A grim slice of Victorian horror rendered with real cinematic staging. In a shadowed archway a hulking werewolf crouches over a fresh kill, muzzle bloodied, one taloned hand pressed into the victim's chest, the body sprawled limp with a pool of blood spreading dark and glossy across the cobblestones. Deeper in the alley a gas-lit street and rooftops are just visible under a full moon, and closing in from the far end, unaware of what's waiting, a Victorian police constable advances with truncheon raised and a bullseye lantern held out, silhouetted against the moonlit sky. The framing device - a heavy grey mat and black border - presents the piece as a formal print rather than a comic panel, and the rendering itself is dense and painterly, fur picked out in individual textured strokes, blood given real weight and shine rather than flat comic colour. It's a good example of straight horror-illustration Bisley produced outside his 2000 AD and superhero work, closer in spirit to the adult horror material he made for Glenn Danzig's Verotik imprint from the mid-1990s onward than to anything in the Sláine or Judge Dredd continuities - atmospheric, violent and unapologetically gruesome, built to unsettle rather than to thrill in the swashbuckling register of his fantasy pin-ups. The dramatic irony of the approaching, oblivious policeman gives the image a horror-comic beat that a static monster portrait wouldn't have on its own.
Werewolf Painting by Simon Bisley
