Flesh returns to Prog 2001 as we discover wat became of Gorehead, Carver and the gang at the Trans-Time Corporation. Clint Langley breaks out his amazing digital toolbox to bring us some seriously eyepopping visuals in the story, including the glorious cover above.
Clint’s previous cover was for Prog 1980, a chilling vision of Death and his world for the excellent Deadworld series Tainted. Clint was kind enough to send the inks for the fearsome foursome. This massive peice was done at A2 and must be an awesome sight to behold!
(It’s on a peice of wire on his belt.)
And here’s Clint’s digital painting. The man is a true visionary when it comes to working digitally…
The Harlem Heroes have let themselves go…
Massive thanks to Clint for sending the amazing images, I can’t wait to see what he, Pat and Gorehead have in store for us!
Paaaaaaaarty! A (very) rare moment of joviality in the Nerve Centre as Tharg allows his characters a break from destruction and mayhem to celebrate the momentous Prog 2000!
This Previews Exclusive cover was brought to you by the cover-miester himself, Mr Glenn Fabry and coloured by the brilliant Ryan Brown. Below we see Glenn’s rough sketch, eagle eyed readers will spot a cameo from Rhubarb, of Rhubarb and Custard fame…
“SURPRISE! Ooops, sorry Death!”
With the layout approved, Glenn gets to work on his trademark, meticulous pencils. Not Glenn’s notes around the border for the more obscure characters…
Tharg: The Kissogram Years…
With the beautiful pencils finished, it was over to art supremo Ryan Brown to colour. He said “It was really was fun to work on, though its hard working on other peoples pencil work as you need understand where all the light sources are coming from.” Below is a work in progress with many of the flats done…
Death takes a sssssssselfie!
Ryan continues “I really enjoyed coming up with all the textures, it’s just a pity I didn’t have more time to work on it!” Modest as ever with a truly Zarjaz cover worthy of such a momentous prog.
Poor Gronk never got over the shock…
Huuuuge thanks to Ryan for the images (check his website at http://ryanbrown-art.com/) and a hearty Congratulations to Tharg and the gang for 2000 Progs of Pure Thrillpower. Here’s to 2000 more!
Prog 2000 is here with, count ’em, THREE scrotnig covers by some of the best artists in the galaxy! Tharg has commissioned some of the greatest artdroids ever assembled to celebrate this magnanimous event in zarjaz style!
The second of our thrillpowered covers comes from Superstar artist Chris Burnham, the artist behind such high profile comics as Nameless, Batman Inc. and, of course, the brilliant Officer Downe.
The cover is based on a (no pun intended) stone cold classic, Prog 168 by Mick McMahon. Here’s the lineart for that iconic cover…
No sir! But if you keep sitting there you’ll get terrible piles.
And the coloured version, which I assume was by the late, great Tom Frame…
Yes, how do you wash your hair if you never take your helmet off?
Chris was kind enough to send his roughs and linework for the image, below we have his thumbnail sketch…
Even from this rougher than rough thumbnail, you can make out Dredd’s scowl…
With Tharg’s approval, Chris begins to work on the image.
Crikey, Dredd is looking rough…
The rough begins to get tightened up as Dredd goes to his ‘Dead Man’ phase…
Come on Joe, make an effort! This is Prog 2000!
Those pencils are converted to blue line and inked…
The thin blue line!
And here are those finished inks, brilliant…
Sitting on the Prog of the Day.
With the inks laid down(e), they were sent to Nathan Fairbairn (Walking Dead, Justice League and Lake of Fire) for colouring. Pretty damned perfect if you ask me…
Red sky at night, Dredd has a fight!
And here’s how the prog looks on your shelf…
Old Stony Base
Huge thanks to Chris for sending the images! On Wednesday, Glenn Fabry and Ryan Brown bring us a 2000AD party!
Prog 2000 is here with, count ’em, THREE scrotnig covers by some of the best artists in the galaxy! Tharg has commissioned some of the greatest artdroids ever assembled to celebrate this magnanimous event in zarjaz style! Obviously, if we’re talking about top quality cover artists, then we have to be talking about the wonderful Mr Cliff Robinson. As if producing a cover for the illustrious Prog 2000 wasn’t exciting enough, this is actually Cliff’s 100th Prog cover, making him the first artist to reach triple figures! Congratulations Cliff, here’s to 100 more!
Cliff told us how he created his centennial masterpiece, he said “Originally I had Tharg just holding onto the current Logo as it and everything else in the picture is being sucked into a black hole. Tharg suggested a star going ‘super nova’ instead of a black hole would be better and he also had the great idea of Tharg surfing on the ‘Space Spinner’.”
Below we see Cliff’s roughs…
Tharg doing his best Peter Shilton impression
Lo-going, going, gone!
With the composition decided, Cliff powers on. He continues “Tharg, the spaceship and the characters were all drawn separately and cobbled together on the computer.”
I love, love, love seeing Cliff take on other characters and he didn’t certainly disappoint below…
“Drokking back seat drivers!”
If Savage was here, would he have called Shotgun?
Duck! Here’s that supernova, yikes!
This is actually what a Rigellion Hotshot looks like.
Everybody’s goin’ surfin’, Surfin Betelgeuse.
“Oh, we’re all going on a, Summer Holiday! No more working for a, week or two!”
With all the elements prepared, it’s time for Cliff to assemble the ingredients into a tasty thrill powered cake. However, Cliff noticed a bit of a snag… “As Tharg was going to be holding the main 2000ad logo, I only drew his left hand thumb, figuring it was a waste of time drawing his other fingers when they’d be covered up once the Logo was added. So I was a bit surprised to see the cover appear on the 2000ad website minus all the Logo’s. I guess a small meteorite could have taken off Tharg’s fingers, but if so, would he be smiling so broadly? Of course that could be a symptom of hypoxia due to his space suit being compromised. If anyone should come across Tharg’s fingers, please return them to the Quaxxann lost & found office.”
“‘Tis but a fleshwound!”
And here’s the line art with those poor doomed logos…
“Out of my way, sucker!”
Tharg didn’t even get past the interview for Ted Rodgers’ old job…
Once the line art is complete, it’s over to Cliff’s partner in crime, the Brilliant Dylan Teague for colouring. As usual, he did a stunning job!
Supersurf 2000 is go!
Huuuuuge thank you to Cliff for sending the images and brilliant commentary and congratulations again of his 100th glorious cover!!!
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.”
Prog 1998 spells certain doom for a major Dredd character, but for whom does the bell toll? Dredd has finally pushed serial, serial killer PJ Maybe over the edge and he has promised to murder someone close to the lawman. Who will it be? Dredd’s niece Vienna? Lovely Old Mrs Gunderson? Bob, the sector 13 hottie stall vendor? Please, please let it be wubbish old Walter!
Below we see a couple of Paul’s initial, very imaginative ideas. Firstly a wonderfully ominous chalk outline in Dredd’s shadow and secondly, a shot of those tight boots as Dredd surveys the scene of the murder, chilling…
Ooooooh, Vienna!?!
The third idea is the one that tickled Tharg’s Belegusian thrill bone, as our favourite lawman looks sullen at the grisly scene…
Chief suspect in the murder was Keith Haring…
With the final sketch approved, it was time for Paul to break out the brushes to ink the final image…
White liiiiiines… blown away!
With the tense scene rendered, it was beamed to colour droid supremo Chris Blthye to work his magic on…
Tsk! Bloody grafitti is getting worse…
Huge thanks to Paul for sending the scrotnig images. This is an excellent cover that has me desperate to find out who lives and who dies!
Prog 1996 features the return of Kapitan-Inspector Atalia Jaegir, of the Nordland State Security Police. Atalia, who is infected with the fearsome Strigoi curse which can mutate it’s victims into fearsome monsters, is part of the Nordland Security Forces who deal with war criminals. The brutal war between the Norts and the Southers has seen its fair share of atrocities, many by members of the Jaegar family. When the time comes, will she be able to bring them to account?
The stiking cover is by Dredd: Uprising and Aquila artist Paul Davidson and is an absolute cracker! I reached out to Paul and he was kind enough to send some fantastic work in progress images and notes about his creative process. He said “Tharg knew what he wanted, so we bypassed the stage of various rough design proposals. From his description, i went straight to a well finished rough…”
A tagline from the Ronseal School of Taglines…
“Once that was given the green light, I proceeded to inks…”
As usual, the troops were quite literally behind Jaegir!
“I then blocked in the background colour as I visualised this with a strong warm colour background, with a cool foreground for maximum punch…”
Red sky at night, Nordland’s do fight! Red Sky in the morning, Nordland’s warring!
“I then added the cool tones to the main deal using Copic markers bought from my local corner shop!”
Here’s pen in your eye!
“And then more of the same to completion…”
Embarrasingly, Jaegir had a piece of lavvy roll handing out of the back of her trousers…
Paul was thrilled with the work done by Tharg’s design team, he said “Picking up on the white light on her face, picked up very nicely in the typography……all tied in nicely………it’s great when that happens!”
Atalia gets ready for a scrap in the scrap.
It’s great for us too, as this is a fine cover for a great character! Thanks to Paul for sending the images and insights, please go visit his website at http://www.pauldavidsonart.com/
Back in Prog 1981 we were in the middle of Mike Carroll’s summer epic, ‘Every Empire Falls’, which saw an attempted hostile takeover of Megacity-One by treacherous dissenters in Texas City and Brit-Cit. Of course, Dredd wasn’t going to take this lying down, so a plot was hatched fake his death before taking him prisoner in Brit Cit. As we know, Dredd is a very hard man to kill and it wasn’t long before the battered and beaten lawman led the fight back for his beloved home, but at what cost?
Premier artdroid, Jon Davis-Hunt produced this glorious cover, which for me, is easily a contender for cover of the year. Jon is currently providing beautiful artwork for the disturbingly grisly ‘Clean Room’ for Vertigo comics, but took time out of his hectic schedule to work on a piece which had been rattling around his curcuits for a while.
He said “I originally had the idea for this cover about a year ago, but had been too busy with stuff to get any time to work on it. My idea was, to have Dredd, seated after a hard fight, with his helmet off, held between his legs. He would be sitting in a strong shadow, the angle of which, as it fell across his face, would not only obscure his eyes (as the helmet normally does) but actually mirror the angle of the helmets nose section.”
“I was heading to Thought Bubble at the end of November and I realised that John Burdis would be there. As he is such a thoroughly nice chap, I figured he would be up for posing for a reference photo. I wanted to do a really detailed version of Dredd’s suit and I figured, as Johns real-life, Planet Replicas version was so ace, it’d be the perfect opportunity. I pitched the idea to Tharg who liked it, then headed off to Leeds to find John. As you can see, he was a total gent and agreed to pose for this photo. Cheers John! :)”
This isn’t the first time that Cellar of Dredd owner John has modelled for 2000AD droids. He has also posed for greats such as Greg Staples and Laurence Campbell, though obviously those images were heavily edited to make Dredd more manly, slender and chiselled…
A thoroughly nice chap, apparently… 🙂
Of course, the above picture in no way resembles this classic Cliff Robinson cover of Prog 1194…
“I’d give that ten years if I were you…”
Jon continues “With a nice photo to help with ref, I then sketched out the pose. I exaggerated Dredd’s size and also tried to get him to hunch over a little more, to emphasise the idea that he’d just been in a bloody and hard fought battle…”
Oor Joey…
“Next came the inks. I went straight from my rough sketch to the inks, as I felt the proportions of the sketch were mostly there. As I worked on each element, I then began to ad in all the scarring, battle-marks and blood. I figured that the Judge uniform would be layered, with armoured weave and multiple layers under the surface for insulation, protection etc and tried to show this on various points. I also tried to imagine specific instances that had occurred – you’ll notice that on Dredd’s right side, his eagle and arm is peppered with shrapnel marks where I imagined he had turned at the last minute to avoid a grenade etc.”
Suprisingly, Dredd’s Megadate profile picture didn’t lead to many dates…
“With the inks done, it was time to flat out the colours. I did toy with the idea of darkening the costume and making it more gritty, maybe even adopting the darker uniform of the film (the good one, not the bad Stallone one). But in the end, decided to go with the original colours.”
He’s been shot and blown up, of course he’s flat!
“With flats done, I then move onto modelling. I tend to keep that fairly simple now, just using a few layers for highlights and a few for shadows.”
Dredd HATED those fiddly little ketchup sachets…
“Finally, lighting. I tried to emphasise the materials here, especially the gold of the armour. I also added in the suggestion of the light source (although I used a large degree of artistic license for this). 🙂 “
He just needs to pop it in a boil wash with new, improved Megsil Powder and those stains will be gone, gone, gone!
“And there you have it!”
You certainly do! Huge thanks to Jon for the images and text. Be sure to check out his site at http://www.jondavis-hunt.com/ for some truly breath taing images! Look out for the making of Jon’s beautiful Anderson cover of Prog 1995 soon!
Alex Ronald is back with this brilliant cover to celebrate the climax of Black Shuck! As readers will know, Shuck had to face the dastardly King Coenwulf as his poor wife was giving birth to twins. Sheesh, the lengths some blokes will go to avoid childbirth!
Alex has been illustrating for the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic for over twenty years (time for a service, Tharg!) and his digital paintings are virtually unrecognisable from his original, more traditional work. Of course, this isn’t his first Black Shuck cover, he painted the magnificent cover that launched the series too…
Orc manoeuvres in the dark.
Below we can see Alex’s rough for the cover…
Shuck was over the (full) moon with his new horsey string puppet.
He says “As you can see the werewolf pose changed a bit between rough and final. I felt the foreshortening of the left arm and the lack of wolfy hair wasn’t really working. Hopefully the shirtless spread arms was a bit of a better approach…”
Shucks to be you Coenwulf!
Another brilliant cover from an artist truly at the top of his game. You can see many more amazing breakdowns of Alex’s work here and please, please visit his site, there’s work on there to die for!
Huge thanks to Alex from sending the images and text!
Mrs Anderson’s little girl returns to Prog 1993 with this fantastic cover by new droid Christian Ward. ‘The Candidate’ by Emma Beeby, Nick Dyer, Richard Elson and Ellie DeVille sees the Big Meg’s premier Psi Judge tasked with protecting controversial politician Carol Smart. A career politician whose Manifesto calls for more judges and increased judicial powers, Smart has made herself a target for the terrorist group known as the Citien’s Army. Can Anderson and Rookie-Judge Flowers protect her in time for the forthcoming mayoral elections?
Cover artist Christian Ward gives us his debut cover for the series, his pychedelic style perfectly complimenting the character. Christian is co-creator and dazzling artist of ODY-C (his panel layouts are amazing!) and has worked on a host of impressive titles such as The Uncanny X-Men, Ultimate Fantastic Four, Mad Max: Fury Road, Dr Who and more.
As a long term 2000AD fan, Christian was delighted to work for the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic! He said “Like a lot of UK comic artists, I grew up on 2000ad. Characters like Dredd and Nemesis the Warlock and artists like Brendan McCarthy and Simon Bisley were hugely influential. It was a revelation that comics didn’t all have to look the same, that they could be non-traditional, or painted, or abstract, or that it could be way more bold and exciting than what I’d previously seen in the pages of American comics. You can see the DNA of it in my art, particularly in the pyschedelia of my creator-owned comic ODY-C which I do with Matt Fraction. It was a huge thrill to get to do a cover and what better character to have a crack at than Anderson. It was great to portray one of the coolest psychic characters there is!”
The brief was pretty straight forward. Just a shot of Anderson with ‘a psychedelic effect flowing out of her’. My initial thought was to have a sense of the threat around her but i quickly dropped that to focus on Anderson…”
Below is Christian’s initial rough sketch…
Cassandra Anderson in ‘Fantastic Voyage!’
And some exploration of his initial idea…
“I’m watching you!”
Tense, nervous headache? Take Megadol!
Christian continues “The favourite was against the white but with a flat colour rather than the white. Nice and straight forward…”
With the initial idea nailed, it was time for the pencils…
Anderson in her psychic form?
And with the pencils done, it was time for Christian to get to work on his trademark psychedelia! Ta da!
“You ain’t seen me, roight!?!”
As you can see, Christian had a blast with the cover, he said “All in all the cover was fun and I hope it’s the first of many!” Us too!
