Comics

‘No more robots, no more trains’ – 2000 AD wishes a very happy retirement to the legendary John M. Burns

9th October 2023

Earlier this week, John M. Burns, one of Britain’s great comic artists, whose work has thrilled and amazed for more than six decades, announced his retirement from comics.

John M. Burns is, without a doubt, a legendary British comics creator. His extensive body of work across the last six decades and more has brought so much joy, evoked so much admiration and respect from fans and his peers, with Burns very much an artist’s artist. He is someone whose work is instantly recognisable and someone who maintained the highest quality throughout that extraordinarily long career full of page after page of perfect comic art.

Here at 2000 AD, as a way to both recognise the artistic contribution of the man, to celebrate his achievements, and to mark the occasion of his retirement, we wanted to say thank you to him for all the incredible work he’s produced through the years.

Throughout his life’s work, John’s art was always effortlessly dynamic and fluid, his characters emotive and expressive, and he was always so beautifully clear in his storytelling, no matter what the subject or how complex a page needed to be. And he painted just as well as he drew, with a mastery of colour that’s immediately obvious to anyone even casually glancing at one of his pages. A Burns piece was always beautiful, striking, and recognisable to his legions of fans around the world.

Although he produced art for so many British comics and newspapers for more than 60 years, John was perhaps best known for two main periods of his work, the first coming through the 1960s and ‘70s for his beautifully painted art on various TV tie-in strips, predominantly for Look-In, and the second coming with 2000 AD from the 1990s until his retirement.

2000 AD may have seemed a strange fit for an artist who was never shy of telling everyone that he wasn’t all that interested in science fiction and fantasy, but you certainly couldn’t tell that from the seemingly effortlessly thrilling art, beautiful, bold, unmistakably Burns, that graced the pages of 2000 AD or the Judge Dredd Megazine.

Burns is undoubtedly one of the great artists of British comics. Indeed, as several commentators have mentioned, he’s one of the last of the Golden Age of British comic artists to hang their brushes up, with his final work coming in his eighties, still as dynamic, as evocative, and as stunning as when we first saw it.

And, as Matt Smith, 2000 AD editor, tells us, he was all about the brushes – the last of the 2000 AD artists to stick to physical artwork rather than switch to digital.

From his very first appearance drawing a Garth  Ennis Judge Dredd in 1991 all the way through to April of this year with the finale to The Order, Burns brought greatness to 2000 AD and it was always an absolute pleasure to see his work.

John M. Burns was born in 1938 in Essex, England. With no formal art training, his work in comics began in the 1950s as an apprentice on various titles such as School Friend and Junior Express before his first major illustration work, in the Champion the Wonder Horse Annual of 1958.

In the 1960s, following his national service, Burns’ comic art and illustrations would appear more and more frequently in a multitude of comics and magazines including Eagle, Wham!, Diana, and TV Century 21 with strips including Wulf the Briton, Kelpie The Boy Wizard, Wrath of the Gods, Roving Reporter, Bids for Freedom, The Fists of Danny Pyke, Dolebuasters, and Dan Dare.

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It was also during this time that he began what would become plentiful work as a newspaper strip cartoonist. Over many years, millions of newspaper readers would have seen his work on The Seekers (1966-1971), Danielle (1973-1974), George & Lynne (1976-1982), Jane (1985-1989), and Modesty Blaise (1978-1979), where he replaced the great Enrique Badía Romero.

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His work at DC Thomson included lush full-colour adaptations of novels such as Great Expectations and Wuthering Heights in the girls’ weekly Diana where Burns made exceptional use of the higher quality production processes that allowed full-colour painted art to be reproduced. And the techniques and styles he developed here that best utilised that production process continued into the 1970s and 1980s as his art moved into comics and magazines such as TV Action, Countdown and, perhaps most fondly remembered, Look-In.

During this time, Burns’ art was seemingly on the comic adaptations of practically every popular show of the day, including UFO and Mission: Impossible for TV Action; Doctor Who in TV Comic, and The Tomorrow People, Kung Fu, Space 1999, The Bionic Woman, How the West was Won, Smuggler, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, and Magnum P.I. in Look-In. This work on TV-related strips meant that a generation of children (and more than a few adults) grew up reading the exploits of their TV heroes and fell in love with Burns’ colourful, magnificent artwork.

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It wasn’t until 1991 that we first saw Burns’ work inside 2000 AD, giving an object lesson in creating stunning yet immediately readable pages with crystal clear storytelling for the comic at a time when this wasn’t always the case.

Obviously, Burns wasn’t brought in via the way of the Future Shock, but instead did that rarest of things, debuting on Judge Dredd on the Garth Ennis-written Garbage Disposal in Prog 738. He’d go on to work with Ennis for several serials, along with Dredds from John Wagner, Dan Abnett, and John Smith.

Although he only really had a handful of Dredds over the next decade-plus, his art put a real stamp on the stories he did illustrate, with his Dredd a memorable one, classic and strong, evoking a darker sensibility, practically a noir tone at times, bringing his signature painterly style and more than a touch of class to 2000 AD.

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John’s beautiful artwork elevated my Dredd scripts to heights they didn’t deserve, but it was always a pleasure to work with him.

I wish him all the very best on his retirement after such an incredible career.

GARTH ENNIS

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Along with his work on Judge Dredd, Burns’ other ‘90s 2000 AD work included a couple of episodes of the X-Files-influenced Vector 13 in 1995 and 1996 (serialised in Progs 974 and 993), followed in 1996 by another strip of black-clad government agents investigating mysterious phenomena and conspiracy theories, Black Light, created by Burns, Dan Abnett, and Steve White (serialised in Progs 1001-1005). This was followed by Gordon Rennie’s 1997 Witchworld series, a pure genre fantasy thing, for which John contibuted art to the final chapter, Closing Shadows (Progs 1059 to 1061). There was also a one-off Durham Red, The Scarlet Apocrypha: Necrocultura written by Dan Abnett (Megazine 4.12, 2002).

But it wasn’t until 1999 that Burns really made his mark at 2000 AD, with his art on his first major series – Nikolai Dante. Co-created by Robbie Morrison and Simon Fraser, Dante was incredibly popular, the swashbuckling sci-fi romps of Russia’s greatest lover, thief, rogue, and all-round legend a highlight of this time in the Prog’s history.

But the popularity was a double-edged sword for series artist Fraser and, as he’ll tell you in a moment, he struggled with meeting some of the deadlines. Several great artists were brought on board to take up the slack, including Chris Weston, Charlie Adlard, Henry Flint, and Andy Clarke, but when Burns joined Dante’s crew on Prog 1148 for the Courtship of Jena Makarov storyline the fit was so natural and obvious and just perfect that it became a permanent thing, with Burns often alternating series with Fraser through the remaining 13 years that Dante thrilled readers in the Prog.

The swashbuckling sci-fi of Dante suited Burns’ artwork perfectly. Indeed, he made such a lasting impression on many readers that some, including Walt Simonson, recognised the character because they loved Burns’ art so much.

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Back in the mid ‘90s when I was a newbie artist working on my first original story for 2000 AD , I was desperate to make a success of it. I was working flat out, but my experience was limited so I was struggling. I couldn’t produce Dante pages as fast as Tharg wanted them, so we needed to get in other artists to fill in. A squad of my peers was duly assembled. Stalwarts like Henry Flint , Charlie Adlard and Andy Clarke duly illustrated several important early chunks of Dante’s exploits. But a more permanent co-artist was required. David Bishop told us that John M. Burns was interested.

You have to understand that as a young and somewhat insecure artist I was simultaneously in awe of Burns and also nervous of him. It was like being a jazz pianist and Thelonius Monk sits down at the piano stool, right next to you. Everyone looks at you wondering what you’re even doing there. You wonder yourself . John M. Burns isn’t just a good comics artist , he’s one of the very best. His draftsmanship is breathtaking. His panel layouts are elegant and dynamic. He can paint as well as he can draw.  His storytelling is effortless and powerful.

When I met Walt Simonson for the first time and showed him some of my Dante work , he recognised the character, not because of me, but because John M. Burns drew him. Walt is a big fan. The Burns fanclub is large and its alumni are very impressive themselves.

Burns emerged from a generational wave of British comics artists, coming in the wake of Frank Bellamy, Frank Hampson, David Wright, Ron Embleton , Don Lawrence and Jim Holdaway. If there was a Golden Age of British comics art, then they were it.  He’s as good as any of them. He is the last of them. We have been immeasurably lucky to have had his beautiful work for so long. It is a privilege to sit in his shadow.

SIMON FRASER – ARTIST AND CO-CREATOR OF NIKOLAI DANTE

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Burns and Morrison also went on to create The Bendatti Vendetta, running across three stories in the Megazine from 2002-2005. A cracking all-out action crime thriller, The Bendatti Vendetta chronicled a tale of revenge and gangster vengeance, stylish but brutal, very bloody, and bloody brilliant to look at, with Burns’ art suiting this ’70s-style thriller to a tee.

In 2011, Burns and writer Kek-W first got together with their sci-fi story, Angel Zero. Running in Progs 1751-1763, it was the first strip in a partnership of writer and artist that would last until Burns’ retirement.

Angel Zero was inspired by classic Japanese Yakuza and splatter films, telling of one young woman’s struggle to escape her fate as a reluctant assassin and living weapon with an alien battle computer grafted to her nervous system. And of course, it looked amazing.

All of which brings us to The Order, the final strip in Burns’ long and illustrious career, with him reuniting with writer Kek-W for a seven-series run of the serial that began in 2014’s Prog 2015 and ended in April 2023 with Prog 2329.

A time-twisting, genre-hopping, historical epic that stretches over 10,000+ years, The Order chronicles the efforts of the extraordinary women and men of this long-established secret society to protect the world from the paranormal threats of the nightmarish and extra-dimensional Wurms. It all begins with Anna Kohl uncovering the mechanical knight Ritterstahl, who will lead her to a group of her missing father’s old colleagues, all of them members of The Order. The subsequent adventuring takes Anna and the readers into strange territory, a whole secret history of the world, incedible danger, and all of it, of course, looking quite stunning.

Even in this final stage of his career, with Burns in his 70s and 80s, there was no let-up in quality and every page of The Order‘s seven series featured his incredible art, as bold, clear, and beautiful as it had always been.

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I first came across the artwork of John M Burns – though I didn’t know it at the time – in the 1960s, in assorted British nursery and educational comics. His work is an indelible part of my formative inner landscape along with Frank Bellamy, Don Lawrence and Frank Hampson. It forms one of the pillars of my own creative self; though he doesn’t realise it, John helped make me who I am. It’s a debt I can never fully repay.

So, it’s incredible to me that we ended up working together all these years later. John and I collaborated on a handful of projects (including an unfinished / unpublished creator-owned strip), but it’s the The Order, of course, that forms the main body of our work. Its theme of comradeship – of outsiders overcoming their differences to create an alliance of equal opposites – felt like an optimistic, hopeful antidote to these awful times we find ourselves living in. But it was John who breathed life into its unlikely, unruly cast of characters; his craft was the fuel that animated them – he made them real in ways I never dared imagine.

In the first series, the endless fairytale forests of 12th century Germany were a glorious call-back to the fabulous landscapes painted by John that had populated the comics of my childhood. When, one day on the phone, he told me his first professional work had been a front-piece for a Champion the Wonder Horse annual, I brought wurm-horses and wurm-dogs into the strip – flashbacks, not only to John’s own astonishing body of work, but to classic Action-Adventure strips and Silver Age animal sidekicks like Rin Tin Tin, Lassie and White Horses. Through John I rediscovered that childlike sense of optimism and wonder I thought I had lost forever.

John’s disdain for science-fiction and fantastical story elements is legendary – yet he’s just so darn good at it! He would regularly cajole me to get rid of Ritterstahl: “No more robots!” he’d grumble. “Can’t we just kill him off?” But when, in an attempt to placate him, I introduced Cassi Jones and the crew of the Cannonball Express (another childhood fave) his response was to send me a postcard which read: “No more trains!”

I love John’s dry chuckle and his self-effacing sense of humour. It’s like he genuinely doesn’t realise the huge esteem in which he’s held; the great affection that we all have for him. John is an artistic titan, one of the giants of our industry – of our beloved hobby. I’ve learned so much while working with him – his career has paralleled the arc of my life. “It’s just a job,” he once told me when I was asking advice on how to navigate the cut-and-thrust existence of a freelancer, “a job like any other. Yet, despite all that, we can’t help putting so much of ourselves on the page.”

Even though I knew it was coming, I confess I had a lump in my throat when he phoned earlier this week to say he had decided to retire. It felt like the end of an era. But I also knew it was selfish of me to secretly want more from a man who has already given us so much of himself. “I’ve walked down to my studio every morning for over sixty years,” he told me. I hope he continues to make that walk for many more years to come.

I wish John and Julia all the very best.

KEK-W – WRITER AND CO-CREATOR OF THE ORDER AND ANGEL ZERO

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Burns’ gorgeous artwork continued on The Order right until the end of its seventh and final series in April 2023. By this time, on medical advice, he first decided to cut back on his workload and then to retire completely. By this point, he was into his eighties and had been making art – beautiful, striking, bold art – for more than 60 years.

So, on the occasion of his retirement, we at 2000 AD wanted to send John our very best wishes and our heartfelt thanks for the incredible body of work he’s produced over the years. As so many of you have been saying, including the writers and artists who worked with him and loved his work so much, we will all miss seeing his work in the pages of the Prog.

We wish John and his wife, Julia, all our best for a long, enjoyable, and very happy retirement. And we hope, as do legions of his fans and fellow artists that this true great of British comics doesn’t completely give up the drawing board just yet.      

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Many years ago, back in 1973, I picked up an issue of TV Action from Fennells, the newsagent in Lakeside shopping precinct in Cardiff. It was a few minutes walk up a very steep hill, but worth every step….I was on the hunt! Somehow I had heard that if I bought a copy of this week’s that weeks comic I would get a free packet of Spangles- what a bargain. I’d not even heard of the comic before though, and wasn’t a committed comic fan at that point, but clearly I just hadn’t found the right one yet. As it turns out the comic itself was life-changing- Dr Who by Gerry Haylock, the Persuaders by Jose Ortiz, along with UFO and Mission Impossible by a certain John M Burns (yes, the comic credited its artists, a real rarity in those days). I was absolutely captivated and not the least bit interested in the Spangles any more. It was the moment when I realised that actual people drew these things and I absolutely wanted to see more. From that moment on I’ve collected as much of John’s work as I could find, not least in the pages of 2000AD of course (I’m still waiting for more episodes of Witchworld!), and have put together a sizeable collection of his originals- which are constantly puled out to admire and be inspired by. And intimidated!

So yes, I’m a fan, a completist, and an admirer. Seeing John’s work literally changed my life- as a comic artist of several decades standing now I can trace that passion all the way back to the first time I saw his artwork, the impression it made on me was that profound.

It still looks incredible to me now. If we have seen the last piece of comic art from John, then he’s left us with an incredibly rich and inspiring legacy, and not many people can say that about their lives. So thank you maestro, for everything.

DAVID ROACH – WRITER, ARTIST AND COMICS HISTORIAN

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John was already a regular contributor when I started at 2000 AD – in fact, he was in the middle of painting the thirteen-part Nikolai Dante arc ‘The Romanov Empire’ when I joined, and of course he made such epic-ness look effortless. Every three to four weeks, a cardboard tube would arrive in the post from Cornwall with his latest pages, and they were beautiful, tactile things, where you marvelled over the brush strokes.

Twenty years on, and John was still delivering physical painted pages, the last of the droids not to adopt a digital methodology, and he remained an incredibly reliable creator, capable of turning his hand to most genres and with the same consummate skill. It’ll be the end of an era not to have him in the prog any more, and we’ll miss him.’

MATT SMITH – 2000 AD EDITOR