2000 AD Covers Uncovered – Neil Roberts gets Vexplosive
15th January 2021
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, we have the return of artist Neil Roberts with an action-packed cover to Prog 2214, featuring Proteus Vex jumping into action. Michael Carroll and Jake Lynch’s sci-fi spectacular continues inside with the latest episode of The Shadow Chancellor, along with more from Judge Dredd, Hershey, Slaine, and Durham Red in a Prog full of Ghafflebette adventures and Scrotnig sci-fi action!
2000 AD Prog 2214 is out right now and you can get it everywhere that great comics are sold, including the 2000 AD web shop.
Neil Roberts has been making these stunning 2000 AD covers for a while now and this is yet another fabulous looking thing that is shouting out from the shelves of your local newsagent right now.
Neil sent over a couple of images in the making of it all, but first, it’s a moment of thinking about influences…
NEIL ROBERTS: I wanted my cover for Proteus Vex to lean heavily in to the artistic influences of the strip. Henry Flint, Moebius, Shaky Kane with a dose of Mick Austin and Wally Wood – all brilliant and influential and also a delightfully eclectic mix.
From the top, Shakey Kane, Moebius, Henry Flint, and then bottom row Mick Austin and Wally Wood.
That is a wonderfully eclectic mix of influences right there. And yes, you can really see them all in the cover, not to mention seeing them in the pages of Proteus Vex.
Okay, back to Neil…
NEIL ROBERTS: I was guided by intuition, my thumbnail inspired by panels from the strip.
Tharg approved it and I was off, painting my way to the deadline!
I hope I’ve done those artists some justice in adding their influences into the piece, hopefully people out there like it as much as I had fun working on it.
Here’s Neil’s rough of the cover… although this is yet another one of those moments where the artist’s idea of just what contributes a rough is wildly at odds with what us normal, non-artist types would ever consider what we’d mean by rough. I mean, just look at this and think about what sort of thing you’d be able to muster as a ‘rough’…
After the rough (well, he calls it rough anyway) stage, time to get everything together and get the finishes and inks and tighten it all up, with it all looking like this…
Thank you so much to Neil for taking the time out to show us his influences and his process work here.
If you want to see more, you can find him on Twitter, see his Artstation site here, and catch his work on the covers of Games Workshop’s New York Times best selling Horus Heresy novels and other series, as well as cover art for Judge Dredd novels, Commando Comics, historical magazines and various video games and TV/ film productions. And, of course, we’ll be looking forward to more from him on the cover of a Prog sometime soon!
And finally, just a quick look at Neil’s one and only interior work at 2000 AD, Prog 1678 and Chrono-Cabbies, a Time Twister written by Alec Worley…
