The Art of Simon Bisley

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I think if someone’s making money out of it, I’ve got a big problem with that. But I think if they are making… press a button, you can make something look like mine or similar to that style, people do that physically anyway, paint it… so they’re kind of doing it. This is just the shit version. Yeah! Yeah. I mean what have I been doing already if not that without the computer? What does any artist do with their influences? Well that’s interesting to think about now. So you encapsulate all these different influences. It’s just done in new ways. Huh. I dunno. It does make it interesting though, eh? It's a mixed bag in many ways, both good and bad. Sometimes the sudden shift in tone are hilarious and work excellently for the story, and sometimes they are just that, abrupt jokes that make you cringe. At times you can almost feel the grandeur of the legend being told and at times you've no idea what is happening and why, where it's all leading to and what happened before. Okay. Good. Brilliant. Anyway, traction these days…I think my prices are more than they used to be. So you just tend to get the guys who specialize. Well, what I’ve noticed is there’s a lot more new faces. Things have moved forward. So you get a lot of young faces now. I’ve become like the old guard. I’m one of the old guys, do you know what I mean?

Simon was still in art school when a friend of his passed along an illo to Pat Mills at Fleetway Comics in the UK. The standard blurb goes something like this: Because you’ve written about it. Because it’s getting a reaction one way or another. If you hate it and you’re reacting negative about it, that’s still a reaction. It’s not about liking something or admiring the ability behind it or anything else. I use pretentious in this context because it’s active consciousness. Non-pretentious art is natural. Nature creates the art. If you take something out of nature and put it in an environment for it to be observed and considered, then that’s pretentious, isn’t it?

laughs] Well, I mean, pretentiousness is a consciousness of art as it’s being presented and regarded. Talking with Grant, we were talking about the purest form of art – so to do art and to do real art is to do something that would be so utterly unconscious, unpretentious and unconscious. Why paint anything at all? Why even bother? If you’re doing fine art and you want to paint something for yourself, why bother at all? Because when you paint you’re considering a lot of things. How are people going to react to it? Am I going to be a great artist or am I going to be a bad artist? Shall I do this or not do it? If somebody has doubts about it, you’re being pretentious because you’re not really actually doing what you really want to do. They put flags on the balls, but Jesus, dogs have balls. I mean, come on! Listen, doesn’t it seem absurd to you that you would hide the balls? Dogs have balls in real life! We do the same thing– we hide nipples! We hide nipples in comics under the T-shirt of a woman – or even a man! It seems odd. A brief word on another character who almost steals the show from our hero - Slaine’s nemesis Weird Slough Feg, squatting within his noisome ‘mystic aura’. With a Yoda-like turn of phrase, denoting extreme age and anachronistic speech patterns, he has some of the best lines you’ll read in any comic anywhere:

Especially when you take into account, again, even from the last time we talked , just how much of yourself you’re trying to put into your work. And when it becomes an unconscious stream of creation – Kao što i Toppi-ja vredi kupiti pre svega zbog crteža, tako ne žalim ni što sam Slaine-a kupila. Moram priznati da je ovo jedno od najboljih Komikovih izdanja koje posedujem. ER. "International Miscellanea: 1993 UK Comic Art Awards," The Comics Journal #161 (August 1993), p. 40. Duncan, Randy; Smith, Matthew J. (2013). Icons of the American Comic Book: From Captain America to Wonder Woman, Volume 1. p.332. ISBN 9780313399237.Uniting the tribes would also bring together their greatest weapons but would also lead Sláine on a journey of exploration as he meets with the Earth Goddess to learn more about the past, when Goddesses ruled the earth, and about the relationship of the tribes to her. His discoveries would lead him to not only to become the High King, but to become the new Horned God. The Horned God is not only the 'husband' of the Earth Goddess, but also means he has to replace the old Horned God, which turns out to be Slough Feg, who is suppose to have died at the end of his reign, but clings on to life, driving him insane. I was about to say, IP probably makes that really difficult. Like working with pre-established characters and histories and all that pressure must add a layer of conscious expectation.

Is there any distinction for you when it comes to labeling something as fine art in comics in terms of digital versus traditional mediums? Simon Bisley is a British comic book artist best known for his 1990s work on ABC Warriors, Lobo and Sláine. Well..it’s all art. Clearly it’s another form of art; it’s another tool. You’ve got to live with the fact that this is the way it’s going, and it’s the way things have progressed. I don’t regard digital as fine art as much as I would physical art with a traditional medium. I like digital, but when it comes to an original piece – the first of something – then I say, “Well, why am I staring at a print?” Sorry, mate. I’m not interested in print as the original. I want to see what else happened in it first. With brand new scans and in its oversized format, Sláine: The Horned God Anniversary Edition promises to bring one of comics’ greatest sagas to live in a way never before seen!

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I can imagine that if you still offered it people would absolutely still pay you in beer. They’d probably pay you in as much as the equivalent of your pricing if you requested it [laughs]