2000ad Covers Uncovered – Old Pink Eye!

Who better to see us out of the 1000s-era of the Prog than the brilliant Boo Cook. And, what more appropriate way to see us out than with a rampaging, gelatinous dinosaur and to splat a bunch of eldsters? Erm… quite!

Good old Boo was quick to tell me about the making of the Prog cover in his usual enthusatic style. Over to Boo: “It’s always an immense pleasure to get an email from Tharg requesting a Dredd cover – I’m sure art droids would agree it’s best if you can get to just do Dredd’s massive face or a big full body action pic, but this one was a bit different as it required a full on narrative approach full of batshit crazy stuff – who doesn’t like a massive pink triceratops made of jelly!?!”

“I was sent Ron Smith’s classic fatties cover from Prog 273 as something to vibe off but having the giant dino in there meant I had to shrink the foreground folks to fit the scene…”

Just another day in the pasty emporium…

“Tharg also wanted a host of crazy eldsters in there so I figured it would be a great opportunity to get some bonkers Norman Rockwell-esque characters on the go and to think of some terrible ageist puns.”

Below, we see Boo’s gloriously chaotic roughs, note the balloon on the right, tsk…

Tut! Have some respect Boo, they fought in the atomic war for you…

And from that, the beautiful pencils…

The Conga Line at the Jackie Stallone Home for the Terminally Bewildered had gotten hopelessly lost…

Readers may have noticed the rather handsome chappie at the left of the picture, Boo explains “At some point along the way I had the idea to put my dear old Gramps in the mix – a fitting tribute to a real lovely fella, himself a recipient of the Kril Tro Thargo in the 80’s for his services to thrill power. Basically, he used to send me and my brother a comic each week without fail from Stevenage down to Devon since I was 4 years old. I started with Toby comic, then The Beano, Look-In was next and was closely followed by Starlord where my man crush on Johnny Alpha began. Pretty soon I was onto 2000AD and he sent me that faithfully from the age of ten onwards and naturally I still get the weekly prog to this day. Alas the sweet guy passed on in ’92 so he never got to see me follow my dream of working for Tharg but to say that my life would be completely unrecognisable without the input of this humble and generous dude is something of an understatement. It’s with great pleasure that I pay tribute to him on the front of the Galaxy’s Greatest!”

And here he is…

We all have a lot to thank this fine man for…

Next, Boo’s fantastic inks come rampaging into the fore…

If Dredd has anything to do with it, the boys controlling the creature will soon have a Megasaurarse…

And with the inks down, Boo takes out his digital crayons to colour the picture in…

Drokk me! Barney hasn’t aged well…

A massive, rampaging dinosaur sized thank you to Boo for sending the images and touching tribute to his lovely Grandpa. Please, rush to Boo’s blog at http://boocook.blogspot.co.uk/ so see some stunning images like this…

“A righteous infliction of retribution manifested by an appropriate agent.”

And this!

I’m sure he’s smiling on the inside…

Next week – A Prog 2000 triple bill!