2000AD Covers Uncovered

Jon Davis-Hunt - A Bonny (and Clyde) Cover!

2012-01-26T12:07:00.000-08:00

Wow! What a fantastic, action-packed wraparound cover for this months' Megazine by the truly wonderful Jon Davis-Hunt! I love all the little details in this image and one or two message boarders are going to be very happy when they see the finished image!

As ever, Jon has been kind enough to send a detailed breakdown of each and every step, so over to him to tell you more...

"This was the initial sketch I worked up from a thumbnail I sent Tharg. The thumbnail itself is frankly appalling so I haven't included it here. : )" What a wimp! - Pete.

"Anyway, it got across to Tharg the concept of the cover which was the important thing - I really wanted to have this very high-octane, kinetic scene with some Juves escaping from a bank-job, not realising that Dredd is simply waiting for them to fly by. I really wanted to try and capture that 'Holy shit..' moment as realisation dawned on the face of the escaping Juve that he's about to get hi-exe'd!"

"In the original I had the escaping juves driving a hover car. On sketching out this rough however, I realised that my dimensions were wildly off in my thumbnail and so substituted the car for a bike, as the former just wouldn't fit. However, I think it's kind of cool that the bad-guys are on a bike, which mirrors Dredd's parked Lawmaster."

"I then inked the main characters. I had to shrink Dredd slightly from my original sketch, just to ensure that he was a comfortable fit for the front cover and to make sure he wasn't interfering with the Megazine logo too much.

I also added the extra character onto the back of the hover-bike, just to make the back-cover shot more dynamic and to balance out the bike. I decided to make the 2nd juve a girl, and imagined them as a kind of Mega-City version of Bonny and Clyde!"

Jon continues "I then inked in the background. I used Mr Ben Willsher's design for the Lawmaster as I think it looks so god damn cool in the Prog, but I gave it a set of retro lights from the old Lawmaster, just because I thought they might look sweet."

"I then flatted in the colours for the characters. I went with a bright red for the hover-bike to act as a sharp contrast to Dredd's Lawmaster. When I flat, I tend to use quite de-saturated colours as I like then going more saturated later..." The bright red bike also has a look of Akira's bike, which we all know Jon loves!

"Next I added in all the shadows and highlights. I spent a fair bit of time on the hover-bike, adding grime and decals to give it a really 'used' look, so you feel like these guys have been pulling jobs on a regular basis." And just check out those decals, we seem to have a Worley sticker and a Buttonman one - are this twisted pair fans of a letter writing loony from Paisley!?!

"I then added in the background colours. I hadn't been able to decide what weather or time of day to do this at, but once I had chosen the red for the hover-bike, I knew I wanted to have a bright blue sky to set it against so that it would really pop out from the back-cover. I darkened down the area around Dredd to contrast and then started to add some shadowing and form to the buildings."

"Finally I lit the scene trying to take into account as many of the lights, screens and neon signs I had drawn in at random. : )

This took a little bit of time as I had stuff emitting light all over the place, but eventually (with some degree of artistic license) I managed to get everything sitting right on the page." Check out the graffiti too, nice to see our favourite podcasting couple get a mention!

Once again thanks to Jon for sending us such an amazing breakdown of an excellent, truly memorable cover! I can't wait till I've got this in my hands!

Prog 1767 - The Great Cover of London.

2012-01-21T06:37:00.000-08:00

London's burning thanks to this astounding cover by the always brilliant Tiernen Trevallion. The image depicts Inspector Absalom on his mobile phone in Pudding Lane circa 1666 (I bet he still gets a better reception than mine) as London's past begins to haunt the present.

Below is Tiernen's initial roughs to help him get his composition spot on. Note the child in the bottom left-hand corner who didn't make the final cut and the surprise appearance of Freddie Mercury on the bottom right...

Next, the wonderful, wonderful inks. I think I say it with every post but for me, Tiernen is one of the most exciting artists to emerge in years. While I hate to compare artists, I can definitely see shades of Kev O'Neill, Mick McMahon and a little bit of Jock in the image below. His style is absolutely magnificent, the suggestion of fire is brilliant and the whole piece has a suitably woodcut feel...

Finally, the wonderful colours, simply stunning.

This cover really is a work of genius. From the excellent use of complementary colours, the superb, almost xylographic inking and clever little touches such as the ripples in the puddle and little orange sparks. The artist, if you excuse the pun, was certainly on fire here!

If you haven't already, please visit Tiernen's site, I promise you won't be sorry!

Cliff Robinson - Bad Dog!

2012-01-14T23:51:00.001-08:00

Cliff Robinson is back with his seventh* scrotnig Strontium Dog cover. The image shows our favourite bounty hunter getting all tooled up, ready to go on a job to find out who's trying to kill him (again!)

Cliff says "Here are a few bits'n'bobs 'n' odds'n'sods, the files include a few abandoned ideas..."

The first of those abandoned ideas, which I absolutely love, is this excellent close up of a rather angry Johnny giving the reader a face full of Electronux!

The second rough, which mirrors events in this weeks' story fairly closely, shows Middenface McNulty handing Johnny his trademark helmet...

A different approach was decided upon and Cliff went on to ink this version of the cover which, quote "Neither Tharg nor myself cared for very much..."

The eagle eyed among you will notice on this version that Cliff has made the right arm bigger and moved Johnny's trademark Westinghouse blaster...

Ever the professional, Cliff went back and re-inked virtually the whole image. He says "As you can see, for the finished cover I scavenged bits I liked from the original inked version. Waste not, want not!"

Below we can see how the physical artwork looks today. Cliff continues "I'll go back and finish the inks properly one day, particularly if anyone should want to buy the original (hint, hint!)"

It seems that at some point McNulty was going to make it back onto the cover though this seems to have been abandoned for a more iconic image...
Once Cliff and Tharg were happy with the inks, the image was whisked off through an inter-dimensional portal to wunder colourist Dylan Teague who really made the image pop. Cliff is delighted with the job Dylan has done, he says "Please give Dylan a big mention, I think he's made my drawing look better than it deserves to be!"

Thanks, as ever, to the brilliant Cliff for sending the images. He had a hectic weekend but still took time out to find these 'bits and bobs' for us. A genuinely lovely fella!

* Six Strony Prog covers and one Strony-themed Big Finish Audio cover.

EDIT - And finally thanks to the fantastic Dylan Teague for sending the final, coloured cover image. Another excellent cover from the dream team of Robinson and Teague!

Steve Yeowell - Wedding Day Dots

2012-01-07T04:22:00.000-08:00

Hats off to the legendary Steve Yeowell who gives us this wonderfully melodramatic, Lichtenstein-inspired cover for prog 1765. The cover, featuring Dante and, of course, a sobbing Jenna lends itself brilliantly to the work of famed pop art visionary Roy Lichtenstein.

Initially, however, the cover was simply a heart wrenching scene from the story, with the pop art idea introduced later. Here's master draughtsman Steve's perfect pencils for the image...

Followed by some typically clever inking...

Next are the flat colours. It was at this point that the Lichtenstein idea was mooted. Steve says "The Lichtenstein idea was suggested by Tharg after seeing the final cover colours..."

Below is a copy of the dot screen version Steve did at the mighty one's request. However, Steve continues "Later Tharg asked for a layered version of the un-filtered cover so the production department could put together the cover now in print..."

And below is that final printed version.

Of course 2000AD has a long tradition of riffing on established artist's work. From memory, I've put some below. We've had Gustav Klimt by Duncan Fegredo...

Gilbert and George and Andy Warhol by Dave Hine...

Banksy by Jock...
This wonderful surrealist Dredd by the (much missed) Mick Austin...

And of course, this year's cover winner, D'Israeli's Hokusai cover.

Can you think of any more?

Many, many thanks to Steve Yeowell for sending the images, it's great to see a 2000AD artist doing a pastiche of an artist who used to pastiche comic artists!

2000AD Cover of the Year Vote 2011 - The Result!

2012-01-03T05:01:00.000-08:00

The results of the great 2000AD cover vote for 2011 are in! They have been meticulously checked and then even more meticulouslyer double checked by myself, then independently checked (and, of course, corrected) by KTT winner the Emperor, to whom I'd like to send a million thanks!

Over 60 people took the time to vote on the 2000AD messageboard, this blog and the brilliant ECBT2000AD blog. I'd like to say thanks to those for taking the time to do so.

So, onto he results! The winner, by an absolute landslide is D'Israeli's Hokasi inspired Dirty Frank cover of Prog 1752. Simply beautiful!

Readers with longer memories will recall that this is the second time in three years that the D'emon D'raughtsman has won, you can see his earlier winning entry here.

In second place is Greg Staples' amazing wraparound for relaunch issue Prog 1750...

Cliff Robinson's bloomin' brilliant Dredd cover for Prog 1738 claimed joint third place...

with Henry Flint's incredibly original Shakara cover of Prog 1725.

Fourth place again went to Henry Flint for this marvellous Dredd piece of Prog 1763.

The fifth spot went to Liam Sharp for his highly cinematic Flesh cover for Prog 1724...

Bubbling under were three crackers, the first by Henry Flint (again!)

Second by newcomer Garry Brown...

And finally the brilliant 1729 by another cover debutant, James Mackay!

Well done to all winners in this fantastic competition!

Prog 1764 - Loving the Alien!

2011-12-29T10:50:00.000-08:00

The brilliant Karl Richardson kicks off 2012 with an absolute stunner of a cover! This terrifying image is for his and Dan Abnett's excellent new strip, Grey Area. The story centres around a group of ETC officers (that's Exo Transfer Patrol to you and me) who police the wonderfully titled 'Grey Area', a temporary holding zone for Extra Terrestrial visitors to Earth.

With many of the aliens' beliefs, characteristics, physical and/or chemical make up unknown, it's a haphazard and very, very dangerous job. The latest addition to the squad is Birdy, the female operative surrounded by those scary looking beasties...

Below is Karl's initial sketch, looking back at my emails he sent this in August!
A few more aliens muscle in on this version of the cover as Karl continues to add and more sumptuous detail (I love the cap!)
The next revision shows the hilarious toothy alien in the background replaced by the mean looking dude with the neck! Karl has also begun to work his magic on the nasty looking creature on the right...
The aliens are just about finished and work begins on poor Birdy...
Almost there as Birdy takes shape...
And, ever the perfectionist, Karl tweaks and refines the image to get it just right! I think he was pleased with it, he said "I've found it the most enjoyable, yet frustrating cover all in one go!"

This is truly an outstanding cover. The composition is fantastic, the design work on the aliens is incredible and the colours absolutely pop! I'm a huge fan of Karl's work and am thrilled to see him back in the prog.

As mentioned previously, Karl really is a perfectionist. Below is a comparison of a splash page which he went back to tweak as he wasn't happy with it. Can you spot the differences? If you can, report to ETC for immediate conscription!

Finally, I thought I'd use this post as an excuse to once again share my wonderful Karl Richardson commission. It's a breathtaking piece that's absolutely jam packed with cool, intricate little details, it looks stunning in the flesh!

Thanks to Karl for the many updates! This cover really is fantastic and may well be a contender for cover of the year 2012! Also, early reviews of Grey Area seem overwhelmingly positive with everyone raving about Karl's incredible art.

I can't wait to see where the story takes us!

Jock - Return of the King of Cool!

2011-12-21T12:53:00.000-08:00

Hooray, Christmas has come early as I'm delighted to be able to share the work of the brilliant, brilliant Jock with you today! The artist has returned to the prog in fine style, producing an excellent cover for the the cover for the Free Comic Book Day prog (May 5th 2012 this year folks!)

Jock has kindly sent me his stunning roughs and final image for the cover, so let's have a look!

I love the first one, and I know Jock liked it too, particularly the Droste effect (Google it, I had too!) This wasn't chosen but let's hope Tharg commissions this image at a later date...

The next mean and moody image is the one that was chosen...
However Jock explains "Keith Richardson wanted more characters on the cover so we included Ichabod Azriel and Zombo. Nice to get a chance to draw Dom and Henry's characters though!"
And here are another couple of sketches, maaaaan Dredd looks hard as nails in 'em!

With the final design chosen, here's an early version...
Followed by the fantastic finished image. Wow, those colours really pop!
Jock is an astounding talent who's cool, iconic images are used again and again. Let's remind ourselves of some of his classic work. Selfishly, the first is probably my all time favourite 2000AD cover, the wraparound for prog 1450, perfect...

Closely followed by another of my all time favourite Dredd images...
Next up, the modern classic that was the cover to Megazine 4.02...
Next, here's the artwork for the first ever Dreddcon, held way back in 2000...
Next up, the cover of Prog 1304. Another strong image that has been used countless times, and understandably so!
Finally the stunning Dreddhead that was used as the official 2000AD T-Shirt design at the San Diego Comic Con this year...
Since getting his break in 2000AD, Jock's career has gone from strength to strength, becoming a cover artist for several massive titles as well as being co-creator of The Losers with long time collaborator Andy Diggle. Luckily for us, the dyamic duo of Diggle and Jock will be returning to the pages of the Megazine soon with their new project, the very cool sounding 'Snapshot!'

Thanks to Jock for sending those brilliant images, I've been beaming all day! Please visit his website to be further blown away by his work!

Rowan's Claws are coming to town!

2011-12-19T23:21:00.000-08:00

Here is a Christmas treat from friend of the blog, the brilliant Jon Davis Hunt. It's a step by step of the circuit-shattering teaser image for Age of the Wolf 2 from Prog 2012! The sequel to this year's snow-covered, werewolf battling extravaganza is once again written by Alec Worley with gorgeous art by Jon. Over to Jon to tell us more...

"This was the original sketch that I did for the teaser, based on the 2nd idea I had. The first idea was a bit more complicated, so I decided to actually save that for a cover." (Can't wait for that! - Pete) "I wanted the teaser to be fairly simple and well, 'teaserish' so figured an iconic shot of Rowan would work best. I also wanted it to be clear that this had moved on from the first story, which was pretty much set in winter and entirely in a blizzard, so added in the leaves and foliage. I thought this would kind of make Rowan herself appear 'wolfish', peering out from the undergrowth like a predator."

"I initially inked the face first, just to get the dimensions spot on. This piece was done entirely in Photoshop, so I didn't bother worrying about the hair and leaves at this point as I new I was going to draw them on a separate layer." (I absolutely adore this image, deceptively simple and so beautiful - Pete)
"I then added in the hair and Rowan's iconic hood which gives her a kind of kick-ass Red Riding Hood vibe. The hair I drew on a separate layer and then filled in with white so that it sat over the previous inks for the face."
With the stunning inks done, Jon begins the colouring process - "Flat colours were then added to get my palette correct."
"And then I added form and shading to bring the colours to life a bit more..."
"Finally, I drew in the leaves on a host of layers, using a slight blurring effect on several to add depth. I then lit the scene to give a sense of sunshine falling through undergrowth. Looking at it now, I could probably have done with adding some volumetric lighting effects too. Curse you hindsight!!!!!!!" Thanks to Jon for sending those beautiful images. I for one can't wait for the AOTW2 as the first book was easily one of my stand out strips of 2011. Alec Worley is easily one of the best horror writers around at the moment (his 3hriller was terrifying!) and Jon's cinematic artwork always blows me away.

Still, I've got to agree about the volumetric lighting in the final, tut tut (Pete scurries away to find out what on earth volumetric lighting effects are...)

Prog 2012 - A 3hriller by Greg Staples

2011-12-18T00:20:00.000-08:00

You'll all have all seen this by now but here's the beautiful end of year cover by the brilliant Greg Staples. And I'm sure you'll agree that Greg's third prestigious Christmas Prog cover is an absolutely wonderful image. Dredd's uniform looks so real and Greg has obviously used a photo of himself from the Judge Minty film as reference too, brilliant!

It's a fantastic end to a brilliant year of covers. Grud bless us everyone!

2000AD Cover of Year Vote 2011

2011-12-11T02:48:00.000-08:00

Please head over to the 2000AD Forum and vote for the 2000AD cover of the year. Full instructions can be found at the link but basically you choose THREE favourites with 3 points going to your favourite, 2 for second favourite and 1 point for your third favourite.

Voting closes at midnight on 2nd January 2012. If, for some strange reason , you're not a member of the 2000AD message board, then you can vote for your favourites by commenting on this thread.

Click on each months' worth of covers for a bigger version. If you want to know more about the creation of each cover then use the search bar at the top of this screen.

Thanks in advance for all who take the time to vote!

Henry Flint...

2011-12-05T13:16:00.000-08:00

is a genius. The End.

EDIT - Henry found his rough, it's ace!!!

Tiernen Travellion - Have Your-elf a Meggy Little Christmas!

2011-12-04T00:02:00.000-08:00

Hey, remember that amazing Christmas story where Dredd was attacked by a demonic horde of robot elves at the city bottom? No? Me neither, but it's one story I'd bloody LOVE to read! We can get a glimpse of could have been on the cover of this months' Meazine, courtesy of the fevered imagination of the brilliant Tiernen Travellion. What a Christmas treat!

Below, we can see Tiernen's mad scribblings. I assume he was under full supervision by the warden and a couple of burly orderlies when given the sharp pencil to draw with...
Next, the freaking incredible inks...
Here Tiernen has blocked out the erm... blocks, giving a general idea of colour for the cover. I love the yellows and blue here, they give a wonderfully wintry feel which really gives a festive flavour...
And the final image which is just brilliant, easily one of my favourite covers of the year. The scene itself is fantastic and the little details such as the candy cane colours, the damage to Dredd's uniform and the sexy lady Santa droid are the icing on a rather fantastic Christmas cake!

This isn't the first time Tiernen has unleashed glorious, disgusting little festive pixies on the world. Here are some delightful images from Christmases gone by, mental...

I hope we see lots more of Tiernen's work in the prog in the coming months, he's easily my favourite artist to have come along in recent years. Obviously, I'm not alone in my appreciation of his work, over on the Comic Art Fans website, an art collector known as "Bad Company" recently got this amazing commission done based on the Warlord story from Prog 451-455. How cool does Dredd look here?

Thanks to Tiernen for sending the images, please check out his outstandingly good site here, he's done lots of updates recently which are stunning!

Lee Garbett - Angel Falling...

2011-11-29T23:15:00.000-08:00

A very welcome return to artdroid Lee Garbett who has produced this cracking cover to prog 1762, featuring a rather scary Maggie Roth about to crack some heads!

Lee was last seen in the Galaxy's greatest in 2006 where he provided brilliant art on the fantastic story London Falling, by Si Spurrier. This gruesome, self contained tale was a horror story exploring a range of monsters from folklore and the power of belief. Lee provided wonderful art which saw numerous mythical beasties rampaging around London committing a range of atrocities, the highlights including the horrific murder of the Queen as well as carnage at the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race. True 2000AD subversion!

Since then, Lee has gone on to big things, providing many covers for publishers such as DC and working high profile storiessuch as 'The Return of Bruce Wayne' and the relaunch of Batgirl.

Below are Lee's roughs for the cover, all of which I really love. I don't think I could have chosen a favourite...

Next up are the pencils, over at his blog, Lee says "Once we had the idea down I set about the finished drawing. I decided to let Angel hang in space a little more in the final piece.."

The pencils were then inked and coloured by David Baron (check out his site for some ace colouring video tutorials.)

Lee was pleased with the final result, praising 2000AD's brilliant design team. he says "Matt and the designers at 2000AD did a great job of recognising and maintaining the negative space. A lot of folks get fearful of that and try to fill it with words or ask to add another character etc which can destroy the balance but here it's allowed to breathe..."

Why not treat yourself to a visit to Lee's blog where you can enjoy some of his great artwork? We'll finish with some great Garbett images of yesteryear, starting with a wicked Dredd and Hershey...

Followed by a Quitely-esque Missionary Man...

And finally this brilliantly moody Dredd which I've always loved!

Dirty Frank - Trained to kill!

2011-11-24T09:53:00.000-08:00

An absolutely explosive cover to mark the end of (hopefully) the current series of Low Life. Dirty Frank and Dirty Judge Aimee Nixon, slug it out atop a high speed train in Hondo City, could you ask for more? The cover is, of course, by bona fide artistic genius D'Israeli who has been kind enough to send a brilliantly detailed master-class of his creative process as well as links to some freeby files!

Over to Matt, who begins with his brief as decreed by the Mighty One: “Frank and Aimee struggling on top of the train, maybe viewed so we see the length of the train beyond them and the drop and the city around them. Frank is holding Aimee down, other fist raised, Aimee's gun coming out of her robot arm.”

Matt begins "Once I started sketching out the design I made one small tweak which was to have Amy’s gun firing close by Frank’s head - I thought that without that sense of immediate threat to Frank’s life, the image of a big, hairy guy holding down and about to punch a woman would have looked a bit dodgy!" Ha ha, I see what you mean!

The first stage is done in Manga Studio Ex 4, I'll ket you know when we switch to Photoshop...

Below we see Matt's rough sketch Matt's first sketch to get an idea of how the cover will look: "First try at the composition. I actually think this is a better drawing than the one I went with, but the figures don’t fill the frame as well. By moving around to the right and getting a bit lower, the figures fill the frame better, and I think there’s a bit more sense of impact..."

"I’d built a template file in Manga Studio for the previous Lowlife cover - this contains various drawing layers with colour options set as I want them (Manga Studio can be set so you can only draw with one colour per layer - I use colour coding for the different stages of the drawing). The template also has 2000AD’s own cover guide embedded, so I know how much space will be taken up by the logo and barcodes.

I use Manga Studio’s perspective rulers to set up a three-point perspective grid (on a perspective ruler layer, right-click any vanishing point with the Object Selector Tool (fig 2a) which gives you a dialog box with controls for colour and number of lines that radiate from that vanishing point (fig 2b). Manga Studio famously has Perspective Rulers that force you to draw straight lines in perspective, but here I’m drawing curvy Dredd-world architecture, so I just want to know where the perspective lines run so I can draw curves around them.

I draw in rough “skeletons” for the figures and a quick indication of where the train’s going to go. At this stage getting the figures the right size, in the right place and the right pose is the main thing."

Fig 2a

Fig 2b

Next onto Matt's rough pencils, he continues "At this point I’m blocking in the figures and the background (this is what I’ll send to Matt Smith for approval). I’m thinking in broad terms here - for example, Frank’s face is a bit crude, but I’ll fix that at the next stage."

"One of the problems of drawing with a Wacom tablet is it’s easy to lose track of what scale you’re working at, and end up fiddling around with details so tiny they’ll barely print. Though I dislike drawing with real pencils (one of my reasons for switching to digital was so I could draw from the start with truly erasable pen), I’ve started using Manga Studio’s Pencil Tool for roughing and pencilling, because the lines break up into dot patterns if I enlarge too much (fig 3a shows maximum scale at which lines display normally, fig 3b shows lines breaking up into dots, signalling you’re working at too large a scale.) This feature literally helps me keep things in proportion!"

"One place I have used Manga Studio’s Perspective Rulers is for the “speed” lines around the edges of the frame."

Fig 3a - Normal lines...

Fig 3b - Lines breaking up.

Time to tighten up those pencils, "Here I’m tidying up the figures and adding more detail. I don’t usually bother fine-tuning backgrounds, since with digital it’s easy to erase and correct drawing done at the inking stage..."

"Next we see my inked outlines over pencils. I use five or six layers for my inks, separating out foreground from background and allowing me to isolate the grey outlines of Aimee’s suit, which I’ll want to convert to colour at some point."

As D'Israeli continues to ink, the image really begins to take shape. "Here are the inks with blacks - the blacks again are on their own set of layers - this lets me separate the black of Aimee’s suit (which will stay solid black) from the black of Frank’s hair (which will be filled with texture.)"

Below, we see D'Israeli begin to add his “Flats” - "On a layer below all the others I start filling the different parts of the drawing with flat colour. I use Manga Studio’s Paint Bucket Tool for this - like Photoshop’s Paint Bucket, it can use lines from other layers to constrain the fills, but also it can be set to ignore small gaps, much reducing the constant “flooding” you get with the Paint Bucket in Photoshop. It can also be set to automatically expand the fill a set number of pixels under the surrounding outlines.

Since I started using Manga Studio, I’ve switched over to doing all my basic “flatting” in that program. It’s startlingly faster than using Photoshop, and I’d recommend anyone doing a lot of colouring to try it. Photoshop is still much better for the more sophisticated stuff, though..."

Next the artist begins to add some of the yucky details "I've added bloodstains and reflections to the pool of blood under the figures. As well as the colouring, I add two layers that I’ll process later in Photoshop (for clarity, I’ve hidden the colouring in the following examples, but it’s still there)"

Onto shading - "I know I want the foreground figures to be in shadow (so the muzzle flash from Aimee’s gun will look more dramatic.) On a new layer, I fill the areas I want shaded in grey. I’ll change this later in Photoshop."

This leads us nicely to some of Matt's exquisite texture work as he begins to work on a layer of 'Grot!' - "Grot - Frank’s face and hands are meant to be permanently grimy. On a new layer I add fills to the areas I’ll want to have the “grot” texture. Again, this awaits more work in Photoshop."

Phew, with all the preliminary work done, it's time to change programs "WITH ALL LAYERS MADE VISIBLE, I EXPORT THE FILE FROM MANGA STUDIO IN PHOTOSHOP FORMAT."

"Manga Studio can export at various sizes and resolutions but the best method I’ve found is to export at 600dpi (giving best quality from the Manga Studio file) and then reducing to a more manageable 400dpi using Photoshop’s Image Size function with “Resample Image” set to “Nearest Neighbour (preserve hard edges)". 400dpi is the lowest resolution where the image will print smoothly without the image pixels being visible as little “steps” on hard edges. At lower resolutions you can use a slight blurring (anti-aliasing) to hide the stepping, but it makes making selections and fills a bit more fiddly..."

Back to adding Grot - "In Photoshop, I go to the layer containing the blue “grot” mask. I Lock Transparency for that layer, fill the blue areas with white (Edit: Fill) and then set the Layer Blend Mode to Multiply, which makes the white fill transparent. Since locking transparency means I can only work on areas of that layer that have been filled, I can now dab texture onto Frank’s face and hands (using a texture brush of my own making) and the texture will only appear in the areas I defined."

"On the layer containing the black of Frank’s hair, I again Lock Transparancy and set the Blend Mode to Multiply. Using the Paint Bucket Tool (with the “Anti-Alias”, “Contiguous” and “All Layers” check boxes all unchecked), I fill the blacks in one go with a texture I made previously (by picking “Pattern” from the “Foreground” pull-down menu in the upper menu bar.)"

Matt has very kindly shared some of his textures "If you want to try some of my texture fills, you can download a set from http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1357329/04-04-09%20Lowlife%20Grot%20Textures.pat . The patterns should be compatible with CS3 or later (it’s worth trying if you have an earlier version of Photoshop). For help in loading the patterns, run Photoshop Help and type “Manage pattern libraries and presets” into the search bar."

"Shading - I went to the layer I’d set up as a shading mask (four pictures up - Pete,) and, you guessed it, Locked Transparency, set Blend Mode to Multiply, and used Edit: Fill to fill the shaded area with a light blue-grey (it’s the colour of the body of the train in the background). Setting Blend Mode to Multiply means that everything under the blue shadow is tinted as if I’d put a watercolour wash over it."

"I now want to tint everything that’s not shaded blue with a pale yellow tint to indicate evening sunlight. The easy way to do that is as follows:

1) Make sure you’re on the layer with the shading.

2) Go Select: Load Selection…

3) A dialog box will appear with two pull down menus. The top one will have the name of the current document. Leave that alone. The bottom one should say “(name of layer you’re on) Transparency” (if it doesn’t, pull down the pull-down list and pick it). Click OK.

4) All the shadow-stuff will be selected. Go Select: Select Inverse and now everything that’s not shadow-stuff is selected.

5) Make a new layer and pick the colour of your choice (in this case, a nice light yellow) from the Photoshop Swatches.

6) Edit: Fill

7) Adjust the transparency slider of the layer until underlying colour are showing through as you wish (in this case the colour is a highlight, so I’m not setting the Blend Mode to Multiply - I actually want the yellow to obscure the underlying colour a bit, as if I were doing a glaze with oils or acrylics.)

This method looks a bit complicated, but it has the advantage that you can make a “counter-fill” of things containing gradations or soft edges in a way that just won’t work with the Paint Bucket or Magic Wand tools."

"Modelling - at this point I make a couple of new layers below the outlines but above the colours - one will be for shading, and is set to Blend Mode: Multiply so the contents will darken what’s below them like a wash. Another has Blend Mode: Normal but Opacity set to 50% to give me highlights (like using semi-opaque acrylic paint.)"

"I dislike the very soft shading often produced with Photoshop, so I use either the Pencil Tool or the Lasso Tool (plus Edit: Fill) to draw in my highlight and shadow areas. I use the same grey-blue as before for shading. Highlights are either the pale yellow from the background (for highlights coming from the right) or a pale blue (reflected light from the sky) coming from the left. That extra pale blue helps both to define the shapes of the figures and to “pop” them forward from the background. I also add some gradations to the roof of the train and the blood puddle under the figures (to select small areas of fiddly colour, try drawing round them with the Lasso Tool then using Select: Colour Range…)"

"I don’t want all my shadows and highlights to be entirely hard-edged, so I use an adapted Photoshop brush to soften some of the edges. This brush is quite hard-edged, but pressure sensitive, and leaves an effect a bit like brush strokes. I have a set of Photoshop brushes available for download here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1357329/04-04-09%20Matt%20Tool%20Presets.tpl - to load them, run Photoshop Help and enter “Load, save, and manage brush presets” into the search bar. Once loaded, the brushes will appear in a pull-down list at the top-left of the screen when you have the Brush Tool selected. The ones I’ve mentioned here are called “Brush Tool Hard Round (size)” and come in several sizes."

Almost there, but I'll be honest, I don't want this fascinating tutorial to end! "Muzzle flash and glow - the final step was to add an orange-yellow glow to Frank’s face and chest from the flash of Aimee’s gun. This was done in the same way as described in the previous paragraph. A circular gradation was added around the muzzle flash to give it a bit more “pop!”

The very final stage is conversion to CMYK mode and flattening to TIFF format before sending to 2000AD via FTP."

Simply, simply stunning! It's humbling to see a real draughtsman at work and a privilege to be able to share his talent with you. Thanks so much to Matt for being so kind with his time and for those brilliant free resources. Please remember to visit his fantatically informative blog here for more pearls of wisdom and really in depth articles on the creative process.

Chris Weston - Talented Bugger!

2011-11-14T06:04:00.000-08:00

Well, it looks like Indigo Prime's seamsters have been tinkering with time again; this time they've plucked their own artist from twenty years ago and made him paint this amazingly gross cover! Yup, veteran artdroid Chris Weston has returned to produce this gloriously nasty image for the current Indigo Prime tale, 'Anthropocalypse'.

Older readers will remember with joy Chris' earlier work in John Smith's multiverse, particularly their classic Killing Time, featuring agents Winwood and Cord and a certain time travelling Victorian serial killer...

Below we see Chris' bonkersly detailed 'rough' (rough, blimey!?!) ?It features Indigo Prime agent Spacesick Steve, who is trapped in a diseased reality where Earth is being overrun by giant creepy crawlies - ugh!

From the rough we have these glorious inks. Chris' attention to detail is always stunning and this belter of a cover is no different...
And finally, the stomach churning finished product....
In my opinion, this cover is bursting with pure, old skool 2000AD Thrillpower! It completely captures the magic of those early 'Supercovers' by the likes of Bolland, Lopez and Ferrer which would often featured poor Earthlings at the mercy of horrific giant beasties. Stunning work.

EDIT - I asked Chris about this and he said "That was EXACTLY what I was going for. That thought genuinely crossed my mind. I just wish i could have given the little boy the following superfluous speech bubble : "Kill me, mummy, before the insects eat my guts!" Quick, someone Photoshop one on!

Thanks to Chris for sending the images - remember to visit his brilliant website here and his wonderful blog here.

Mark Harrison - Pun-gent!

2011-11-12T05:09:00.000-08:00

Mark Harrison is Rebellion's head concept designer and maaaan, does it show! Every aspect of every cover he does is considered to the nth degree and absolutely packed with research and revisions. This brilliant cover to Megazine 317 is no different, as you'll discover as you read on.

When I contacted Mark, I congratulated him on having a Meg cover with the most cringe-worthy tag line in 2000AD's long history. Resyk-Hell was the offending tag line (Recycle, geddit?) and Mark proudly told me that he was responsible for that stinker! For shame!

I also asked Mark about his change of style here. I pride myself on being able to identify an artist's work on sight but this cover threw me. Mark said "A lot of the image was based on photo imagery, specifically the Judge Minty fan stuff. At one point I was digitally painting up Greg Staples as Dredd, artist painting a fellow artist as a comic character in a costume created by fans....!" Cool! Check out the Judge Minty site here to see more!

Mark takes us through the creative process - "It's pretty tough to come up with a new Dredd pose that's also cool, but it's probably going to be the execution that will mark it out as different. So with that in mind, take a look at these 4 dredd poses, and take account of the second sheet (no colour) that has some additional ideas."

Tharg was happy with the initial ideas, saying "Thanks for the cover sketches. I like no 1 the best in terms of Dredd’s pose, and I like the reddy orange colour scheme..."

Moving forward, Mark has some vivid, nightmarish visions of Resyk, particularly the processes involved in breaking down bodies and the ambience of the place as a result. He says "I have it in mind that the basic background has a hellish reddy orange glow, the idea that Resyk is "Hell" and that'll be reinforced with lots of billowing steam rising up, think of the carbon freezing chamber in The Empire Strikes Back."

Mark explains "I imagine the conveyor belt being spot lit, patches of dark and light. There's some nice accidentals that sell the "ResykHELL vibe - giving it a broiling billowing steam look of Hades with a demonic face/maw - looking body processor (part garbage truck, wood clipper and meat grinder) at the end of a conveyor belt.

Conveyor belt steams for added dynamism; there's steam pumped through drainage holes plus pools of boiling water used to clean the bodies- something I learned from my abattoir ref. I blurred the bodies to suggest heat haze but also to kill the graphicness.

There's lots of arterial pipes pumping fluids to other areas for processing. Funnily enough all this references a little know 80's horror film "Razorback" (about a Giant Boar terrorising the Outback,) very hot and humid."

So below we can see Mark's version of Resyk's fearsome conveyor belt...

Now to Dredd - "Dredd is in a patch of dark but just passing under a close focus spot of white light that is picking out his head and shoulders in natural colours. The rest fades off in both detail and colours.

I felt the image need something more and I don't know if this is the case but I recall resyk uses digestive nozzles to break down the bodies, or they are at least showered in boiling water (I've looked at enough abattoir stuff to know this is the case!) I've imagined the lawman has had a bit of a shower which gives me the excuse for wet streaming Dredd which makes it a little different and dynamic. Dredd's got an almost religious look about him too. A Hellish image!"

Mark continues "He has a Clint Eastwood scowl. Clint was the coolest guy in the planet in the 70's! I find that chewing a bee look to be a bit caricature so I'm just going with disdain!" Yup, those lips are definitely Clint's...

Again, Tharg was pleased with how the cover was going (or as pleased as the migty one gets,) with only a minor quibble, saying "I’m not sure about the ‘wet look’, it doesn’t happen in the story (Dredd just chases the perp into Resyk) and I think it’s just going make the reader wonder why Dredd’s stepped out of the shower. So can we keep him dry?"

Mark also had a few colour tweaks for the image too, he said "I found knocking back the green gloved arm into "red light" help focus the attention on Dredd's face, where it should be. See it without and see how it all looks a little too cut out. Resyk was pretty detailed but don't fall in love with the background so I blurred it."

And with that, Tharg was very pleased with the cover. He said says "A very nightmarish version of Resyk. Good pun, too!" For once, I must face the wrath of Tharg and disagree, while the image is excellent, the pun is awful! Almost as bad as mine for this article!

Below is a wallpaper which Mark has kindly done for us, including his favourite bit. I'll let him explain "My fave bit is the eye you can just see through the visor. Once you see that the expression has more intensity. With: Intense! Without: Passive disdain! That's the problem with a helmeted character (and one the film will have to deal with) you loose a lot of expression without the eyes to convey nuance."

As a further bonus, Mark has included his helmet study. "I've also attached a helmet workout I did to try and figure out the bloody thing..."

Thanks yet again to Mark there for another fascinating walk-through of his creative process. I always look forward to an email form him as they are always jam packed with details and imaginative commentary. Remember, you can see more of Mark's brilliant work here.

Clint Langley - Mean Machine!

2011-11-06T09:15:00.000-08:00

Wow, another wonderful Clint Langley cover for Day of Chaos. What's not to love about Dredd looking mean and moody astride his Lawmaster hunting for perps?

If you love this, be sure to check out American Reaper in the Megazine which features brain melting photo-manipulated artwork by Clint and a bonkers script from Pat Mills that is absolutely bursting with amazing ideas - downloadable dresses, neon tattoos, Aeroblasting (kind of reverse bungee jumping to thumping music) and literal identity theft, brilliant!

Below are the pencils for this cover which are just beautiful....
Thanks to Clint for the covers, what a lovely guy! Be sure to check out his website, Facebook page and the Repeat Offenders website, the publishing company he's set up with Pat Mills and Jeremy Davis. If American Reaper (which has already been optioned for a movie) is anything to go by, then you can count me in as a loyal customer!

Zar-Staz!

2011-11-03T14:07:00.000-07:00

Stak! What a brilliant cover to premier fanzine Zarjaz by the superb Staz Johnson! Yes Earthlets, the latest issue of Zarjaz is available to buy from the Quaequam Blog and at the forthcoming Thought Bubble con.

This issue is absolutely packed to the rafters with work from tomorrows' big writers and artists. As well as Rogue Trooper, there are tales from Dredd, Robohunter, ABC Warriors, Bad Company and much, much more! Quick, get yerself over to the Quaequam Blog and order a copy or two!

Below we can see Staz's wonderful inks for the cover...
The image is based on the rather familiar looking cover from master artist Frank Frazetta shown below. Frazetta is the inspiration of many, many, many 2000AD artists, please check out this rather amazing Frazetta gallery here, it's stunning.

The cover is familiar looking as the original, 46 year old image was used as the inspiration for this classic Glimmer Rats cover by Rebellion concept artist, the fantastic Mark Harrison.

Unfortunately, Frazella never directly contributed to the Galaxy's greatest however he did famously paint Dredd busting Alfred E Newman for the cover of Mad Magazine.

Thanks to Zarjaz editor Bolt for sending the images. Remember to buy a copy of Zarjaz today!

Simon Davis' biggest fan!

2011-10-31T13:48:00.000-07:00

That man Simon Davis is back with another perfectly designed and executed cover for the galaxy's greatest! The cover features Ampney Crucus (hopefully) rescuing his loyal Butler Eddie Cromwell from the tentacles of an utter rotter in a rather horrific alternate dimension.

Below is Simon's rough, which shows a much tighter shot than the finished design. Hmmm, I really like this...
And again, that rather spiffing final image. Top show from the Davis chap, what?

Thanks to Simon for sending the rough and Pye for the finished cover!

Neil Roberts - Look-In' Good!

2011-10-29T02:35:00.000-07:00

My word, what a brilliant cover by digital master, Neil Roberts! It's criminal that the shelf life of our beloved prog is only a week when droids such as he are regularly creating such stunning images!

Neil has a written an excellent piece on his blog about the cover which is for new thrill Angel Zero. The artist discusses his love of Look In, the hugely popular television-based comic of the seventies, eighties and nineties which I'm sure many readers will fondly remember. The comic featured the work of many 2000AD artists, including legendary Angel Zero artist John Burns as well as the brilliant Arthur Ranson. Many of the covers were often painted by renowned film poster artist Arnaldo Pitzu, who's work had a profound effect on young Master Roberts!

Pitzu's bold colour palette was the inspiration for Neil's cover. You can see how he has taken the lush purples and greens from the covers below and used them as the basis for the background of his own dazzling creation.

Below we can see Neil's initial sketches for the cover...

And, of course, it would not be a Neil Roberts cover without one of his hilarious photo refs. This time, Neil has spared us one of his trademark gurning pictures and has concentrated on giving us a look down the back of his pants instead - niiiiiice!

I don't want to tread on Neil's toes so I won't say much more, please go to his wonderful blog and read more about the cover (and have your brain frazzled by some of his other amazing work) from the man himself!

Thanks to the amazing Mr Roberts for sending the pictures, yet another contender for cover of the year!

Simon Davis - Looking Rough...

2011-10-15T23:34:00.000-07:00

Simon Davis is a phenomenal, award winning fine artist who's painted covers and artwork always add an extra touch of class to the prog. However, with this traditional approach comes a perfectly old school attitude. When I first started this blog, Simon was one of the first artists I contacted, asking for roughs and, in particular, work in progress pictures of his beautiful work. I got a very nice reply from the artist, admitting that he was very much of the old guard, in fact, he said "I don't even have a scanner, I deliver the actual artwork and Tharg does the rest, I'm very much a Luddite with artwork!"

Recently, though this seemed to have changed as I was delighted to receive these roughs from the great man. I excitedly contacted him, asking if he'd finally dragged himself into the 20th(!) century and got himself a scanner... Alas, it was not to be "I'm afraid I still live in a Dickensian world so don't have a scanner...the photos are taken with a camera."

Bah, still he's getting there I suppose! Above you can see the rough for the beautiful Angel Zero cover to Prog 1751...

Followed by the thumbnail for the Ampney Crucis cover of Prog 1754, stunning!

Thanks again to Simon for sending these amazing covers!

The Monstrous Machinations of N Percival!

2011-10-15T10:28:00.000-07:00

Yuck! What a horrible, creepy cover this is by the brilliant Nick Percival! This cover is for the reality bending mind-drokk that is Indigo Prime by John Smith and Edmund Bagwell.

Nick gives us the lowdown on this glorious cover. "Tharg wanted a pure white cover with some Lovecraft style tentacles slowly breaking out into our reality, so to speak. I actually had the Blu-ray of ‘Monsters’ playing in the background while I was painting this, so don’t know if it had a subtle influence or not on the creature…who knows? Quite a minimalist cover that hopefully works well.” Well, I've got to say it works really, really well!

As well as sending the cover, Nick sent a stunning commission he'd just finished based on a classic Bolland Batman cover, amazing! If you're up for a commission from the man, contact him through his site!

Thanks a million to Nick for sending the cover, I love it!

Up Close and Personal with Cliff Robinson

2011-10-13T08:49:00.000-07:00

Another detailed study of the inner workings of the justice department from the master that is Cliff Robinson. As mentioned in this article, Cliff is king of the Lawgiver so it's nice to see him giving us some details! Below we see Cliff's photo reference with the artist obviously the proud owner of a Termight Replicas version of the gun...

Next the coloured version of the cover with a test title...

And the finished cover without the text - lovely!

One of the many things I love about Cliff's work, his attention to detail. He's a true craftsman who obviously puts a lot of thought into how things work. For example, take the cover of Prog 1538 below, we get to see how each buckle, strap and fastener works on Dredd's pads and boots as well as a new take on the classic boot holster design. Brilliant...

Another ingenious close up of Cliff's is this painted cover of Prog 706, giving us a fearsome reflection of Dredd's visage in the legendary Cyclops Phylon TX Laser - classic!

Many thanks to the glorious Mr Robinson for sending this weeks' images - just FIVE more covers and he will equal King Carlos as most published voer artist on the prog!

Simon Davis - Loving the Alien...

2011-10-10T14:47:00.000-07:00

Simon Davis, the man who, just three short progs ago painted one of the most beautiful 2000AD covers ever, is back with this ugly buggly! Look at that alien, it's brilliantly horrible! Check out its squid bag! Mental! I wonder if Simon is like Jekyll and Hyde?

Of course, the cover is for Ampney Crucis' latest adventure which sees our favourite English gentleman travelling to a hellish, other worldly dimension which is inhabited by all manner of horrible beasties, including the afore mentioned squid-bagged, big lipped savages! I love it!

Thanks a million to the wonderful Pye Parr for sending the image, it's great!

Paul Marshall - Definitely Maybe! EDITED!

2011-09-27T12:47:00.001-07:00

At last! A cover from one of 2000AD's truly unsung heroes, Paul Marshall. This terrifying cover features a genuinely scary image of Dredd's murderous nemesis PJ Maybe, as he grins maniacally at the reader. Paul, who's first work for the galaxy's greatest was over twenty three years ago, has drawn a variety of strips for 2000AD and the Megazine, with highlights including Dredd, the legendary Firekind, Leatherjack, Nikolai Dante, Samizdat Dquad and Sinister Dexter.

Over to Paul, who tells us "This cover had a very straightforward idea/concept behind it. Matt Smith had a clear vision for what he wanted this cover to look like. The idea being a traditional style 'Wanted' poster seen from the viewer's eye-level with PJ looking out at the reader with a chilling/evil style grin..."

Below we see Paul's brilliant first pencils, with PJ certainly looking every inch the psychopath!

Paul continues, "Initially PJ was meant to have the straight-to-camera mugshot pose but we changed this to a slightly more angled view. This added a little more visual interest to what could have been a somewhat static image..."

Interestingly, Paul's initial colour choices didn't match muted, more sepia tones of the finished version. He says "Then it was off to Abigail for the colour... I didn't go with this version... wasn't sure if it worked. Too clean, too colourful? As it turned out, Abigail Ryder (colourist on Kingdom) did a fantastic job, so I was right afterall!"

Very modest comments there from Mr Marshall! Below we can see Abigail's excellent colours and how she interpreted the brief. Maaaan, that really is an unnerving image of PJ!

Finally, the image as printed...

Thanks a million to Paul for getting in touch and allowing us to see the stages involved in creating such a cool cover. I've been trying to get this illusive droid for a loooong time so it's brilliant to finally be able to publish the work in progress sketches and learn a little about the design ethic of such a long serving, esteemed artist. Thanks again Paul!

Hokusai Pocusai - More D'Israeli Magic!

2011-09-20T09:58:00.000-07:00

And the genius that is D'Israeli hits us with yet another potential cover of the year starring the wonderful Dirty Frank. Regular readers will know that the amazing artist won the erm... prestigious 2000AD Message Board Cover of the Year Award in 2009 with his stunning 'Stained Glass Frank' cover of prog 1631. The cover was also, quite rightly, entered for an Eagle Award.

For the cover of Prog 1752, D'Israeli has channelled the spirit of Eighteenth Century Japanese artist and print maker Hokusai to produce this absolutely stunning cover! He has an excellent article on it's production on his blog which you'll find here, however he also held back images and a special step by step for this very blog, saying "On my blog I've talked about process, but I thought a full step-by-step would go better on yours, which is the proper place for such things!" Wahoooooo, I'm geeking out!!!

So, without further ado, let's get going. Matt tells us "The figure comes from the print 'Musahshi Goro Sadayo Dies in Battle at the Age of Fifteen’ from the Illustrated Book of Heroes of China and Japan in the Style of Katsushika." You can see the tragic figure below...

He continues "The background landscape on the left comes from ‘Aoigaoka Waterfall at Edo’ from A Tour of Japanese Waterfalls..." Note the colours here, they're important late on!

Next we have some absolutely beautiful ideas which weren't used "Below are Unused Cover 1 & Unused Cover 2 - These are designs I produced but never submitted to Matt Smith. They are initial roughs, drawing and inking done in Manga Studio EX 4..." Breathtaking!
"Next we see the reference image placed in a Manga Studio EX 4 file along with a 2000AD cover template."
Matt continues "Rough pencils on a new layer above the reference image. I’m tracing key details like the face and pose and changing other aspects such as the clothing." This image features the début of the brilliant Tesqueaux bag!
With the roughs done, it's time to check in with Tharg... "This is what was sent to Matt Smith for approval..."
With the okay from Matt S, Matt B gets on with some refinements on the image "Unusually, I didn’t do “proper” pencils on this one - All the really important detail like the face and hands was in the reference image. I just tidied up the background buildings a bit and added some patterns to Frank’s clothing. Difficult drawing buildings in “non-perspective!”
With the refinements about done, D'Israeli begins to ink the image. "Inking on a new layer. I mostly used Manga Studio’s pen tool, with heavier brush tool lines on the folds of Frank’s clothing, in imitation of Hokusai’s technique."
The next image features ' Just the inks'. In his notes D'Israeli suggests "Pete - this, or the previous image may be redundant" which is proof that the artist is indeed insane, both images simply have to be seen!!!

Next Matt adds the flat colour "Manga Studio’s Paint Bucket tool can ignore small gaps in lines, so it’s MUCH faster to drop in areas of flat colour using that than Photoshop. I’m using chunks of bright, well-differentiated colour that I can grab and fill with the actual colours in Photoshop (which is much better at mixing colours). After this stage, I export the file in .psd format with layers intact and start work in Photoshop CS 4."
D'Israeli adds some authentic colour in Photoshop. He says "Adding the true colours in Photoshop, many of them sampled from scans of Hokusai prints to get the right feel. Gradations added on the ground, sky and Frank’s coat. (just noticed, I hadn’t finished colouring Frank’s shoes in this one!)" Looking at the image below and the Aoigaoka Waterfall image at the top of the page you can begin to see some of the colours...
Finally, D'Israeli tinkers with the colours and adds some of his mind boggling, trademark textures. He says "Added: Grot to Frank’s flesh using a Photoshop texture brush. Overall subtle texture added to imply paper texture. Image opened in Corel Painter and Simple Water blender brush used to “muss up” over perfect gradations in background.

Return to Photoshop, export as flat CMYK TIFF and upload to 2000AD FTP server. Done!"

And there we have it, a genuinely beautiful cover by an artist at the absolute top of his game. Thank you so, so much to Matt for sending the files and taking the time to write the frankly brilliant commentary (no pun intended.) It's truly an event every time D'Israeli does a cover, how on earth is he going to top this one?

Please, if you only visit one blog this year, visit Matt's, it's absolutely brilliant.

Prog 1751 - Problems with an Angel's Lumpy Bits!

2011-09-12T13:28:00.000-07:00

Apologies for tainting what is an absolutely beautiful cover for Prog 1751 by the monstrously talented Simon Davis with such a childish headline. However, all will be revealed by top design droid, Pye Parr, who explains "A bit of trivia on this cover – I had a last minute panic with it, as I noticed the scanner was picking up the texture of the canvas far too much (if you check out the scan that went into the Megazine this month, it’s different from the one on the prog.)"

The Meg Version of the cover

Simon continues, "While I wanted to retain the texture, all the lumps where coming out almost completely white and made the image as a whole look far too speckly!"

Those offensive lumps!

However, Simon had a brainwave. He says "Unfortunately I only thought about this on Wednesday afternoon right before the issue went to press so we delayed the print until the next morning and I gave the painting to a guy in the office, Kevin Bezant, who has a good set-up at home for taking really detailed photographs. He took some pictures that night and I sorted it out the next day. Looks much better for it I think, without all the white bits of reflected light the colours look much richer."

So hats off to Kevin Bezant who has helped the two Simons deliver one of the most elegant 2000AD covers ever. It really is an astonishing piece.

The image is for new strip Angel Zero which follows the story of the mysterious Maggie Roth, inhabitant of the carbon-negative town of McLuhan on a distant backwater planet. Maggie suffers from terrible nightmares and it would appear her horrors will soon become reality... The strip by Kek-W and the brilliant John Burns begins in this weeks' prog.

Thanks to Pye for taking the time to sort the cover out for me, please visit his excellent blog here, his latest work is stunning!

Prog 1750 Bonus - Boy, do I feel lucky?

2011-09-03T02:15:00.001-07:00

Wahoooo! I've been dying to write this for ages! Above is the excellent, excellent Star Scan from Prog 1750 by Rebellion's head concept artist, Mark Harrison. A star scan that was instigated by ME!

Let me take you back 48 progs to Prog 1702, Mark's 'Knock Knock cover below:

You can read about it's creation here (please do, Mark always gives great commentary on his work.) During the inception that cover, Mark submitted a riff on a kooky old Magnum Force film poster, which Tharg rejected:

I loved the idea and couldn't shake the image from my mind, eventually I wrote to Mark, asking if he'd consider doing the image as a private commission. Unfortunately, Mark only works digitally these days and doubted that he even had the paints or equipment to do it! However, he was kind enough to ask me to send my sketch book and he'd have no problem doing a sketch.

After a couple of weeks, my beloved sketchbook was returned with this brilliant watercolour below. It's beautiful!

However, there was more. Mark enjoyed creating the image so much he did a cover-quality digital painting of it and re-submitted it to Tharg who promised to print it as a Star Scan! So, in the end, I got my wish! It may not have been a cover but I have a beautiful print on my desk at home and now a permanent record of it in the prog!

Thanks to Mark Harrison for being amazing! Check out his site here.

Greg Staples - Un-American Graffiti!

2011-09-02T08:30:00.000-07:00

So hows that for an amazing cover? Greg Staples, the coolest of cover artists, pays homage to Banksy, the coolest street artists, in his first wraparound 2000AD cover.

Greg says "I said it would be nice to do a wraparound cover as I haven't done one for 2000ad before and I think the rough idea came from seeing a Banksey illustration. I just thought if anyone should catch Banksey at it then its Dredd." Hmmmm, I wonder if Marlon Shakespeare is a descendant of the mysterious artist.

The cover also features a shady Thrill merchant, peddling the galaxy's greatest comic! Greg continues "I also like the idea of 2000ad being banned and there's a back alley you could find a dealer!"

Reaction to the cover since its' release on Bleeding Cool has been overwhelmingly positive though it has spawned one or two questions. Firstly, with regards to production, "It's not digital as a few people have asked but a rather large original painting which I handed over to the Nerve Centre. I felt an original painting was well over due as everything is digital right now."

The second question was whether or not Greg had cast himself as Judge Dredd, seeing as he plays the lawman in the forthcoming Judge Minty movie. Greg laughs this off "For the record the Dredd isn't really me in the Minty costume but I guess I'm so used to seeing those images and myself in the mirror that it comes out when I do Dredd. I did take some photos at the last session specifically for cover ideas so I'm sure a little further down the line that may be the case!"

Below is Greg's initial sketch for the cover, even that is incredible...

Followed by this stunning underpainting...

And the absolutely beautiful finished image...

Remember, the cover is for Prog 1750, a 'Jumping On' Prog featuring an all new lineup of thrills and superstar talent. Henry Flint joins John Wagner as Judge Dredd's Day of Chaos continues, D'Israeli and Rob Williams start a new adventure for Dirty Frank as he goes in search of fellow Wally Squad Judge Aimee Nixon in Low Life. After an absence of over twenty years (do you feel old Earthlet?), Indigo Prime returns to the prog courtesy of Cradlegrave duo John Smith and Edmund Bagwell and finally Ian Edginton and Simon Davis continue the supernatural adventures of paranormal investigator Ampney Crucis! Exciting times ahead!

Thanks, as ever to Greg Staples who has one again been very generous with his time. Check out some of the beautiful artwork on his website here and his blog here.

Garry Brown - La Placa Rifa?

2011-08-27T10:43:00.000-07:00

Welcome to a dead Dredd special in honour of the shocking events of Prog 1749! A bad trip, blood splattered version of Dredd's badge? That can't be good news! Hats off to Garry Brown for taking Psi Judge Hennesy's shocking psi flash in current Dredd epic Day of Chaos and making it scarily real!

Garry said "Tharg asked me to work up 2 layouts for a cover. He didn't tell me the plot or anything, he just had strong ideas for the cover. He wanted a closeup of Dredd's visor and a close up of his badge with blood on it. I then did 2 colour roughs. Matt liked the badge layout so I went with it..."

So below we see Garry's roughs...

With the badge idea approved, Garry continues "I then emailed the cover below however the editor wanted me to flip the colour horizontally so that the darkest part was up top, that way popping out the blood on the badge."

"And here's the finished cover"

A guuughe thanks to Garry for those brilliant pictures and fascinating commentary. Remember to visit his site here.

Of course, near death is just another day at the office for Mega-City One's premier lawman and a bloody, battered badge has long been a symbol for Dredd and the Justice Department's darkest days. Take, for example, Robin Smith's iconic cover of Prog 262, when, during the Apocalypse War, Dredd murders his own chief judge before turning the gun on himself. I can still remember my nine year old self shuddering at this cover...
An homage to that cover is Mark Harrison's heartbreaking cover to Prog 1009 which saw the popular 'Death of a Legend' story where Dredd took Ex Chief Judge McGruder, who was in the late stages of Alzheimer's disease, on one last, fatal mission...

Design guru Simon Parr shattered the badge for this striking cover to prog 1414 as the judges stood down to give control to terrorist group Total War during their nuclear siege of the city...

Of course, hard as nails Dredd has been at death's door numerous times. Who could forget this classic moment from 'The Day the Law Died' when Dredd is shot through the head by one of Cal's assassins?
And, of course, the evil Murd the Oppressor from the Judge Child Epic who goes one further and actually kills Dredd (albeit temporarily.)
Still, you know Joe Dredd, you can shoot him...

Image: Brian Bolland

You can nuke him...

Image: Brian Bolland

You can stab him...

Image: Carlos Ezquerra

You can squish him...

Image: Brian Bolland

You can bite him..

Image: Steve Dillon

You can burn him...

Image: Brian Bolland

Crucify him...

Image: Jock

Beat him...

Image: Simon Bisley

But you certainly won't break him...

Image: Mick McMahon

'Cos in the end, the badge rules creeps...

Image: Cam Kennedy

and you'd better...

Image: Cliff Robinson

Crazy Legs Trevallion!

2011-08-20T10:33:00.000-07:00

Boom! Who better to draw Download's two coolest gunsharks than 2000AD's coolest new artdroid, Tiernen Trevallion? Here, in various forms, is the funtin' excellent cover of Prog 1748, a triumph in style and damn good design.

As we work through the images you'll notice one or two alternative ideas, one or two of which I wish had made the final cover - not that I'm doubting the wisdom of the mighty Tharg of course!

Over to Tiernen to describe his original vision. He says "As you can see, the first sketch had Ramone looking sharp while Finnigan is in the background, flying backwards through a window..."

However, the mighty one must have wanted more action from Dexter as we can see he's also blasting away in sketch no 2...
With the sketch approved, here are frankly stunning inks. Dexter really does look dashing, check out his Mr Darcy style hair, while Finny looks hilarious with those gangly legs and mental hand cannon!
Now this is the very essence of cool! The figures look great against the dark background and those muzzle flashes seem to glow! The glass looks great, really adding movement and drama to the piece. I love the bits behind Dexter too...
Here's my (shite) mock up to see what it woulda looked like with the 2000AD logo...
Finally, the version as chosen by the editorial team. Still very cool but I think I prefer the darker image...

Folk that know me from the 2000AD forum will know I'm a BIG fan of Tiernen Trevallion's work and recently got a commission from him. With his creepy style I thought he's tackle Fink Angel really well and, he did! The finished piece is absolutely stunning and a real favourite of mine.

Thanks to Tiernen for the images and the VERY entertaining emails. Remember you can visit his glorious site here.

Carlos Ezquerra - Return of the King!

2011-08-15T11:26:00.000-07:00

All hail King Carlos! Back in his rightful place in the galaxy's greatest comic! Yes it takes more than life threatening illness and the removal of vital organs to stop Tharg's premier artdroid (see the cover of his special fan-made get well comic here for more details.) And what a return! The cover of this months' Megazine features Judge Rico and Judge-Marshal Koburn scouring the Cursed Earth in search of a missing City-Def Unit.

Above them, I believe is a Gila Munja. These fearful, chameleon-like creatures live in the Cursed Earth and are masters of camouflage and one look at the news stand version of the Meg shows that this little blighter has completely blended himself into the logo! That 'Missing in Action' strap line could be talking about him!
Moving on, below we see Carlos' sketch for Koburn... Followed by his unmistakable inks!

And again, that final, wonderful image. Soooo cool!

Obviously, this isn't the first time Koburn has come across the Fargo bloodline. He met Dredd way back in Megazine 211 which was reprinted in The Carlos Ezquerra Collection, the cover of which can be seen here:
So what better way to celebrate Carlos' return than a look at some classic, high rez Ezquerra covers of yesteryear, starting with a real favourite of mine - Prog 333, the classic, if a little surreal "Um...Synthi Sausage!"Of course, readers in the know would tell you that the cover was for the classic 'Requiem for a Heavyweight' story and was a part of a still slightly surreal wraparound...
Next, Prog 256 where Dredd first gets to try out his Stub Gun on the incoming Sov Strato-V's during the Apocalypse War. A true classic!Next we have Prog 281 which saw the return of one of Dredd's meanest enemies...

Did you guess which one?
Onto more recent covers and here's the classic 'Three Dredds' featuring Joe, Rico and Dolman...
Finally, the last ever traditionally painted cover by Carlos and one of the few featuring both Johnny Alpha and Judge Dredd. I own this so I'm simply showing off!
Lets finish with a couple of Strontium Dogs, starting with what I would argue is the most iconic Alpha image ever, that of Prog 339. Next we have two absolute classics from fan favourite 'Rage.' Firstly, the heartbreaking Prog 445...

And the highly cinematic 469, stunning!So all hail King Carlos, truly one of the greatest droids ever assembled! And thanks to the great man for sending the Megazine cover.

EDIT - For letter to the Stars (and PJ Holden) Jim Campbell, I've added prog 195...

Jim says "I'd like to nominate Prog 195 as one of Carlos' more significant covers, since it features Dredd, who he hadn't drawn in nearly four years at that point, and wouldn't draw him again until the Apocalypse War, a year later…"

Well said that man!

Another 3riller from Clint Langley!

2011-08-13T13:04:00.000-07:00

Hooooooooooooooooows that for an amazing cover? Sometimes, getting a brief from Tharg must be like being given an absolute gift. I can only imagine the joy Clint Langley must have felt when Tharg offered him money to produce a cover featuring, of all things, a freaking robotic werewolf!

The image is for Arthur Wyatt and Steve Yowell's excellent 3riller Strip 'Wolves', a tale of exoskeleton clad soldiers fighting a war against European insurgents. Below is the cover without the background, just check out the detail...

And the image with the background, the full moon eluding to the lycan nature of the mysterious robots in the story.
Thanks once again to Clint for his fantastic support of this blog and congratulations for producing such an amazing cover! Check out his site here.

Henry Flint - Zombozoic!

2011-08-10T14:31:00.000-07:00

He's done it again! Fan favourite Henry Flint has produced yet another stunning cover that manages to distil the very essence of 2000AD. Above is his latest masterpiece which, like his seminal Shakara cover of prog 1657, is a tip of the hat to a classic cover of yesteryear...

Older squaxx will remember Metalzoic, Pat Mills and Kev O'Neill's bonkers tale of robotic wildlife desperately struggling to survive on an abandoned planet Earth. The story featured a psychotic, gorilla-like robot known as Armageddon who's brutal, often cruel behaviour was a result of him operating on his own brain. Hence, the much-loved cover of Prog 485:
Current events in Zombo: The Day the Zombo Died have seen our lovable zombie's brain destroyed by the evil, crime fighting uber zombie Omboz, causing the emergency re-boot of a secondary brain hidden in Zombo's arse. This secondary brain belonged to an awfully melodramatic Male Stripper called Eric Rabinowicz, who has given Zombo an hilarious, yet heartbreakingly clichéd inner monologue. Yup, I'm fairly certain that the above plot synopsis could only have come from the addled minds of Al Ewing and Henry Flint!

Below are Henry stunning pencils, wow...

Followed by the background paints which Henry uses to bring out those beautiful textures in his work...Glue 'em together with some of the old Flint magic and you end up with the amazing finished image.
Finally, the design droids at the Nerve Centre add the nostalgia inducing speech balloon and we have yet another cover that is definitely going to be up there in this year's Cover of the Year votes.
Thanks to the wonderful Henry Flint for sending the images, remember to go and visit his beautiful blog at http://henryflint.wordpress.com/

Neil Roberts - The Gurnmeister Returns!

2011-08-02T04:17:00.000-07:00

I love Neil Roberts! Not because his work ALWAYS blows me away, not because he has a unique, incredibly cool style, not even because he's a lovely, approachable guy who's as passionate about 2000AD as the rest of us. Nope, it's because he always gurns his way through a cover and has no qualms about posting his brilliant gurning pictu... I mean reference photos!

When this weeks' issue of 2000AD plopped through my letterbox on Saturday I was a tad disappointed when I saw the terrifying cover. Not at all with the image itself, it's definitely fighting for my top cover of the year, plus I was delighted to see Neil back. No, I was disappointed because I thought, with it being all robots on the cover, I'd have to do a Neil Roberts cover piece without those signature Neil Roberts gurning pictures. Thankfully, I was wrong, enjoy...

Picture 1 - Is my nose clean dear?

Picture 2 - Neil holds an invisible midget at bay...

Neil used his reference pictures to produce the thumbnail below. He only submitted one thumbnail as he thought this covered Tharg's brief of "BlackBlood MkI's looming over and reaching out to grab the reader..." Cool!

Naturally Tharg approved the thumbnail which led to this astonishing cover. As I said earlier, this is certainly vying for top cover of 2011 for me - I adore Blackblood and Neil has really done him jusssssssstice.

Thanks to Neil for allowing me to blatantly letting me steal these images from his excellent blog. Also, check out his supoib online gallery here.

Anthony Williams - The Willy Wonka of Comics!

2011-07-26T01:34:00.000-07:00

After working for the mighty one for twenty one years, Anthony Williams has certainly cemented himself in 2000AD legend with an incredibly broad portfolio for both 2000AD and beyond. Starting his 2000AD career illustrating PJ Maybe's exploits during Necropolis, he quickly became principle artist on strips such as Sam and Samantha Slade, Kola Kommandos, Babe Race 2000, The V.C.s and most recently, Sinister Dexter. While some may question the quality of some of those series' scripts, no one could ever doubt the quality of the top notch artwork.

Tharg isn't the only fan of Williams' work as his portfolio reads like a who's who of Mega corporations including giants such as the Google, the BBC, McDonalds, Burger King and of course Marvel and DC. Not too shabby eh?

Anthony has taken his immense creativity and used it to form something of a cottage comics and illustration industry. Branding himself as the Comic Stripper and employing several like-minded, Oompa Loompa-style creatives to create a host of custom comics and artwork. You can see his excellent website here, for which I urge you to subscribe to his weekly newsletter which is ace! Anthony and co are obviously having far too much fun in their comics factory, producing spoof adverts such as the one below. Who wouldn't want to work there!?!

Note Anthony's excellent Dredd-style grimace at the end of the ad...

Back in 2000AD, Anthony has returned to Sinister Dexter, continuing to plot the gunsharks' adventures in Charon's Crossing. After being hurled six months' into their future, Ray and Finny are busted from custody by a mysterious, shape-changing agent of a shadowy organisation known as Context. Below is Anthony's rough, I love how the image is framed by those swords...

Next, we have Anthony's very cool pencils...
And his gorgeous inked image...
Finally the extra details are added digitally by an Oompa Loompa known only as Rob to really make the cover snap, crackle and pop!
Thanks to Anthony for finding the time to send the images, they're ace! Quick, go and subscribe to his newsletter!

Clint Langley - Digital Chaos.

2011-07-16T15:16:00.000-07:00

Yes!!! The return of Clint Langley! On the day when a brand new Dredd epic kicks off and we get a new, rather cool photograph of Karl Urban from the forthcoming Dredd movie. A hat trick and no mistake!

Clint's image is for the opening part of Day of Chaos, the brand new Mega Epic by John Wagner. The first arc of which features stunning art by the brilliant Ben Willsher which features more Dreddworld cameos than you can shake a daystick at! I asked John to give us a clue as to what Day of Chaos was about. He said "Let's just say that it's 30 years since the Apocalypse War and the destruction of East-Meg One. Some people might be a little...bitter?"

John gave details of the format of the story in a recent interview with goodcomicbooks.com. The tale will be similar in structure to more recent mega epics such as The Pit and the amazing Tour of Duty being made up of "a lot of shorter stories, some of which may seem at first only obliquely connected to the bigger picture – building up to an electrifying and violent conclusion!" Can't wait!!!

Below are Clint's fantastic inks for the image, I love how pissed off Dredd looks...

Next, as if by magic, Clint digitally enhances the picture to brain scrambling proportions! Just look how realistic Dredd's flesh is! And check out the burning city in his visor, I have a feeling this epic is going to be just that!

Thanks as ever to Clint for sending the images. He tells me he's working hard on American Reaper for his Repeat Offenders company at the moment, but hopefully he'll be back on ABC Warriors soon.

Henry Flint - "Pleased to eat you!"

2011-07-12T04:44:00.000-07:00

Celebrate Earthlets! Not just because the zarjaz Henry Flint is back in the prog, not just because lovable, codpiece wearing zombie Zombo has returned, but... (Drumroll please...) Henry Flint, the living embodiment of 2000AD, has got his own blog!!! Happy, happy days!

You can find and love it here.

WAIT! Wait! Before you rush off to melt your eyeballs with it, don't forget to read the rest of this post, sheesh! So, the amazing Mr Flint is back on cover duties with this wonderful Zombo and Obmoz illustration. Below we can see Henry's initial ideas; personally I'd have love to have seen number one - I think Zombo in his codpiece contrasting with Omboz in his smart suit would have been hilarious!

Once a design had been approved, Henry inked it up all nice like...

Henry uses tracing paper a lot in his work and I'm guessing he used this to get those insane textures.
And again, the brilliant final image

Thanks to Henry for letting me plunder his blog! Right I'm gong back there to ogle some more!

The Incorruptible Garry Brown!

2011-07-02T12:43:00.000-07:00

So, here's the cover for Prog 1741, the second from Garry Brown, however, the first that the artist had sent. He says "This was actually a spec cover that Matt liked enough to buy. I emailed him and asked if there was any work available, he said if I did a spec cover of a generic Dredd image he'd take a look at it. So I did..."

Below is Garry's rough sketch...
Followed by these rather splendid pencils...
And of course, his raw and dirty inks...
Garry, who has been doing an amazing job colouring his incorruptible covers, sent this version off to the very hard to please Betelgeusian editor however "He didn't like the colours originally, he liked the composition and the lineart (the cover was also the wrong dimensions, been working on US covers for a while now), but not the colours..."

Garry continues "So I edited the cover and he liked it enough to use it." Hmmmm, I have to say I don't know which I prefer. I like the contrasts in the top cover but also the warm colours of the chosen image...

Plundered from Garry's Deviant art gallery are several more Dredd related images staring with this cutey below...
And this rather brilliant try-out piece. Judging by this (no pun intended) I'd love to see Garry work on an actual Dredd strip.
The next few early images of Dredd are from when Garry was "messing around, trying to get a version I like..."

Finally another spec cover that Garry sent to Tharg which unfortunately old green bonce didn't go for. Such a shame as it's ace!

Thanks again to Garry for sending the images. Remember you can visit his website here and I urge you all to take a look through his Deviantart folder here!

Liam Sharp - There's gold in them thar thrills!

2011-06-22T12:18:00.000-07:00

Behold the striking features of Tharg the Mighty, majestically brought to life by the amazing Liam Sharp! This stunning cover is for Prog 1740, one of Tharg's famed 'jumping on' progs, where each story is a first-parter to help new readers in their quest for thrill power!

This issue sees the beginning of a brand new Judge Dredd Tale 'The Dasterdly Deeds of PJ Maybe' where we find out what's next for the murderous ex-mayor of Mega City One. This herald's the return of John Wagner and Colin MacNeil to the prog which means we're in for a treat. Next up is Savage Book 7: 'Secret City' by Pat Mills and the excellent Patrick Goddard which continues Bill Savage's underground battle with the dirty Volgs! There's also the welcome return of everyone's favourite ultra-polite corpse Zombo, in the wonderfully titled 'The Day the Zombo Died' by the brilliant Al Ewing and mad-as-a-box-of-frogs Henry Flint. The issue also (hopefully) sees the return of Download's coolest hitmen Sinister Dexter as they continue their war against familiar enemies from other dimensions in the ominously titled 'Charon's Crossing' by Dan Abnett and Anthony Williams. Finally the prog will feature the mighty one's latest brainwave 3hrillers, these are three part, stand alone stories that don't expect the reader to know over thirty years of 2000AD history. The first of these tales is 'The Silver -Tongued Exploits of Cosmo Nibs' written by Tom Eglington and illustrated by the superb John McCrea who's work was last seen in the Prog seven years ago! All of these pulse pounding thrills are wrapped up in Liam's magnificent cover, exciting times indeed!

So let's get back to the all important matter of that magnificent cover! Liam said "This was a no-messing, straight to completion piece. I didn't do a rough of the mighty one (my eyes could only stand his aura for an extremely limited amount of time) and literally went straight to the canvas, painting shadows and highlights over a gold acrylic primed surface."

And here it is, impressive eh?

Next Liam adds some digital magic, he continues "From that I imported the image into my computer on my scanner and set about working up the full colour version in Photoshop. Here's the result!"

And finally the image with 2000AD template, which Liam used to get an idea of how the final product will look...

Thanks a million to Liam for sending the images, it's great to see Tharg on the cover again and fantastic that it's by such a comics legend!

Tiernen Trevallion - La Placa Rifa!

2011-06-20T08:20:00.000-07:00

And it's another wonderful cover by the brilliant Absalom artist Tiernen Trevallion! This cover could (and if you ask a certain writer, should) have been much different. Tiernen says "Matt and I had a similar idea, I was keen to do an action scene, a good old school copper/demon punch up, but we were running short on time so we went for this one. Errr... that's about it, really... sorry, Monday and all that..."

So, below we have Tiernen's pencils for the image...

Followed by his colour rough, which is where the twist comes in the tale...

Tiernen continues "No, there was one thing... I sent Gordon the colour rough, and he said he'd planned to NEVER REVEAL Harry's police badge... and there it is... right on the cover.... he was okay about it, and said we should use it now it's been drawn up..." Hmmmm, coincidence or are demonic forces getting revenge on the creative team for giving them a good pasting in the strip?

Again, the cooooool final image...

I love this cover, it's very intelligent, eye catching and the design work is ace, I particularly adore the colours of the logo. However, I can't help wondering what the alternative version would have looked like, and neither can Tiernen by the sound of it, he says "Anyway, there'll be another opportunity to show Harry giving some demonic forces a good shoeing, I'm sure." Let's hope so as Gordon's dense script and Tiernen's sublime visuals have been a huge hit with readers.

Thanks again to Tiernen for supplying the visuals, what a brilliant talent he is! Please visit his website here.

Cliff Robinson - Blooming Crackpot!

2011-06-13T22:39:00.001-07:00

Blooming heck! The wonderful Cliff Robinson obviously has FAR to much fun in his work as this weeks' amazing cover will show! This is the cover for the current Dredd thriller 'Scream' which features the return of Prog 18's 'Brainblooms', human-plant hybrids that can imitate any known sound!

Below we see Cliff's rough thumbnails, he seems to have started working on the one to the bottom-left...

This next rough is fascinating, Cliff tells me "My left ear, glasses and watch are visible on one of the roughs. I filmed myself with my camcorder then printed out the pose in blueline and pencilled over the top. I often do this as it saves a lot of time and can be fun, although I'd never let anyone see the original photo's of me posing like a complete pillock!"

Ah, so now we know what Dredd looks like under the helmet, Cliff Robinson!

And below is a mock up of the cover with some of Cliff's trademark terrible puns! A story - last year I broke a rib in a car crash and made the mistake of telling Cliff that it was agonising when I laugh. For days and days afterwards he sent me (absolutely terrible) jokes, the swine!
For some reason, Cliff had a change of heart (I suspect it was Tharg induced) and went for his alternative design. Of the brainblooms themselves, Cliff said "The brainbloom faces were also from photo's of me gurning like a fool. But again, the original photo's are unavailable for publication... heh!"

You can tell they're Cliff as he left in his pointy ears and bulging veins...

Midway through the process Cliff obviously decided to go for a more dynamic pose for both Dredd and the Brainbloom in the foreground....
Here's the cover rough mock up...
And finally, those stunning, trademark perfect Cliff Robinson inks which shows that he truly is the best in the business...

Absolutely amazing. The inks were then sent to the similarly brilliant Dylan Teague to be coloured and once again, we have a frikking AMAZING 2000AD cover.
Thanks SO much to Cliff for sending the images, he's always such a brilliant supporter of the site. Thanks also to Dylan for his amazingly fast response and support!

Naturally I couldn't let this post go without re-telling the disgraceful story of the cover of Prog 18. From this blog:

"According to The Judge Dredd Mega-History, this cover for Prog 18 by Don Lawrence further angered Carlos Ezquerra (Dredd's creator, who was already pissed off because the début strip of his character drawn by someone else.) Apparently, Lawrence was having trouble getting the look of Dredd right (an old woman is about as far wrong as you can get!) so an Ezquerra Dredd from 'Bank Raid' (which was to be the first Dredd tale but was considered too violent - try to keep up!) was pasted over the top. Shocking!"

Green Fingers Ma Mahaffy - now you see her...

Now ya don't!

Sean Phillips - Criminally Good!

2011-06-04T03:30:00.000-07:00

For this week's cover we see Anderson dressed as a perp as she goes undercover in this gritty cover by the awesome Sean Phillips. This is Sean's first 2000AD cover for 12 years and, as you can see, it's excellent!

Below is Sean's digital sketch...

Followed by the lush painted version...

The Criminal and Marvel Zombies artist got his 2000AD break working with Pat Mills and John Smith on the political comic Crisis in the late eighties. Thankfully, by the time Crisis was cancelled, Sean had crossed over into the Prog and Meg. As well as working on 2000AD favourites such as Dredd and Sinister Dexter, Sean co-created two of the Megazine's biggest characters, as well as the overall look for the Meg on it's launch.

Below is a cracking gatefold inner cover from Megazine no 1 which introduced readers to Dredd's world, it's great to see Sean's versions of the city and some of it's classic characters...

And some spoof Ads for the Judge Pal Club, which invites children to snitch on adults to earn Pal Points for prizes!

Judge Pal - The Juve's Friend

Below is Sean's first 2000AD cover, Prog 646 waaaay back in September 1989. Already there are signs of Sean's moody, noiresque style with a hard as nails Dredd glaring at the reader from the dark...

Next, onto two of my all time favourite covers, the first is for Prog 780 which was a relaunch issue. The re-launch was entitled 'The Megablast!' hence Megacity-One's premier law man running from that huge explosion!

Next, Prog 800, another landmark prog. This issue featured the first part of Garth Ennis' excellent Dredd strip 'The Marshall', which featured fantastic art by Sean. The story told the tale of a lone survivor of a clan of Cursed Earth peacekeepers which were accidentally wiped out by the Justice Department. Just look at that cover, it's amazing!

Much of Phillips' Dredd work (including The Marshall) were reprinted in the Hamlyn Graphic Novel, Tales of the Damned, for which Sean provided this lovely cover...

While we're on with reprint covers, here's Sean's cover for the 'Law in Order' reprints which has Dredd in exactly the same pose as Clint Langley's Star Scan in this weeks' issue - freaky huh!?!

Next a couple of montage covers, the first is 852 featuring Tharg, Sam Slade, Slane, Tyranny Rex and of course, Dredd...

Followed by Prog 980, this time featuring Cannon Fodder, Dredd and Venus Bluegenes.

To finish off the prog covers I have, here's eco-witch Finn facing off against a giant dragon on Prog 945...
And a true classic, Dredd responding to a Code 99 Red (judge down) on the cover of Prog 999!
Onto the Megazine, as I said earlier, Sean was co-creator of both Devlin Waugh and Armitage. We'll start with upper class Vatican Vampire, Devlin Waugh. Co-created with John Smith, Waugh was an English, spiritual emissary from the Vatican, described as a cross between Noel Coward, Terry Thomas and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The first story dealt with an infestation of vampire inmates at a brilliantly designed underwater prison known as Aquatraz. In a story was both gruesome and terrifying, so the camp, hilarious quips from Waugh really lifted the mood. Philips' art throughout was amazing, making a really memorable character. Blow is the cover from the Hamlyn reprint...

Next Armatige, a grizzled, Brit-Cit detective, very much in the mould of Inspector Morse. Co-created by Dave Stone, this character was perfect for Philips, looking at where his career has taken him since. Below is the début cover of the strip showing Armitage, a Brit Cit judge (Sean states that Brenfan McCarthy, designer of the Brit Cit uniform is a huge inspiration to him) and rookie detective Treasure Steel...

Below is the cover for Deathmasques, a Virgin Novel where Dredd and Armitage reluctantly team up. I absolutely love this cover!
Sean returned to Armitage in 2009, providing this great cover for the Brit Cit detective's return...
Aaaaaand finally, to bring this article full circle, we have a perp dressed as a psi-Judge! This was the saucy cover for Meg 1.13 featuring Lisa, ace hacker-come prostitute and one of Armitage's many contacts. Again, it's an amazing bit of foresight from the mighty Tharg!

It's been an amazing year for returning artists in the prog, Bryan Talbot, Jesus Redondo, Liam Sharp and now Sean Phillips - long may it continue. Make sure you visit Sean's blog and site for more of his fantastic, hard-hitting work!

Alex and Nigel, Zarjaz Cover Artists!

2011-06-01T02:05:00.000-07:00

Those Zarjaz boys are back and boy, are they back in style! They've kept to their policy of commissioning 2000AD droids to produce fantastic wraparound covers for their fine fanzines, with absolutely dazzling results. Big names cover artists of the past include Colin MacNeil, Leigh (phwooor) Gallagher, Clint Langley, PJ Holden, Richard Elson and Dave Kendall. This time we're treated covers from the brilliant Alex Ronald and the wonderful Nigel Dobbyn.

First, let's look at Alex's amazing cover for Zarjaz 12. Quite simply, it's gorgeous; if this were on a prog, it would easily bag my cover of the year (and we've had some stunners this year.) Done very much in the style of Alex's Crackdown 2 comic and his brilliant Vampire Vixens of the Wehrmacht tale for Wasted, it's a digital masterpiece.

If you haven't seen Alex's brilliant webcomic for Crackdown 2, you can watch part 1 of 5 here:

And finally some more of Alex's digital Dredds!

Go to Alex's blog 'Never Finished, Only Abandoned' to see more...

Next up, is the super versatile Nigel Dobbyn with this brilliant Dogbreath cover. Featuring everyone's favourite Gronk, this cracking cover proves once again that Dobbyn is the master at drawing the cute little aliens from Blas.

Here's the fantastic line work for the cover too:

Like Alex, it's been a while since we saw Nigel in the prog but he's certainly been busy while he was away. A quick look at his portfolio shows he has worked on treasures such as Billy the Cat, Sonic the Comic, Angelina Ballerina, Thunderbirds and Mr Bean. Again, it looks like the artist has developed exponentially since his previous 2000AD strips and I'd love to see him back in the mighty prog. A final image from Nigel, just to prove he is the master of Gronkdom, is this beauty...
Make your way over to the Quaequalm Blog to grab BRILLIANT wallpapers of most of the Zarjaz and Dogbreath covers to date and while you're there, order some comics, you won't be sorry!

"Aaaaar(my of) Shipmates!"

2011-05-29T07:56:00.001-07:00

Is that the worst pun I've ever written? If so, or even if not, I apologise profusely! Moving on, the able crew of Cliff Robinson and Dylan Teague bring us a dynamic cover that Ray Harryhausen (or if I was being cheeky, Michael Flatley) would be proud of!

The cover depicts (the aptly named, if again, I was being cheeky) Jack Dancer leading an army of invincible Greek warriors against the legions of Hell, in Ian Edgington and Steve Yeowell's swashbuckling epic, Red Seas. Not bad timing in the week that Pirates of the Caribbean 4 opened at the box office, he's knows what he's doing, does Tharg!

So, let's raise the anchor and set off! Below is Cliff's rough sketch. Though quite the traditionalist in some approaches to his work, Cliff isn't afraid to use Photoshop to facilitate his work flow. I think it's safe to assume that all of the warriors on this sketch are one and the same...

With the composition sorted, Cliff begins to ink. Like many artists, he prints an A3 blue line image (you can see traces of blue if you zoom in on the image below) and inks by hand on top of that. However, again it appears that the soldier was inked separately then digitally added and cloned...

And there's the finished inks, ready to be sent off to the wonderful Mr Teague to be coloured...
And here are those colours. As ever, Dylan has done an excellent job, fabulously bringing the image to life without sacrificing any of Cliff's intricate linework. The dynamic duo strike again!

Thanks yet again to both Cliff and Dylan for sending the various images, two more sturdier shipmates you could never wish to have! Arrrrrr!

Gibson Quarter - Wasted Talent!

2011-05-26T11:23:00.000-07:00

There are many, many talented 2000AD boarders who's work I'm gagging to see in the prog, and Gibson Quarter is certainly one of the picks of the crop! Though he is yet to appear in Tharg's mighty organ, his fantastic work can currently be seen with a whole host of 2000AD droids' work in Wasted magazine, edited by the legendary Alan Grant.

I was delighted when Gibson contacted me to ask if I wanted show his cover process for Wasted Issue 8 and naturally jumped at the chance!

Over to GQ!

"The gang at Wasted central headquarters asked me to draw up the cover for issue 8. The neat bonus of this assignment was that Frank Quitely was working as the cover editor for me on this one. "My instructions for this cover were "a Johnny K. holding badge out close so its surface is clearly readable, larger than the one on the red WOD Tee-shirts. He's holding his gun in the other hand. Give him the usual jock lantern jawed shit eatin' grin!”

"So, that said, I threw these 4 roughs (Very rough!) images back to see what they’d prefer. Part of my master plan here in drawing these so loosely, was to Get Quitely to draw some roughs back at me that actually looked like real drawings, but alas he didn’t bite. Sigh…next time. ;-)"

"The result was that everyone picked pose #3 as the preferred one. I kinda liked pose #1 the best, but I was out voted. Frank’s specific feedback was “I like 3 the best, but I think it would be improved by having him face us, so I took the head off 4 and dropped it on top of 3, and flipped it. Well, I moved the rear hand with the gun a tiny bit and cropped it so he seemed more balanced, and then voila! Maybe it could be still further improved by tilting the head back a bit so he's looking down his nose at us a little - but it's a trickier angle.”

With that he send back my crappy drawing tweaked in photoshop ( NO Frank! You were supposed to redraw it a bit, its part of my master plan!) His tweaked version looked like this:

"After that I worked on it a bit and sent the pencils rough for approval...:"

"Then tighter pencils before inks:"

"I printed it out in Blueline and inked it like so..." (How frikking cool is that!?! - Pete)

"Then the magic REALLY happened…Jamie Grant went in there an coloured it up to this:"

"All in all I was really happy with how it turned out. I think it’s a good iconic Johnny K ‘War on Drugs’ cover. Now, you’ll have to excuse me, I’ve gotta go and create another master plan for how to get a Johnny K drawing out of Frank Quitely!"

A brilliant article from Gibson Quarter there, here's how the finished article looked...

Aw maaan, can you imagine GQ's take on Dredd? Well, imagine no more, here are a few of his cracking entries from previous 2000AD compos:

Great stuff, Thanks to Gibson Quarter for sending the images, they're really cool! Check out more of his work on his blog here. Aaaaagh come on Tharg, get this fella in me prog!

Simon Fraser - Tearing up the rule book!

2011-05-20T14:25:00.000-07:00

It looks like Si Fraser has been spending a little too much time with his own creation and his risk-taking, leave it to chance philosophy is starting to rub off on the premier artist! Simon said "This was a tricky cover because I kind of ended up throwing out the rulebook and then winging it. The difference was that I did a greytone version with markers on top of the linework then worked into that with colours in Photoshop..."

The sketch

The greytone version...

Si continues "That preserves some textural information which adds a bit of tooth to the drawing (pun intended!) There was no separate line-layer, so it ended up a bit more 'painterly' than my usual. I've been doing a lot of experiments on the DrawBridge Blog recently (http://draw-bridge.blogspot.com/) and as a result I felt more comfortable trying something a bit different."

Of the finished cover, Simon remarked "It's another Dante grinning with his arms folded cover, like the Army of Thieves & Whores cover I did last year. This might be turning into a theme..." Or maybe the character is getting some of his creators traits too - a confidence that can only come from someone at the very top of their game.

Thanks as ever to Simon, it's a beautifully designed cover with a brave style that really works. 'Spectacular' some would say...

Steve Cook - Photo finish!

2011-05-16T14:58:00.000-07:00

2000AD has a long and proud tradition of photo covers, many of them being the work of 2000AD Design Droid & artist Steve Cook. As well as ace designer (he designed the current 2000AD logo) Steve is a photographic artist of some repute with his long running Alternity project (fusing old and new photography) and an extensive portfolio that includes major and minor stars such as Freddie Mercury, William Orbit, Sophie Aldred, Robert Crumb, Stephen King and Adam West!

I contacted Steve to see if he had any covers to send for the blog and he was kind enough to send these great images of the cover of Prog 1615 featuring Jenna Makarov, or rather model Valeria Dragova.

Steve says "I took a fair few photos of Valeria Dragova, but strangely it was one of my lighting test out-takes of her that seemed to be the best image to start with. Having seen the script and knowing the outline of the story, this particular image had the essence of what I was looking for. I then built it up digitally, layer upon layer after first sending a rough design to get the go-ahead from the editor."

Below is the rough...

And the lighting test shot...

Steve continues "Rather than attempting to source a Russian costume to shoot, it was actually quicker to create her tunic in Adobe Illustrator and then manipulate it in Photoshop based upon John Burns’ original design."

Being a thickie, I asked Steve to tell me more about the hat and crest. He said "The hat was added from another shot and the crest then added to that, with a bit of fake shadow detail. I have a pretty extensive archive of negatives to sample bits from."

"I made sure I left plenty of space around her to give the designer enough room for the logo, cover lines, barcode and other elements and I think he did an excellent design job on the finished cover design..."

Finally a word from Steve about the lovely model, he says "Beware googling Valeria, her pics can be somewhat – racy!!! : )" Naturally, I've followed his advice so don't know what he could possibly mean!

HUGE thanks to Mr Cook for taking time out to send the images - it's brilliant to see a different kind of cover coming together.

Garry Brown - "This is Anderson's Boomstick!"

2011-05-14T01:37:00.000-07:00

Yet ANOTHER cover Débutante this week! Garry Brown is an insanely talented Scottish artist with an outstanding sense of design. A recently graduating from the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art, Garry has been making a big splash producing stunning covers for Boom! Studios Incorruptible series as well as working for a host of other comic publishers.

Not one to be left out, the Mighty Tharg has commissioned Garry to produce some 2000AD covers. The first is this brilliant Cadet Anderson one, for which Garry posted a breakdown of the cover process on his Deviantart site.

I've chopped the image up so we can fully appreciate each step. Over to Garry "1 - One of 3 layouts I emailed to the editor. The cover was to involve PSI Judge Anderson in her rookie days. I actually did all 3 layouts in my moleskin sketchbook at ECCC this year. Anyway, this is the one the editor chose to go with."

He continues "2 - Normally my process would be to print that out full size then put tracing paper on top of it and work out the anatomy/details. BUT, i recently got a cintiq 21ux (Lucky git! -Pete), so i get to do it all digitally now so I simply took it into PS and added a layout above then draw out the anatomy."

"3 - Next layer above to make sure i have everything i need details wise (except the hand for some reason.)"

The image is looking stunning right now, which leads us onto a little Garry rant! "4 - I wanted to show this because I have been accused in the past and present of being a 'when in doubt black it out' guy. Not the case. I draw everything out and then used to add another tracing paper layer above it and roughly ink out the shadows. As stated above, I do this digitally now."

"5 - I then blueline print it out on comic board and ink it traditionally. I don't think I'll ever ink digitally, I like the randomness of natural inks." I can certainly see Garry's point here. While I love a nice clean digitally created image there's something raw and exciting about good, old fashioned ink!

"6 - THIS IS NOT THE FINAL COVER. I did this by accident. It's pretty much the trapping layer moved above the lineart layer. I thought it looked cool so I sent it off to the editor as I continued to colour the cover in a more traditional style. It took about 3 minutes to do this red version, sent it off to a buddy for his take on it, then he said, 'kind of looks like a Dave Johnson cover for 100 Bullets.' Turns out it IS the same style of colouring for issue 78 of 100 Bullets. So that was that. Wasn't going to use it. Still worth showing I think. It was after all part of the process and I almost finished colouring a cover in 3 minutes, nice!"
That 100 Bullets cover for ya...

However, the final art has the magnificent blue/purple colour scheme shown below.

Garry says "I had already sent the red version to the editor but I didn't like it. I went ahead and coloured the second version. I always had a strong blue and white colour scheme in mind for it so it all went relatively quickly."

Once again, the design team at 2000AD have done a great job with the image, with Pye Parr versatile logo design rocking the blue and white dynamic of the original image. Brilliant!

Thanks to Garry for his wonderful input (look out for a cooool future Dredd cover from him on his Deviantart site!) You can find his website here where I urge you to look lovingly at his Incorruptible covers and his Batman cover.

I look forward to seeing lots more from this superb artist!

Liam Sharp - Mutie Hell!

2011-05-07T04:33:00.000-07:00

Well, would you look at that? An absolutely brilliant cover from Liam Sharp showing our favourite law man surrounded by some very scary looking muties in the heat of the Cursed Earth. It's a brilliant cover and for once, we're going to start at the end product as there seems to have been a few decisions made after the cover was completed.

Over to Liam for the full story, "This is the cover unadorned. I wanted to keep it really simple and clean, and to hark back a bit to my old Dredd work, and the Bolland Dredds I grew up with."

However, once completed, the mighty one had other ideas about it, Liam continues "Tharg wanted to see if it worked better in close up..."

"...but I had been very careful with the design, working it up with the logo very much in mind. Ultimately he agreed with me and we settled on this version..." I was recently lucky enough to meet Mr Sharp at the Kapow con and let me tell you, he's a big fella and not one to be argued with. Even if you're the mighty Tharg!

"...but not before we tried one more with a couple more muties roughly sketched in in the background." Check out those bad boys below:

And so, that final cover again and the last words from Liam "What I'm really pleased with, though, is the colour. I've been working with hotter palettes than I usually go for recently and it's been really interesting seeing the results." Regular readers of the blog will remember Liam showed hotter and cooler versions of his brilliant wraparound Flesh cover.

Speaking of Liam's use of cooler colours, I thought I could use that as an excuse to show this amazing Rancor Hunters painting he did for the Star Wars: Visions art book, I adore this picture!

Once again, a HUGE thank you to Liam for taking the time to send the art and the quotes, it's very much appreciated by me and everyone who reads the blog! Liam's next cover features the mighty Tharg, so after going toe to toe with the mighty one on this cover, look out for the addition of a wart on the end of his nose or some comedy glasses!

Tiernen Travallion - Absal-outely Class!

2011-05-04T05:06:00.000-07:00

So, here's another cover debut, the second in a month! This time it's by the brilliant Tiernen Trevallion who's work has been a revellation since appearing in a 'Tales from the Black Museum' strip in Megazine 289.

The cover is for new series Absalom, written by fan favourite Gordon Rennie with sumptuous art by Trevallion. The story is described as "a pseudo-spin-off from Rennie’s popular but unfinished Caballistics series for 2000 AD about a freelance team of demon hunters caught up in an ancient game of good versus evil.

An old-school London copper, Absalom has been on the force for 40 years. He’s also head of a special squad that enforces The Accord, a diplomatic treaty made in the 15th Century between the throne of England and the powers of Hell, keeping tabs on the demons who walk amongst us."

Below we can see Tiernen's pencils showing Absalom's mob, I can't wait to meet these! It's also a rare glimpse into the template used for 2000AD coversn note the choice of positioning for the bar codes and the guidelines for artists written in blue...

Tiernen inks the squad to make them look truly menacing...Aaaand finally, the deceptively simple colours are added, fantastic!

Behold Tiernen's excellent website here: http://tiernentrevallion.co.uk/ There's some beautiful, truly stunning artwork on it which really reminds me of industry giants such as Mignola, Kev Walker, O'Neill, McMahon and Jock. Just check out that Dredd below, I hope he gets a proper Dredd story soon...

Thanks to Tiernen for sending the bloody lovely images, I can't wait to see more of his work.

Judge Dredd - Il est le loi!

2011-04-26T04:53:00.000-07:00

MegaCity One's premier lawman is no just popular in the UK and US, his books are translated to multiple languages and sold all over the world. I recently stumbled across the above image of Dredd by the fantastic French artist Sebastien Grenier and asked him about it.

He said "Bonjour Wells! It's done for the French edition of integral of Judge Dredd (early issues) for Soleil editions (collection Anticipation)." Integral is obviously the French version of our Case Files for which Sebastien has provided an excellent cover.

Below we see his pencils...
Followed by a monotone wash...
And finally that cracking cover image which was done with oils on Gessoed Board. Beautiful!
And here it is on the book, not bad eh?
Compared to the UK version:
and the US version:
So there we go, Dredd from around the world! A huge "Merci" to Sebastien for sending the image and the breakdown, check out his website here and his excellent Deviant Art gallery here!

Cliff and Dylan - A Rip Roaring Combination!

2011-04-22T08:24:00.000-07:00

Bojemoi! Nikolai Dante returns, as you'd expect, in fine style thanks to the creative tour de force that is Cliff Robinson and Dylan Teague. The story serves as a recap for readers on Dante's epic adventures to date and, unsurprisingly, the super talented Cliff has captured the Russian Rogue's swagger and cocky demeanour perfectly.

Below are his stunning roughs...

Followed, as ever, by absolutely faultless linework in his inks. Brilliant.

The cover has been coloured by the awesome Dylan Teague. No stranger to colouring Cliff's work, Dylan is himself a fan. He says "I love colouring Cliff's stuff! It's always superbly drawn so I just try and be as sympathetic to it as possible. I try and keep it simple and not to over render. Cliff has described most of the forms in his linework so my job is really just to try and pick the right colours and add a little texture here and there."

Of course, Dylan himself in one of 2000AD's most talented artists and has produced some absolutely dazzling covers in his time, including the iconic 1348 which appears in this blog's very logo! Here are the inks for it...

And the coloured version...

Next a REAL favourite of mine, the glorious cover of Megazine 238, featuring just about every one of Dredd's most troublesome enemies. I can't tell you how much I love this cover.
Next up, this superb cover for the reprint of 'The Corps' in the Extreme Edition...
And this thrilling cover for the Dredd Thriller Regime Change in the Meg.
Beyond the Dredd universe, Dylan has produced covers for a host of other 2000AD thrills including this classic Synnamon cover:

To these great Malone and Lowlife covers...

As well as trying his hand at some more classic characters, Dante:

Rogue Trooper:
Mega thanks to Cliff and Dylan for sending the images, top blokes!

Steve Yeowell - In the Lap of the Gods

2011-04-20T00:01:00.000-07:00

Avast me hearties, Captain Jack Dancer is back and, erm... dead. This beautiful cover by the genius that is Steve Yeowell, kicks off the latest Red Seas adventure "Gods and Monsters." As the Norse Gods look on, Idun know how he's going to get out of this one...

Moooving on, below is Steve's thumbnail for the cover...

Followed by the pencils.

Next are the inks which beautifully illustrate Steve's clean, economic style where not a single brush stroke is wasted. Amazing...
And finally the beautiful coloured version which, I'm assuming Steve coloured himself.

I really like this cover, it's absolutely beautiful. Going from one extreme to the other though, is Steve's cover of Megazine 307. This features some very scary mutants from the Samizdat Squad strip which are anything but beautiful! A really dark and nasty cover which really highlights Yeowell's versatility as an artist.

Thanks to Steve for sending the images and for flying the flag for 2000AD at Kapow!

"Shoot me Boss! Don't let it eat me alive!"

2011-04-17T02:14:00.000-07:00

Now that's a début cover! New artdroid James McKay absolutely knocks it out of the park with this terrifying painted cover for Flesh - Texas. It has all the impact of those early progs back when we were all kiddies getting our weekly prog from newsagent!

Below is James' sketch, he said "I wanted to focus on Gorehead in close up on the cover, for maximum impact!" Gorehead is, we have discovered, a blood-drenched Tyrannosaurus Rex who, because of a blast at a Trans-Time base, has become 'unstable' in time, so almost indestructible!
Below is the zarjaz, fully painted cover again. James continues "I want to do some more covers where I show him full figure and make him look even more evil! Pat always insists on him eating someone...!"

So congratulations to James on a brilliant first cover. He says "I was extremely chuffed to be offered the chance to do my first 2000AD cover, hopefully there'll be a lot more!"

Can't agree more! I'm sure it'll help that Pat Mills is ecstatic with James' work. The godfather of 2000AD raves "James has done the impossible. He's brought Flesh back to life with a Vengeance. After Ramon Sola's brilliant interpretation of Flesh in Book One, I never thought I'd find another artist who could do justice to its varied themes - cowboys, time travel, science fiction and dinosaurs. James has achieved this and more!" High praise indeed!

As if to prove Pat right, James was also kind enough to send some sketches(!) firstly, there's a full Gorehead for us to ogle...

Followed by a Styracosaurus and Troodon, wow!

James has a cracking website with many more of his amazing illustrations, you'll find it here.

Thanks a million to James for sending the images, they're brilliant! And best of luck for the rest of the series!

Jon Davis-Hunt's Knight-mare!

2011-04-13T15:31:00.000-07:00

It's no secret that I am a walloping great fan of Jon Davis-Hunt's work and the amazing thing is, he just seems to get better and better! The Eagle-Award best cover finalist (and, at time of writing, hopefully winner!) has turned out another amazing cover after taking over Warren Pleece's art duties on Alec Worley's fantastic Dandrige strip.

As usual, Jon has sent a brilliant step by step breakdown of each stage of the creative process as well as some superb commentary. A top guy! So, over to Jon:

"I usually send Tharg three or four sketches initially for a cover, but in this case, I had a pretty clear idea in my head what I thought the cover should look like. So, I sent Tharg this sketch with an short accompanying email, just explaining the final look for the cover. While I'd been doing the initial research for the Dandridge series, I'd found a load of Vaudeville Edwardian style posters online, so wanted to capture some of that feel in this cover. At this point, I still hadn't finally decided on the details of the ghosts armour, so in this sketch, he has solid steel gauntlets. He also has a visor as I wasn't 100% sure how it was going to look yet."

Man, I love this next image. Jon says "For this cover I inked Dandridge in full first. The original idea for this was that I was contemplating have the ghost armour slightly transparent, so I intended on effectively inking the ghost in on a separate layer in photoshop and then taking the opacity down later. However, shortly after I finished inking Dandridge, I decided against that, as I wanted instead, to make the armour look really heavy and reflective and as the background was going to have a delicate and intricate Edwardian design, I thought this might clash if the inking on the Ghost let the background show through."

"So I went straight on and inked in the ghost. It was at this point I decided to give the Ghost's gauntlets the segmented metal look - mainly because I always loved this effect when Marc Silvestri used to ink Colossus back in the Xmen in the early 90's."

With the inks in place, it's time for some of Jon's exquisite colouring; "I then flat coloured the image, using the colour swatches I had already built up from doing the series."

"The next step was adding in all the shading and highlights to the colouring. At this point, I didn't add any of the bloom or lighting effects that would come later and I'm still colouring 'under' the inks in Photoshop..."

Jon adds the background detail - "I then added in the background, which I just kind of made up on the spot, based on a whole host of Edwardian posters and playing cards..." Bloody show off!

And finally, some of the old JDH magic, "The final stage was to add in the shine and glow effects for the ghost and armour and also Dandridge's blade. I then added several washes to the overall image, to pull the colours together and to slightly age the image, which I then enhanced by adding in several textures, from scanned in pieces of paper and from sources I found on the web of interesting textures. Again, I wanted to really give the poster a worn, aged, Vaudeville quality."

On a final note, Jon says "I thought I had been quite clever doing a historically themed image, but then literally, the day after I finished the cover and sent it in, I saw Henry Flint's awesome Shakara cover, which also used a distinct time period for inspiration. Damn. : ) " Modest as ever, I think this cover even gives Henry a run for his money!

Jon's artwork on this strip has been amazing, below is an actual page from the story...

So, let's call time on another absolutely stunning cover from Jon. I'd like to thank him for (yet again) taking the time to send the pics and the brilliant commentary. Please go and visit his site here and send him the gushing plaudits he deserves!

SHAKARA!!!

2011-03-31T23:47:00.000-07:00

Shakara, by Robbie Morrison and Henry Flint, made his audacious début in Prog 2002 in a riotous strip which saw the destruction of Planet Earth on page one, shortly followed by the unceremonious squishing of the last human being by page three! The story focuses on an almost indestructible being who is a tool of wrathful vengeance for an extinct race. Below are some of Henry Flint's terrifying original designs for the principal character...

The series began deceptively simply; each week we'd be introduced to an immoral, hideous yet amazingly designed race of aliens who would be killed by the laser blades and shurikens of our eponymous hero. However, as the series progressed and the first book came to a close, we were given hints that Shakara's killing sprees were linked and part of a much bigger plan...

The first ever Shakara cover was this beauty for Prog 1277 by friend of the blog, the amazing Clint Langley. Here we see Shakara facing off against the evil Investigator Sneer...

This was followed two progs later by Henry's first Shakara cover, possibly giving us a hint of the galaxy spanning adventures that were to follow.

The first book was collected as a hardback TPB, the cover of which is shown below...

And the printed version...

Book 2 of the saga, Shakara - The Assassin, began with Shakara's execution of the kindly but strangely repentant Dr Lara Procopio, before introducing us to a doomed group of bounty hunters and killers, hired by Shakara's enemies to bring him down. This arc also showed us Shakara's more defiant side as he repeatedly rebelled against the voices that controlled him...

This series spawned a single cover, the inks for which can be seen below:

And here's the coloured version:

The success of Shakara obviously caught the eye of Droid Life creator Cat Sullivan who treat us to this classic in Prog 1455:

Shakara - The Defiant, the third book in the series, introduced us to the evil Cinnebar Brenneka, the villain of the piece who was responsible for the rise and fall of the Shakaran race. We also meet Dr Eva Procopio, the daughter of Shakara's first victim in book 2, who swears vengeance on her mother's killer. You can see how Henry designed the look of Eva below...

In this book we discover the shocking truth about Eva's mother, she was responsible for the virus that had wiped out the Shakaran race, hence her guilt and acceptance of her fate at the beginning of the previous book. During this part of the saga, Shakara defies his masters and saves the life of young Eva, before showing her the crimes of her mother.

Two big names gave us covers for this arc, firstly 2000AD stalwart and Legends creator Nick Percival, gave us this absolute beauty:

Followed by this amazing cover by none other than Brendan McArthy, wow...

Though it appeared differently when published...

Shakara - The Destroyer, Book 4 in the series, saw Brennaka make his move against Shakara and begin to make a weapon to destroy the entire galaxy. During this book, we saw Eva and Shakara's relationship begin to develop, only to be cruelly cut short when Shakara was seemingly killed...

Below we have the inks and final cover for Prog 1657 based on Mick McMahon's classic Cursed Earth cover of Prog 85.

The final, epic book of the series, Shakara - Avenger, saw the regeneration of Shakara and followed his thrilling race against time to stop Brenakka from destroying the universe, before the black plague finally killed him. This world devastating romp was an absolute 2000AD classic with both writer and artist at the very top of their game.

The saga began with another Clint Langley classic, his first fully painted cover for over ten years!

And was shortly followed by this brilliant Neil Roberts illustration - I love it!

For the final two covers, it was up to Shakara creator Henry Flint to close the book on his fantastic offspring. The first showed Shakara destroying the entire star fleet of his enemies by simply driving a planet at them...

And, almost in total contrast to the madness of the previous cover, we have the work of genius that is the Vitruvian Man-like plans for the Shakaran's instrument of vengeance - firstly the rough...

Followed by the amazing final version - just look at that beautiful 2000AD logo, perfect...

Shakara has been a phenomenal series, easily one of the best in recent years. It has quite rightly drawn parallels with classics such as Nemesis and is a fine example of the new golden age of 2000AD. The plaudits often go to Henry Flint for his stunning, mind bending artwork but a special mention must surely go to writer Robbie Morrison, who has given a master class in storytelling here. Let's hope Rebellion plan a huge phone-book sized trade paperback featuring all five books!

Thanks to all artists who have sent images for this post.