2000AD Covers Uncovered – Harvey Wall Clanger!
25th March 2017
Trial by Machine is back! John Wagner and John McCrea bring full metal justice to the streets of Mega City One in the blistering new Judge Dredd thriller Harvey, beginning in Prog 2024. With justice department resources at an all time low, Chief Judge Hershey looks to the troubled Mechanismo Programme to help bring some order to the Chaos. After the previous catastrophic failings of the robotic judges, have Tek Division finally got it right?
I asked celebrated artdroid John McCrea to tell us about his creation of the brilliant cover for the opening episode. He said “The story focuses on a Mechanismo robot called Harvey, and as the film Harvey, starring Jimmy Stewart and his eponymous 8ft tall invisible rabbit, is one of my favourite movies ever ( though a lot of Jimmy Stewart’s films are in my favourite list!) I thought a tribute to the movie poster would be cool…“
Jimmy Stewart loved Easter…
“So I roughed out a sketch (I thought about having Dredd sitting down but didn’t have the artistic chops to pull it off) and plonked the logo on it to give Tharg an idea of the finished cover. It got the green thumbs up.”
Barry Manilow visits Megacity-One
And with a nice logo added…
Dredd outside Isaac Asimov Block
“I printed out the pencils and inked them on a lightbox. Then I went and had a sandwich. Beetroot, humous, basil and pepper, lightly toasted. Honest, it’s fantastic. And a cup of tea. I walked back to the drawing board, looked at the inks, hated the Dredd figure and started again.”
Here are the inks that John hated, maybe HE should go and see Dr Sanderson…
Behold! The unloved inks of the monster that is John McCrea!
“I wanted the Dredd figure to be more dynamic- he was a little to startled looking in my previous attempt. Dredd is never startled. Pissed off, annoyed, grumpy maybe, but never startled, surprised, shocked etc…”
A more pissed off, annoyed and grumpy Dredd.
” I decided to use more of an ink wash finish this time round ( I’d been doing a lot of that on my Dreddwolf story for IDW and I had some spare ink left on my mixing plate (49p from Ikea… ))”
Dredd and his shadow, shooting up the avenue…
“I then send the art to Mike Spicer in Americaland and shortly thereafter it returns, looking lovely and ready to print. Total time, 2 days. Hope you like it, Earthlets!”
A cold, hard law machine and a robot called Harvey.
Awesome! I love this cover and John’s interiors are amazing! We are totally spoilt at the moment as this week also sees the release of IDW’s “How of the Wolf.” This Deviations tale asks what would happen if Dredd remained a werewolf after the events of the famed ‘Cry of the Werewolf’ tale.
HUGE thanks to John for sending the images and excellent write up, this Dredd tale is going to be wild!
http://www.johnmccrea.com/