2000 AD Covers Uncovered – Proteus Vex! Robots! Neil Roberts!
11th February 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, adorning the front of the Galaxy’s Greatest with a pulp-infused, Moebius-influenced Proteus Vex cover… it’s the return of art droid Neil Roberts for 2000 AD Prog 2268 – out wherever you get your Thrill Power on 9 February.
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Neil’s one of Tharg’s cover specialists responsible for making the Prog pop from the shelves for many years now. And with Prog 2268, he’s turned his hand to the latest series of Proteus Vex: Desire Paths by Mike Carroll and Jake Lynch. It’s outer space action packed with mystery and adventure perfectly captured by Neil right here! And, as Neil’s about to tell you, it all started with Tharg just telling him… ‘Proteus Vex vs Robots.’
NEIL ROBERTS: As always, it starts with a brief from Tharg – basically, “Proteus Vex vs Robots” and a couple of pages of the amazing strip art. From there, I worked up a few initial ideas.
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For this piece I really wanted to go for a Moebius/ Giraud feel – so I used AI to give me a few pointers:
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Being one of Tharg’s many art droids, what’s fun is seeing how a purely AI art-bot thinks. I love using/ messing about with new Earth technologies to try stuff out. “Art is a progression” and all that kinda human stuff.
With the thumbnail chosen, I set about doing the work, sitting and painting until it was finished.
With that – it was sent to Tharg and put on the cover of The Galaxies Greatest Comic!
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And that’s it! One stunning Vexatious cover from Neil Roberts there! Thanks so much to Neil for sending that one along.
You can find 2000 AD Prog 2268 wherever you pick up your weekly dose of Ghafflebette comics, including the 2000 AD web shop.