2000 AD Covers Uncovered: Get On Yer Bike, Dredd – It’s Regened Time!
29th February 2020
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 the first of four awesome all-ages Regened Progs for this year, where the pages of the Galaxy’s Greatest get taken over by Tharg’s nephew Joko-Jargo and we get to see some wonderfully different all-ages strips featuring both familiar faces and new strips.
And the cover for Prog 2170 comes from the pen of the hugely talented Mark Sexton…
Sexton’s got more than two decades of comics and film work under his belt right now, but he sure does love coming back to 2000 AD. His resume includes storyboards for Alex Proyas’ cult classic, Dark City (1996), and work on, amongst many more, Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones, Mad Max Fury Road, Black Panther, and Happy Feet.
He looks a little like this…
For comics, he was responsible for bringing Mad Max to comics as writer and artist on the DC/Vertigo Mad Max: Fury Road series. And for Tharg, he’s been responsible for a number of strips, including Judge Dredd: Ghosts and The Long Game (with Michael Carroll), Sinister Dexter (with Dan Abnett). And now he’s back on cover duties.
And, as is so often the case, it all started with another job unexpectedly disappearing… over to Mark…
It was all a case of being in the right place at the right time… I had been working on storyboards for an upcoming film when the dreaded word came through from on high that the studio was shutting the project down. Usually, I work on film but I absolutely love doing whatever I can for the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic; it’s been a dream of mine since childhood.
So whenever the opportunity arises, I annoy Tharg’s earthly minion Matt-1 with enthusiastic yet plaintive queries as to whether there might be something I could help out with.
In this case and in a desperate attempt to get rid of me, Matt-1 offered up the cover for the next upcoming Regened issue. In keeping with the theme, he suggested Cadet Dredd on the Lawmaster, and hastily left me to get on with it.
After the usual procrastination and stuffing around (and a polite email from Matt-1 asking whether there might have been any progress on the cover), I finally turned in a couple of rough covers. Working off the previous Regened covers, featuring iconic imagery of 2000AD characters against an almost featureless background, I went for a matching simplicity.
And because, for some reason, I have a thing about putting characters in a spotlight, I went for a black background too, which I rather liked and thought was potentially eye-catching…
Tharg and/or Matt-1, in their collective wisdom, immediately nixed the spotlight version, which goes to show why they’re the editors of the Galaxy’s Greatest and I am not. And a good thing it is too, I’d make terrible choices.
Because I work digitally, I pretty much go straight from rough to inks, developing the linework piece by piece, detail by detail. Probably too much detail really!
There was lots of fiddling with the scale of Dredd on the Lawmaster. The rough ended up feeling as though Dredd was too large against the bike, and as the image is supposed to be of Dredd as a cadet, it felt necessary to make him smaller and thinner. His head got a little larger in comparison, and of course, there’s always fun to be had riffing on the early Ezquerra/McMahon/Gibson uniform with its more rounded pads and helmet.
Speaking of which, this is the original Mark 1 Lawmaster, which I recall was featured in a brilliant futuregraph on the back of an early prog – an early version, before it was issued with the classic bike cannons mounted on either side of the front wheel. I checked this with Matt-1 as I didn’t want to get digitally burnt in effigy for getting it wrong; however I’m sure I got something else wrong, so I’m looking forward to doing my best Guy Fawkes impression when the Prog comes out…
But I got to draw the classic Lawmaster for the prog. Huzzah!
I’m not a natural colourist – I think I’m a bit literal really when it comes to using a colour palette – but I figured I could get away with this one. I tend to draw my images so that they work in black and white as well as colour, so this didn’t feel like there was too much up for interpretation.
Still, I’m soooooo slow when it comes to colour, it takes me ages – I’m positive all those professional colourists out there could smash an image like this in a very short space of time and still make it look a thousand times better than I did!
Having said that, there’s always something magical about adding colour to an image, and it is fun. But I think next time I’ll leave it to the professionals!
All in all, this was a fun cover to do. Revisiting the old Dredd uniform and Lawmaster is always fun, and trying to make the image simple yet strong is a great challenge. Hopefully it worked!
Note to self: next time, check with Matt-1 whether we’re using a different logo – I worked off the current 2000AD logo and cover layout in composing this image, but only remembered that the Regened logo is a throwback to the original 2000AD logo once I saw this image in the promotional lead-up to its release. I hope it still works compositionally! I can just picture the design droids in the Nerve Centre abusing me roundly for mucking up their layout…
A last thought – I’d love to do more work for 2000AD, it’s always a pleasure to work on Dredd – even if he’s so complicated to draw! But hopefully I can start to loosen up in my artwork with the next story and try to get a little more dynamism into the art. There are so many brilliant artists producing stunning artwork for 2000AD, and there’s so much I see in their work that I’d like to try myself and change things up. Fingers crossed that Matt-1 doesn’t immediately delete my next enthusiastic yet plaintive missive.
It’s just occurred to me that the prog with this cover comes out only two days after my “birthday of temporal importance”, so that’s a nice little extra birthday gift. Almost like it was meant to be. Cheers Tharg!
Thanks so much to Mark for the great write-up!
You take a look at Pete Wells’ Covers Uncovered for Mark’s Prog 1973 cover , which looked like this…
And this Dredd for issue 26 of the Judge Dredd series from IDW:
