2000 AD Covers Uncovered: Lee Carter’s Debut Prog Cover for Prog 2393 – Rogue’s Return!
31st July 2024
Every week, 2000 AD brings you the galaxy’s greatest artwork and 2000 AD Covers Uncovered takes you behind-the-scenes with the headline artists responsible for our top cover art – join bloggers Richard Bruton and Pete Wells as they uncover the greatest covers from 2000 AD!
Borag Thungg Earthlets, time to take a look at another zarjaz cover for the Galaxy’s Greatest, featuring the return of everyone’s favourite Genetic Infantaryman. Inside, we have Geoffrey D. Wessel and Paul Marshall begin a new multi-parter with Rogue Trooper: Recon, And to mark that special occasion, we have a debut Prog cover from art droid Lee Carter…
Lee’s been a regular at 2000 AD since his very first strip, a Tharg’s Terror Tale: Bad Blood, written by Arthur Wyatt, in 2007’s Prog 1539. Since then, his art’s appeared on Dredd, Grey Area, Rogue Trooper, and he’s the co-creator of Dead Eyes, Necrophim, and Angelic. His most recent appearance inside the Prog was earlier this year with Kek-W on Indigo Prime: Black Monday.
But despite all of that, amazingly, this is his very first 2000 AD Prog cover – but what a cover it is. And if you’re thinking it looks a little familiar, you’re absolutely right, it’s this classic pin-up from Dave Gibbons…
LEE CARTER: Matt had asked me to do a cover based on a Dave Gibbons pin-up, which had Rogue’s face in full shadow black hole and holding his gun…
So, in terms of thumbnails, I really didn’t need to do too many, due to the pose being basically the same.. which was great as I do tend to do way too many thumbnails…
The placement of the black hole was the only thing that really needed to be decided so I did do a few roughs to pass over to Matt...
Once everything was ready to go I tried a few different amounts of shadow on his face and moved away from Dave’s fully shadowed Rogue.
Starting with line work which I do digitally in Photoshop… I then add greys and add some form and tone to the image.
Normally I use flat colours in strip work to give everything a consistent look throughout, I did the same with this cover.
Everything is on layers in Photoshop so I can turn on the line layer, colour flats, grey tones etc, also adding scanned-in paint textures gets away from Photoshop’s clean colours.
With the figure done, I moved on to the background, the background is a mix of photos from Whitby beach, which I took years ago, some old WW2 beach forts.
I basically photobashed and painted into the image.. then colour-corrected it all so it fitted with the figure.
As far as debuts go, that’s a cracker! Thank you to Lee for sending that along! You can get your hands on that cover and that Prog from all the usual places, including the 2000 AD web shop.
For more from Lee, do check out his first Judge Dredd Megazine cover, the 2021 Christmas blowout issue 439, and have a listen to him on the 2000 AD Thrill-Cast here, again from 2021, chatting about working in video games, drawing military hardware, secret story reveals, and reimagining classic Judge Dredd villains.
Find Lee on Twitter: @MrLeeCarter