Comics

2000 AD Covers Uncovered: Nick Percival’s cover for Prog 2382 promises “There will be blood” for Dredd…

15th May 2024

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!

Borag Thungg, Earthlets! – 2000 AD Prog 2382 sees the debut of another great Dredd from the Niemand and Percival droids, Iron Teeth, and we’re talking to Nick Percival about a stunning wrapround cover to start the story off…

The new six-parter Iron Teeth sees Dredd investigating a mythical monster, one that’s got all the juves riled up and talking about hunting down the mysterious thing they’ve christened Iron Teeth. But when a group of juves head down into the tunnels under Mega-City One, they’re about to discover that the mythical Iron Teeth is way more terrifying than anything they could have imagined.

Written by Ken Niemand, this one has the return of the beautifully horrific or horrifically beautiful artwork of Nick Percival. They were last together on Dredd with the three-parter The House on Bleaker Street (Progs 2247-2249), where they had Dredd investigating a house with a reputation and a nightmarish holdover from Necropolis.

As Nick will tell you, he and the Niemand droid are planning on diving deeper and deeper into the horrors of Dredd’s world in Iron Teeth, all starting on the cover here for a series that Nick first trailed with this teaser painting…

NICK PERCIVAL: Back for a spooky Dredd six-parter, so you better bring your big boy pants…

I did a teaser painting for the series first that was printed as a pin-up. This was done very early on when Ken Niemand and I were chucking ideas back and forth. The teaser was just to convey the mood and tone for the series and give us a vague glimpse of Iron Teeth – it was me basically thinking out loud on the digital art board. I wanted to experiment a little more with my style, getting a bit more scratchy and raw in places, rather than keeping everything super slick – I had a lot of fun creating that piece.

So, onto the first cover and it was nice to go for a wraparound image to hopefully get things off to a strong start.

I wanted a little widescreen movie poster feel to the layout but the content can only act as another teaser as we don’t want to give away too much or reveal our big bad properly just yet. As you can see from the extremely loose rough, Iron Teeth is all in shadow, Nosferatu style – we get a look at the kids of the story and of course as always, grumpy bastard, Dredd looming over everything…

At this very rough stage, I hadn’t fully developed the look of the children, so it’s nothing much more than basic placeholder elements as I worked on their designs.

We talked about the film, ‘Stand By Me’ as a starting point and that fits in well with the kids’ attitudes and how we wanted to develop them both visually and personality-wise. I did briefly consider a version of that movie poster for the cover image but ultimately went with what we have here.

For the the final painted art, it’s all very much high contrast reds, yellows and orange tones – very warm. It’s kind of arty farty symbolic since, in the story, Dredd and the kids descend deeper and deeper into what is the hell-scape environment of Iron Teeth’s sinister lair.

In early episodes, the colour palette starts very cool and slowly becomes hotter as we progress. Give me that art ‘A’ level now, please.

Without spoilers, this new story does link back to our previous Dredd horror outing, The House On Bleaker Street and it doesn’t end cleanly. We have plans to expand this horror side of Dredd’s world and are sowing some dark and crusty seeds that will hopefully pay off down the line.

There will be blood…

Now that’s the sort of cover that jumps off the shelves at you, all thanks to Nick’s incredible artwork. Our thanks to Nick for sharing all that zarjaz imagery here with us!

You can find 2000 AD 2382 everywhere the Galaxy’s Greatest is sold, including the 2000 AD web shop from 15 May.

If you’re in the mood for more of Nick’s Covers Uncovered work, be sure to have a look at these – Prog 2247, Megazine 425, Megazine 427, Megazine 430, Megazine 433, Megazine 430, Megazine 443, Megazine 448, Megazine 453, Megazine 456, and Megazine 458.

And we’ve talked to Nick all about the six years of Dark Judges work he’s terrified us with here, plus we’ve talked with the Dark Judges team of David Hine and Nick about two Dark Judges storylines – Deliverance here and Death Metal Planet here. And finally, Molch-R talks to Hine and Percival about all things Dark Judges in the 2000 AD Thrill-Cast Lockdown Tapes here.

Now, a bit of a bonus thanks to Nick sending along huge images for us – giving us the chance to give you some blow-ups from various bits of the cover and teaser image to really show you just all the terrifically terrifying detail that goes into things. But first, a couple of teasers for the new Iron Teeth series…

Iron Teeth’s lair…