2000 AD Covers Uncovered: ‘Heheheh… surprise surprise!’ – Tazio Bettin on 2000 AD Prog 2342
27th July 2023
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 a return to the cover of Tazio Bettin with an Azimuth cover that reveals the big surprise behind the series, as perpetrated by Bettin and Dan Abnett… yes, it’s all been leading up to this moment in Azimuth: The Stranger.
Where Abnett and Bettin take Azimuth from here, we can really only guess! But it’s surely a strip that lives up to the promise that this is a ‘data-driven metropolis where anything is possible.‘
Here, we have a very unexpected introduction – Ramone Dexter. This would be the coming of a stranger that’s been predicted in the strange dreams and portents of the New Flesh masters of Azimuth!
So, without further ado, over to Tazio to tell you about putting together the cover…
TAZIO BETTIN: Heheheh… surprise surprise! My pleasure to be part of Covers Uncovered again!
Well now that it has been revealed, I can share it with you: a clue that Dexter was coming back in Azimuth has been right in front of everyone’s eyes all the time, and that’s Suzi herself!
If you have read the stories I drew of Sinister Dexter so far, you should have recognized Suzi and all others like her dressing only in white, and sometimes black, no colours, and sporting those circuit pattern tattoos exactly like the creepfakes of Sinister and Tracy Weld. So there it was all the time…
Okay, onto the cover itself.
One of the many things I love about Azimuth is that it gives me a chance to draw some of the things I love, or am inspired from, or somehow influenced me or left a profound impression for some reason. In this Dan is always extremely encouraging, and it’s one of the many things I love about working with him.
You may have noticed that every single page of Azimuth hides some easter egg reference from movies and video games. You may have noticed the Ghostbusters’ ghost trap, the Companion Cube and the Voight-Kampff machine in Papa Legday’s workshop, or the Brutal Exterminator from Zardoz in the last panel of part 2’s first page.
there’s Easter eggs throughout Azimuth, these are just two he specifically references here
We’ve pretty much shown a bit of the wild amalgam of futuristic and fantastic, pop culture, historical and mythological elements that form Azimuth in the previous chapter with Suzi’s exploration of the setting.
After the initial culture shock that Azimuth’s strangeness hopefully managed to elicit in readers, I felt like it was a good time to tone down the craziness a little and focus on consistency exploring a specific district of the city, depicted here in this cover.
When I was a teenager I saw some of the movies by great film director Pier Paolo Pasolini, who had an eye for visuals and locations like few others I’ve ever seen. His interpretation of the 1001 Nights tales is set, amongst other places, in Yemen’s hauntingly beautiful city of Sana’a. The impression that place left in me was profound.
And at the cost of sharing a personal side of me, I also tend to be deeply affected by the injustices, oppressions and wars that happen in the world, especially those that plague those that Noam Chomsky calls the “non-people” of history, those conveniently forgotten or never mentioned by the western mainstream media, and history as we write it.
A lot of people seem oblivious of the inhuman oppression of the Palestinian people, never heard of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, and almost no one seems to have even heard of the war in Yemen of the last eight years, which caused what the United Nations Population Fund defines the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, including famine, plague, human trafficking and child abuse. As always, the innocent are those who pay the dearest price.
Because of my movie culture and because of my conscience, I felt compelled to portray a place inspired by the beautiful city of Sana’a… there is no place like it in the world, and it’s thanks to Pasolini’s visionary filmmaking that I discovered it.
Even though the location was central, as it needs to be in this title, the visual focus of the cover had of course to be the big reveal of Dexter’s return.
I produced some sketches, and discussed them with Dan. I always try to provide multiple solutions for a cover because I second guess my first intuition, but that always ends up being the winning choice we all agree upon.
I wanted to draw a cover that’s both dynamic and foreboding. Yeah I keep saying that word, don’t I? But I prefer that to vulgar action scenes: we see plenty of superhero covers where characters in dynamic poses show off their fighting skills.
I had this idea of a Western face-off scene between Dexter and a crowd of opponents, portraying that tense moment before action explodes, and I thought that perspective might be the key to make the composition have the appropriate dramatic effect.
The Buddha statue with the head of Ra was just an addition I felt like including just to remind everyone that Azimuth is that place where anything can be found.
The idea came from my university studies about the ancient Silk Road, where innumerable cultures met and merged giving birth to some wonderful cultural contaminations. I’m not mentioning colours because they came up pretty naturally: the city, the sky, the characters… it was all pretty much decided before I even started considering them so I focused on values to make sure that the scene is immediately and easily readable.
It may be odd, but the one detail I spent more time thinking about was the precise shade of blue I wanted for the sky. It had to be that intense, almost blinding blue that you can see in a terse sky in a dry weather, the one where you can see for miles in the horizon. I think it’s a small touch but if I did it right, it should give a sense of spaciousness to the whole image.
Of course, it’s for the readers to decide whether I succeeded or not.
Oh, we think you’ll all agree that he succeeded – that’s a beautiful, spacious blue sky!
And there you have it, another great cover by Tazio Bettin, a surprise for readers, and a hell of a lot of thought behind it all. Thanks so much for Tazio to sending that one along.
You can find 2000 AD Prog 2342 wherever you pick up your weekly dose of Ghafflebette comics, including the 2000 AD web shop from 26 July.
And you can see more of Tazio’s excellent covers for Covers Uncovered here – there’s Sinister Dexter covers for Prog 2259, and Prog 2283, and then there was an unusual guest appearance in this Andy Clarke Covers Uncovered for Prog 2290 where we talked all things Austin Allegro! And there’s also his cover for Hope… In The Shadows for Prog 2302.
And as for Azimuth, there’s the incredible cover for the first episode in Prog 2337, plus interviews with Tazio and Dan here and here.
And finally, cause we promised you – the full-sized versions of Tazio’s cover sketch ideas…
