Comics

2000 AD Covers Uncovered: it’s a fungicidal Goya – talking Megazine 443 with cover artist Pye Parr

22nd April 2022

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!

This month’s Judge Dredd Megazine has a fabulous looking Judge Goya cover as Intestinauts artist Pye Parr switches over from the Prog to the Meg to give us his take on Death Cap’s hero as she makes her way across the Cursed Earth in search of revenge, desperate to find those who killed everyone she loved before the fungus in her head takes over and kills her.

(Damn, now that’s a mean machine right there)

So, over to Pye for a breakdown on the cover… first up, the brief from Tharg…

PYE PARR: Everything started after Matt (Tharg) got in touch with a pretty simple brief: “In the story Death Cap that Boo is drawing, the main character gets this modded Mad Max-style Lawmaster. I was thinking of a kinetic shot of her speeding towards us on the bike. She’s been infected with the Grubb’s fungus…”

I did the first one on my iPad in front of the tv. It looked crap so I tried again a bit later on. I expanded on the grubs fungus thing and put mushrooms everywhere.

All of that trial and error means three different cover roughs…

(Damn that fungus, Goya’s just got no clue whether she’s coming or going.)

With the rough approved, it’s time to get moving, especially as print deadline day is coming up fast… back to Pye again…

Pencils drawn, scanned then cleaned up, and final linework. I moved Goya’s head out from behind the handlebars so you could see her face better on the final version.

(Taking it from pencils to inks – Goya’s fungal nightmare develops)

Then it’s time for the colouring progress. I started off pretty muted, but there was a couple of weeks gap between image 2 and 3 here, so when i came back to it I was like “fuck all that dull stuff, this needs some acid green and pink!” 

(Acciiiiiidddd! Acccciiiiidddd! – See kids, this is what the special mushrooms can lead to!)

And all that gets us to the final artwork. It *might* have caused The Mighty One some heart palpitations here by messing up my timings and not supplying it till 6pm on print deadline day… 

(She’s a rough-ridin’, ‘shroom-sproutin’, mad as hell fungicidal Judge and she’s comin to get ya!)

And that’s it, from basic idea from Matt all the way through to a stunning final cover for what’s turning out to be a stunning series. Of course, for putting Tharg through that last-minute worry, the Parr droid is getting his very sensitive circuits repeatedly driven over by Goya’s mean machine for the next few weeks.

Thanks so much to Pye Parr for sending over all that great artwork and sharing how he does the great things he does!

Death Cap, by TC Eglington and Boo Cook, continues its run in the Megazine issue 443 – all capped off with Pye’s cover and available from 20 April in all great shops and the 2000 AD web shop. And don’t forget that Pye’s art can be found in the Prog right now with the latest installment of the intestinal infiltrators as the Intestinauts meet the Bowel Impactors.

And finally, for more background on Eglington and Cook’s absolutely brilliant Death Cap, check out the interview with the pair of them here.