2000 AD Covers Uncovered – Tazio Bettin gives us ‘foreboding, gloomy atmospheres’ for Prog 2302
5th October 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 sees the start of Guy Adams & Jimmy Broxton’s nightmarish Hope… In The Shadows Reel Two inside the Prog and to set things off suitably atmospheric and moody we have Tazio Bettin on cover duties – as the shadows gather – and hell follows with her…
So, without further ado… over to Tazio to tell you all about it…
TAZIO BETTIN: I’ve sent along some colour sketches I did for this job – but perhaps the finished cover speaks for itself better.
Well, I don’t know – seeing the four colour sketches does give us a look inside the creative process and just how things get put together… the four different cover ideas all look damn fine…
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When you work on a cover where the keywords you set for yourself are “foreboding, gloomy atmospheres” it’s advisable to listen to a good doom metal record. I recommend Four Phantoms by Bell Witch.
It’s the first time in my collaboration with 2000 AD that I’ve drawn a cover that isn’t from a project I’m part of, and it’s quite exciting!
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I received a very short description dealing with the atmosphere and theme of Hope… In The Shadows that this cover is for, and a page of the strip to have an idea of the mood – and I was captured by the wonderful inks right away. I had just the perfect amount of information needed – enough boundaries to know what to work with, and enough freedom to explore ideas.
I felt inspired and let imagination fly, and several ideas immediately came to me. Horror is a genre I very much love, and I wanted this illustration to give off a feeling of foreshadowing, rather than immediate danger. In other words, I wanted it to be subtle and creepy. I also wanted it to include some symbolism. It must be all the books I’m recently reading about medieval literature and its focus on allegories… also the aforementioned record helped with picturing things in my mind.
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So I drew several sketches, selected some, and submitted them to Tharg.
In the end, as it often happens, the first idea I’d had was the one that worked best.
Unusually for me, colours came first in picturing this cover. I wanted a juxtaposition of warm, soothing colours and oppressive, dark, and cold ones – all creating a geometrical composition designed to give a sense of oppression and the promise of violence through the use of an almost solid red.
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All elements point towards the car, and the clouds closing on it are about to choke the light of the sun. Cloudy desert landscapes can be very evocative and melancholic, and I wanted that feeling going hand to hand with the sense of something sinister stirring.
So I pictured an ominous sky where you can see shapes in clouds, and dead hands slowly stirring under the ground to deny escape to the figure of the protagonist, slowly closing in despite the illusory feeling of freedom a car speeding in a desert highway would naturally communicate.
The initial sketch had snakes slithering through the clouds instead of skulls, but that felt too much like immediate threat rather than foreboding gloom. So leering skulls it is, an image of inescapable doom. The lower half of the composition is also an unabashed homage to Mike Mignola’s amazing covers compositions.
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Well, I don’t think anyone’s going to argue that Tazio hasn’t delivered just what he was aiming for – foreboding gloom never looked so great!
2000 AD Prog 2302, with that gorgeously dark cover heralding the first episode of Hope… In The Shadows Reel Two, is out everywhere Thrill Power is on sale, including the 2000 AD web shop, from 5 October.
You can find more of Tazio’s Covers Uncovered work right here at the site – whether it’s Prog 2259’s Jurassic Shark or Prog 2283’s Scare In The Community – two of his great Sinister Dexter covers.
