's tumbling gold hair, the visual anchor of the whole composition. This kind of scene is squarely in the tradition Bisley is best known for: the brutal, myth-soaked violence of Sláine, the 2000 AD strip created by writer Pat Mills and built on a pseudo-Celtic world of tribes, druids and monstrous Fomorian raiders. Bisley's painted, muscular, larger-than-life take on that material - all thick brushwork, gore and heroic anatomy - is widely credited with redefining Sláine's whole visual identity when he took over the art in the late 1980s, moving it from tidy linework into something closer to painted myth. Whether this particular blonde is meant as Sláine's own warrior-queen ally or one of the strip's many similarly-built female fighters, the image trades entirely in that world's grammar - a lone figure, outnumbered and outsized, winning through sheer ferocity against something monstrous and green.
This blonde brains the orc
