2000 AD Covers Uncovered – Bring on the Dinos with Nick Roche, dino-expert!
25th August 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 week, it’s time to get all Regened again as super talented droid Nick Roche returns to the cover of the 2000 AD All-Ages Prog 2296 with Cadet Dredd laying down some Dino-law to the Dinosaurs of the Cursed Earth!
2000 AD Regened Prog 2296 features five Scrotnig tales to get readers young and old excited – leading off with Cadet Dredd (of course!) in Two Tribes by James Peaty and Luke Horsman, new thrill Renk by Paul Starkey and Anna Readman, a ghafflebette Future Shock by David Barnett and Steve Roberts, more from the Justice Department’s strangest as Department K take on the Crisis of Infinite Estabons, as told by Rory McConville and Nick Dyer, and then it’s back to the world of the Survival Geeks as Gordon Rennie, Emma Beeny, and Neil Googe show us more from the ‘Splorers in The Big Splash.
And it’s all under a stunning Nick Roche cover… and as luck would have it, he’s here to talk to us now about it…
NICK ROCHE: Tharg asking me to do one 2000 AD Regened cover is lucky: Asking me to do a SECOND must surely be carelessness. But The Mighty One doesn’t make mistakes, so here we are again.
The last Cadet Dredd cover [Prog 2220] I did featured my bread and butter: A HONKING GREAT ROBOT. So it was nice to be asked to draw, (what’s next after ‘bread and butter’…? Oh yeah…) my Jaffa Cakes: DINOSAURS.
My first ever interior comics work featured Transformers that turned into biologically accurate dinosaurs, and I gave them SUCH accuracy, that a paleontologist called Dr Michael O’ Sullivan named a genus after me, a pterosaur called ‘Klobiodon Rochei’.
Now, hands up out there if you thought Nick was pulling your leg with that claim? I know I thought it was a gag… but NO. It’s absolutely, totally, 100% true! Take a look at this from the Klobiodon wiki page… ‘the specific name rochei honors the comic book artist Nick Roche for his anatomically correct designs inspired by dinosaurs.’ Even better, from the actual paper by Michael O’Sullivan and David M. Martill, which says this… ‘Etymology: After comic book artist Nick Roche. Comic books are a medium where extinct animals are portrayed in an increasingly scientifically accurate manner, and Roche’s work in the late 2000s was one of the earlier examples in this renaissance in palaeoart.’
What an honour! They’re a talented bunch all these art droids! Okay, back to Nick…
NR: So it’s true, accuracy has its place, but sometimes it’s nice to just draw gnarly, exaggerated Cursed Earth dinos, and their moody little jockeys. So I betrayed my paleo chums and just drew some super fun dinolads.
Here’s the brief from Tharg: “Another Cadet Dredd cover, maybe him surrounded by mutants mounted on dinosaurs or similar weird creatures, wielding lances pointing down at him, perhaps. ‘Another day in the Cursed Earth’, kind of thing”.
So I submitted the pencil sketch, expecting to have to redraft it, but it seemingly sated Tharg’s needs, allowing me to go straight to inks.
NR: I think that ‘Left-to-right diagonal slash’ composition is one that nearly always works. It’s a great way to draw your eye towards the main subject, and give the sense that they’re overwhelmed, outnumbered or outgunned.
I particularly enjoyed in this case subverting that by simply having Junior Dredd refuse to acknowledge he’s in an unwinnable scenario. A methodology all us droids try to approach at the Nerve Centre, though not always with success…
After my Bread and Butter, and now my Jaffa Cakes, I’m hoping to be asked back to draw the equivalent of, I dunno, my ‘Milky Tea’. Keep pouring, Mighty One, I’ll say ‘when’…
There you go, not just a fabulous cover from Nick there, but a little bit of Dino-knowledge at the same time! Thanks so much to Nick for sending it along.
You can find 2000 AD Prog 2296 wherever you pick up your weekly dose of Thrill Power, including the 2000 AD web shop – it’s out right now.
As for Nick’s previous Cadet Dredd cover for 2000 AD Prog 2220 – you can check the Covers Uncovered for that one right here.
