Tag: interview

We have a new script droid making their debut in the pages of the latest 2000 AD – Jon Lock! His debut comes with the Terror Tale: Antumnos in Prog 2376 where, with art droid Richard Elson, he tells a tale of, as he puts it, ‘old, cold folklore’, shadowy government agencies, mystery disappearances, and the funny things that happen in Wales’ soft places…

As you’ll find out when we chat, Lock’s no newcomer to comics. No, he’s been writing and making comics for more than 10 years now, primarily his really great multi-volume epic of corporate con-artistry and a makeover of the world of the dead: Afterlife Inc. where Jack Fortune, master of the corporate con, lands in the afterlife and realizes that death might be the greatest business opportunity of his life.

But Antumnos is his very first appearance in the Prog and that’s worth celebrating, particularly as it’s a really great six-page Terror Tale with artist Richard Elson that sees us deep in the heart of Wales with two spooks from a shadowy government outfit investigating all manner of weirdness in the valleys… there’s no welcome in the hillside here, that’s for sure.

So, time to settle down and start chatting to new script droid, Jon Lock – everyone say hi to the new boy!

Hi Jon, your very first 2000 AD story is out in Prog 2376 right now – Terror Tales: Antumnos, with art from the brilliant Richard Elson.

First of all, what’s it like to be a Prog debutante? Was there whooping and screaming when Tharg gave you the call?

JON LOCK: Oh, absolutely. It’s like getting an invite to meet the King – only this King has the dark and terrible power to hurt you if you refuse.

Now, can you fill us in on what Antumnos is all about?

JL: Antumnos follows two agents of HERNE, a shadowy government agency tasked with exploring the strange and unknown, as they investigate the disappearance of four hikers in the deep, dark heart of Wales, only to discover something best left buried…

What was the impetus behind the tale? Is there a conspiracy theorist in you that thinks about the shadowy government organisations and the rest? Have you been sitting on a British X-Files pitch for a long time? Or is there a longstanding love of the supernatural and the folklore of Wales in there?

Antumnos sprang from a conversation Rich and I were having about our shared love of old, cold folklore. There’s something about the landscape of Britain that gets under your skin. Peel back the rolling hills and biscuit-tin villages, and there’s something hard and grim beneath the surface. The land’s like a whetstone, sharpening those hardy enough to survive on its windswept rocks.

From that discussion about places that genuinely scare you it was a short leap to our other shared love: The Fourth World of Jack Kirby. We’ve seen many depictions of myth and folklore over the years, especially in a horror setting, where the idea of an ‘Otherworld’ could be purely magical or even Lovecraftian. One approach we felt hadn’t been taken was to go ‘cosmic’ – to make the ‘fair folk’ of legend inscrutable, godlike figures of chrome and alien science.

The further you dive into Welsh folklore such as the Mabinogion or the Book of Taliesin, the more encounters with the Otherworld sound like alien abduction stories. The Matter of Britain combined with space gods is a surprisingly good fit, and as for HERNE… well, who doesn’t enjoy a secretive government agency?!

With something like a Terror Tale, just like a Future Shock, there’s a real skill to getting a full story that really works into just the six pages you have to play with.

How difficult was it to do? Compared to your other writing, what sort of mindset do you have to get into to really condense a full, satisfying tale into such a limited page count?

JL: I’m lucky in that short-form stories such as these are where I cut my teeth as a writer. There’s a strong tradition in UK comics, both in 2000 AD and in the independent scene, in doing a lot with a little.

Having self-published comics for over a decade, I try to be as efficient as possible, as while it’s always tempting to go big… more pages equals more work. I’m currently working on a 208-page graphic novel, which is a wonderful experience in itself, but I’ll always be at my most comfortable with something in the region of 4-8 pages. You can say a lot with that format and it challenges you to leave dead weight on the cutting room floor.

Similarly, with over four and a half decades of Future Shocks, Terror Tales etc, how difficult was it to come up with something original and approved by Tharg?

JL: I’m my own harshest critic and I can’t get behind a story if there isn’t something weird and special at its core. More than anything, Rich and I wanted to make a story that played to our interests and that we could get excited about. If you’re grinning like an idiot when you finish a script, you might be on the right path – and that enthusiasm is infectious.

I think some of that passion carried over into our pitch to Tharg, who gave us the go ahead to make Antumnos a reality.

One thing that really struck me about the strip and the ending is that it feels like there’s a lot more to be told with Antumnos and Agent Sharpe? Is that the case and how eager are you for Tharg to get in touch about continuing it?

JL: If the option presents itself, I’d leap at the chance to expand the world of Antumnos. Contact with the fair folk and their otherworldly fortress of Caer Sidi has significant consequences for humanity, leaving HERNE on the frontline of a brewing war.

I’d also like to explore exactly how humanity survived its first contact with the Otherworld, centuries prior, and what secrets remain hidden beneath the Welsh landscape.

So that would be a yes – Tharg? If you’re reading this?

Have you seen the finished piece yet in all its glory?

JL: Only just! Rich was good enough to keep me in the loop throughout development, so I got to see the finished artwork well in advance. I’ve only just seen the fully lettered pages, where the story finally comes alive, and Simon has done an absolutely amazing job with the letters.

Always good that you’ve seen it in its completed state! – in which case, what did you think of the artwork by Richard?

JL: Rich’s artwork is just incredible. I honestly couldn’t be happier with the finished piece. The great thing about Rich is that whether he’s drawing something truly cosmic (and if you’ve seen Antumnos you’ll know what I’m talking about) or the quieter moments of two agents sharing a pint, the level of detail he packs in is on another level entirely. My favourite thing in the whole story is Agent Hob’s design – there’s so much subtle character work going on in his face, his build… He feels so real. You know you’re in safe hands with Rich on the job.

Now, as a debutante, feel free to tell us about all about yourself, including what comics writing you’ve done so far?

JL: I’ve been writing comics for over a decade now, both as an independent creator and as part of Big Punch Studios, which I co-founded in 2015. I’m perhaps best known for my series Afterlife Inc., which recently celebrated its 10th anniversary. So far, there have been six volumes of Afterlife Inc. (or two supersized hardback omnibuses) and I’m currently working on Volume 7, which has been funded in part by a National Lottery Project Grant.

In addition to the production of the new book, I’ve also been delivering comic-making workshops for children in deprived areas of Gloucester, which is where I share a studio with fellow Big Puncher Nich Angell.

As part of Big Punch Studios, I’ve written and edited multiple series, such as Cuckoos, Orb, and 99 Swords. I’ve also dipped my toe into the world of tabletop gaming, having co-designed the hit card game Sandwich Masters, and I’ll soon be collaborating with Nich on a prose project set in the world of his award-winning tabletop RPG Colostle.

Off the back of my work in comics, I was hired to write the upcoming Toxic Crusaders video game, based on the cult Toxic Avenger franchise from Troma Entertainment. The game should be out at some point this year, around the same time as the Toxic Avenger remake starring Peter Dinklage, Kevin Bacon and Elijah Wood – which promises to be a surreal experience. Nich and I have also just signed a deal on a really exciting new project that I’m not allowed to talk about yet, so I’ll instead be mysterious and just say ‘watch this space’.

It’s been a strange, wonderful decade getting to this point, but I owe it all to comics, which will always be my lifeblood.

Yep, as I said in the intro – you’re far from being a comics newcomer!

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Is this the first time you pitched to 2000 AD or is your writer’s tale more the traditional one of pitch, rejection, pitch, rejection, pitch, rejection, repeat, repeat, repeat?

JL: Unless you count an unsuccessful Future Shock pitch when I was a mere 19-years-old, this is my first proper attempt at a 2000 AD story – which I think goes to show just how lucky I am!

And with that one statement, you have earned the never-ending hatred of so many rejected script droids, not to mention many existing script droids who remember their own plentiful rejections!

We already opened with a brief question about what it means to you to have that debut Prog credit, but can we go a little deeper into it here – what does it mean to you to be a member of the 2000 AD family now?

JL: It’s a genuine honour to be part of the 2000 AD family. It’s an institution that casts a long shadow across UK comics – something I’ve tried hard to live up to. Having worked in indie comics for so long, I think I’d developed something of an independent streak, assuming that I’d always be on the outside making my own books my own way.

When the opportunity came to pitch to 2000 AD, however, it was genuinely exciting. It was a chance to rise to the occasion and make a story that could hopefully stand alongside all the great work that’s come before.

To build on what I was saying earlier about being lucky, I must be living a charmed life as the story proposal (and subsequent script) met with Tharg’s approval quite early on. It’s always nerve-wracking opening yourself up for criticism but aside from some slight feedback on the last few panels, the finished story is pretty much identical to the first draft.

And are you planning to do the thing many new droids do – popping into your local newsagent and/or comic shop and proudly buying the Prog? Maybe even going in with a Sharpie to offer to sign copies?

JL: I have my complimentary copies of the Prog sitting proudly on the desk beside me, but you can guarantee that I’m heading into town tomorrow to grab some additional copies. I hadn’t even thought of going on a signing spree but if I ask very nicely (and offer to provide my own pen) maybe they’ll humour me!

Let’s talk a little of your comics reading history – what are your early and/or most important comic reading experiences and what part did 2000 AD play in them?

JL: Like a lot of kids growing up in the UK in the nineties, my introduction to comics was probably the Beano and Dandy. Beyond that, my life really took two dramatic leaps forward a) in primary school, when I discovered Fleetway’s Sonic the Comic (ironically enough, my introduction to Rich’s artwork) and b) in secondary school, when I discovered Grant Morrison.

STC was the first time I realised that humans actually made comics and that I might be able to do the same, while stumbling upon Morrison’s work started a love affair that persists to this day. Morrison taught me that comics can (and should) be weird, wonderful and heartfelt. There’s magic in low art – and as much as comics have been maligned or dismissed over the years, they’re the purest form of storytelling I can imagine. The moment I discovered those books, I knew that I was set for life. It was comics or nothing.

I was something of a late arrival to 2000 AD. The first Prog I picked up (I confess, I can’t remember which number) featured a Sláine story that really got under my skin, and which I still think about to this day. I didn’t really dive into 2000 AD properly, however, until a friend gifted me the entire run of Morrison’s Zenith in Prog form. In addition to being a classic piece of Morrison history, this was also an excellent crash course in all things 2000 AD that opened my eyes to what was out there.

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What about favourite 2000 AD strips or writers that really had an impact on you?

JL: To this day, I think Ten-Seconders might just be the single, greatest elevator pitch I’ve ever heard.

Oh isn’t it just – Rob Williams, Dom Reardon and the rest doing incredible things – ‘Those who fight back against the tyranny of the ‘Gods’ are nicknamed the ‘Ten-Seconders’ – so called because that is the average life expectancy given to those brave enough to battle the overwhelmingly-powerful opposition.’

JL: Despite being late to the party, I’m a big fan of everything that came out of Vertigo and the British Invasion in the eighties – and you don’t get that without the pioneering work of people like Grant Morrison and Peter Milligan.

Well, I would ask you about influences, but you’ve already started in on those with Morrison, Milligan, and the whole British Invasion/Vertigo era. What other works and creators would you consider influences on your approach to making your comics?

JL: As my previous answers probably suggest, I’m a Morrison man through and through. Neil Gaiman, Mark Waid and Alan Moore have also been big inspirations over the years (somewhat predictably, given my reading tastes growing up).

I like to revisit Casanova by Matt Fraction, Gabriel Bá and Fábio Moon every few years – I’m re-reading it right now and it honestly blows me away every time just how free and wildly creative it is. Speaking of Bá and Moon, Daytripper is an absolute masterpiece. Reading Locke and Key by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodríguez was the first time I was utterly humbled by a book – and the realisation that I would never, ever make something that good! Oh, and on the prose front, Nick Harkaway is a sublime genius – go read Angelmaker, your brain will thank you!

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Nearly finally, one for fun – if there was just one 2000 AD character that you could write, which one would it be – feel free to go wild here, if you’ve got a fantasy pitch all worked out, now’s the time to make it!

JL: Ah heck, why not aim high and go for the big man himself? The great thing about Judge Dredd is that his world glances off both the incredible and the mundane, all tied up in the tortured powder keg that is Mega-City One.

Dredd’s this cypher – a symbol of unrelenting duty in which the highs and lows of humanity are reflected. Let’s push Dredd into the background and feel the city breathe around him.

Let’s set a story entirely within the ‘lifespan’ of a single bullet, from the moment it fires to the moment it finds its target. How much can happen in that split second? Mega-City One holds its breath… and in that single instance we see everything – the victim and the murderer, the guilty and the desperate, laughter, failure, the pulse of humanity, all connected, trying their best – before boom! The bullet finds its mark and that one perfect moment is lost, leaving just Dredd, the only thing that never changes, to swoop in and enact justice, as implacable as death.

Again, Tharg? If you are listening, I think Jon’s got a Dredd pitch for you!

Finally, what’s coming up for you in the near, or not so near future, whether that’s for Tharg or elsewhere?

As mentioned above, Nich and I have just started work on something big that’s going to keep us occupied for a few years – something that I hope to be able to shout about very soon. Beyond that, I’m plugging away on completing Afterlife Inc. Volume 7 with my amazing art team and generally keeping my head above water.

Plus, if Tharg will have me, I’d love to have another crack at something for 2000 AD!

Well, based on just how good Antumnos was, I reckon Tharg will be getting in touch for more Jon!

Thank you to Jon for taking the time to answer those questions. Like we say, with the quality on show with this debut effort we reckon it won’t be long before you see more credits for the new Lock-droid.

You can find Jon Lock and Richard Elson’s Terror Tales: Antumnos in the current Prog, fresh out right now with another stunning debut, the first cover by RM Guera, the artist on the new Rob Williams written Dredd, Rend & Tear with Tooth & Claw – it’s a cover that will just jump off the shelves and grab you by the throat it’s so damn good! Get it from the 2000 AD web shop, set up a subscription to guarantee you’ll never miss a Prog, or head to your local newsagent or comic shop (heck, pick it up from a newsagent or comic shop that’s miles and miles away if you want!)

This is what you’re looking for… stunning, ain’t it?

For more from Jon Lock, head to his website here – www.jonlock.com – and do be sure to check out his excellent Afterlife Inc. series, something that’s every bit as good as the killer concept of a corporate makeover of the afterlife sounds – it’s all written by Jon with art from over 60 artists across the six volumes or two massive Book of Life/Death, The Afterlife Inc. 10th Anniversary Collections.

This is how Jon describes the series…

“With the vision, the business-smarts and a ragtag collection of allies behind him, Jack strives to reinvent the afterlife as a modern-day corporate entity. Establishing a new business is always challenging, but now Jack must balance the demands of a free market with rampaging archangels, a misplaced God and the dark secrets at the heart of their world. This may be the job he was born to die for, but has Jack’s reach finally exceeded his grasp?”

Prog 2359 brings the saga of Chief Judge Barbara Hershey to a close with the finale of Judge Dredd: Poison, where Rob Williams and PJ Holden give us a resolution to the murder mystery that’s been playing out. So, whodunnit? And why?

Judge Hershey’s life and legacy stretches back some 40+ years in the annals of 2000 AD. We’ve seen her introduction and her rise to the rank of Chief Judge – not once but twice. And we’ve seen both triumph and failure in equal measure throughout her life. And now, with the conclusion of Judge Dredd: Poison, her saga comes to its end as Dredd wraps up the investigation into her death.

A few years ago, she died for the first time, poisoned by an alien virus, only to secretly cheat death to do one last act – undo her great wrong of letting Judge Smiley get away with too much. In the recent Hershey series by Rob Williams and Simon Fraser, we saw a still dying Hershey struggle to hold off the effects of the virus until she’d purged her world of Enceladus and she could finally die knowing she’d righted those wrongs.

And that death came to Hershey in 2000 AD Prog 2349, cold and sharp, brutal even. However, there were still questions to be answered in the aftermath… exactly who was it who infected her and why did they want her dead? Which is just what Dredd’s been finding out through the eight parts of Poison that began in Prog 2351 and ended this week with Prog 2359. It was a Dredd murder mystery, MC-1’s finest determined to get to the truth.

So – whodunnit? And why? Well, the best people to ask would be writer Rob Williams and artist PJ Holden… so we did. But fear not – for those of you waiting to read the whole tale we’ve kept this one spoiler-free for you!

Judge Dredd: Poison came to its conclusion in Prog 2359 with Dredd finally uncovering just who’s responsible for the death of Hershey.

Across the eight parts, you played out an old-fashioned murder mystery, a whodunnit even, with elements of a classic quest sort of story, taking Dredd across multiple locations. But, for those who maybe haven’t read it yet and are waiting till it’s ending, can you explain to everyone just what Poison is all about?

ROB WILLIAMS: Somebody poisoned and eventually murdered ex-Chief Judge Hershey. Poison is Judge Dredd attempting to hunt down the killer.

And why the decision to go this murder mystery route? What was the attraction for you in doing a proper detective tale with all that entails?

RW: I’ve done a bunch of more ‘action’ focussed Dredd stories. I thought it’d be fun to do a Detective tale. After all, he’s a Cop. Also, I bloody-mindedly thought it’d be interesting to tell a long-form Dredd tale where he doesn’t shoot anybody for a change.

Yes, there’s that moment in Episode 4 where Domino gets to deliver that great line to Dredd…

How did the story come together in the end and what was the seed to this one? How long have you had it in mind?

RW: Well, writing Hershey’s slow-protracted death over four series’ due to the effects of the Alien Pathogen she contracted – that was obviously the seed for Poison.

But I think it was Matt Smith who said to me ‘you know, we’ve never told the story of who poisoned Hershey.’ As John Wagner wrote Hershey being poisoned off-world I just assumed that John would tell that tale at some point, but Matt spoke to John and came back saying he was happy for me to tell it.

There’s certainly plenty of threads in here that I assume you took great delight in planting – all the different suspects in Hershey’s murder, all the red herrings along the way?

RW: It’s a murder-mystery. You have to have a few suspects and a few red herrings. I knew I wanted it to be a road movie for Dredd across different parts of the Dreddworld.

Hershey contracted the virus off world so start there. Plus there was a resonance to that as Dredd first encountered Hershey on the Judge Child mission. Then onto East-Meg 2. Back to Mega-City One. Into The Cursed Earth and then finally… you come home. Most murders are domestic ones…

Okay, so why and how did you decide on the eventual villain of the piece, the man who killed Hershey?

[Okay, here we really have to edit Rob heavily as he’s giving the game away over and over again…]

RW: A number of reasons. But really. what █████████ had suffered was so traumatic. First being ██████████████, then █████████ and the appalling suffering there, then being tortured and ████████████ there. He was always a character driven by vanity. Hershey and Dredd ████████████ where you can’t even imagine what he went through. He’s immensely bitter. Wants someone to blame…

This was something we hadn’t seen for the longest time in Dredd, a good old-fashioned murder mystery, Agatha Christie done through the lens of Mega-City and Dredd – a proper whodunnit.

But there’s also a Hitchcock vibe in here as well, with the sense of constant motion, the constantly changing locales, the sheer speed of it all. It’s almost North by Northwest with a sci-fi twist in many ways, wouldn’t you say?

RW: It’s got a Hitchcock vibe to it, I guess. But without those big classic set pieces. I guess there was a longer version where we could have done that. Eight episodes is quite a lot for a Dredd story but this all became somewhat tight. Hopefully, that means there’s no fat on the bones.

Each week we were drawn further into the web of conspiracies and mystery. Each week seemed to throw up another potential suspect – and plenty of red herrings along the way of course, just as any good whodunnit should have.

As a writer, was there something of a delight in laying the trail, giving the reader the clues, planting the false paths, that sort of thing?

RW: I quite enjoyed stirring the pot with PJ Maybe being a possibility and what that did to Dredd’s trust in his own judgement. He loses that and he’s nothing. Maybe has come back from the dead before so why not this time? And I figured long-time readers would have a reaction to the possibility that PJ Maybe was behind it, either good or bad. That’s fine, I knew what I was doing there.

You can say it was a cynical bit of writing. It probably was. But I knew it was an effective mid-point beat for the story. It raised the stakes, I felt. But the actual murderer being PJ Maybe wasn’t something that ever interested me. It was always a misdirect.

Along with the whodunnit aspect of it, it was also a return to a good old Dredd quest, that almost road movie feel of Judge Child et al, with Dredd taking the grande tour and revisiting a few of his and Hershey’s old haunts along the way. Was this more a function of the storytelling or a way to pay homage to all the great quest Dredd tales of the past?

RW: It was Dredd following Hershey’s life as well as the case. She was in space with him on the Judge Child quest, she was part of the crew that ended the Apocalypse War, part of the Mutie Rights furore they encountered in settlements in The Cursed Earth. He sees trails of her everywhere.

Hershey was probably the closest thing to a friend that Dredd has ever had – you can argue for Anderson, Giant(s) I guess. Hershey’s dead. This is, in his own glacial way, Dredd dealing with grief. Seeing her footsteps everywhere he goes on this case.

One thing that always comes through in your work is an ability to seemingly get inside Dredd’s head. Here we saw a really driven Dredd but also one trying and, at times, failing to cope with the self-doubts that came midway through his investigation when he just couldn’t seem to give up the PJ Maybe connection.

It was fascinating to see Dredd’s fixation and the loss of his control, watching the self-doubt creep in. For a man who’s so often gone with his gut, to suddenly find that gut reaction might be wrong is shown to be a major thing for Dredd. The way that doubt creeps in and takes hold – it’s another less obvious aspect of the title if I’m right?

RW: Yeah, there’s a line in there somewhere about doubt spreading like Poison. Pretty much all Dredd has to tether him (and his rage) is The Law and his Gut (capital letter on purpose where Joe is concerned). His own Judgement.

In terms of being a Judge, he’s kind of a savant. But if he can’t trust his Gut anymore, he’s lost… That’s what has kept him alive and thriving all these years. And if PJ Maybe can be still alive and behind all this… when he saw Maybe explode in front of him… And if Dredd goes, you feel Mega-City One and the Judges will fall behind him. He’s the totem that keeps this creaking house of totalitarian cards upright. It’s a double meaning in the title.

Now obviously Dredd is Dredd and any unsolved murder will eat at him. But this had a more personal air right from the start.

What’s your take on the relationship of Dredd and Hershey, seeing as you’ve been heavily involved with Hershey for quite a while now?

RW: Dredd doesn’t really do ‘friends’ but there’s those he trusts, those he’s been through the battles with. Hershey was there for a very long time. They butted heads a lot when she was Chief Judge, and he ultimately took her down and humiliated her in doing so.

That was a brutal defenestration and in writing the Hershey series, she spent a lot of her final years feeling angry and bitter towards him for that. It’s like a lot of family relationships. You can love someone and feel anger and resentment towards them at the same time.

I think Hershey’s one of the few Judges who Dredd saw as an equal. She died. The murder of any Chief Judge would fill Dredd with a burning desire for justice. It’s a cliched movie tag line but “this one is personal.”

Any future ramifications for Dredd in this one – it was his final act of friendship or duty towards Hershey after all? Will the emotions resonate through future tales or is this absolutely, finally, the end now? Have you neatly tied a bow around Hershey’s tale?

RW: Oh, I think so. This is the end of the Hershey tale, and Hershey shut down the ramifications of Smiley’s actions abroad and the Enceladus Energy. I’ll be leaving those threads alone from now on.

Hershey was one of the most beloved of Judge Hershey of Dredd characters and you certainly played a huge role in all that. You’ve really guided her tale in the three Hershey volumes and capped it all off here in Poison. What were your thoughts on her character – did she get under your skin at all?

RW: Any character you write for so long gets under your skin. One of the main points with the Hershey tale was to ask the question she was feeling herself – OK, I was a Judge, I was possibly the best Judge in the City. That’s over now. I have a limited amount of time left. Who the fuck am I if I’m no longer a Judge?

She, quite naturally I think, went through periods of great pain, anger, resentment. She came very, very close to tipping over into being a criminal in her quest for Justice. In fact, at the end of Book Two of Hershey, I think she does step over that line, which Frank calls her on. It’s revenge. But she pulls back from that point on. And eventually comes back to a place of structure in life that she can find something close to peace in. She has her last moment with Dredd where she gets to tell him that he was a dick to her (in better dialogue than that). She gets to see the City she loves one last time. And then, in her final days, she chooses to try and help the citizens in Antarctic City. And in Frank, Joe the Dog, and Juninho, she gets a little family. I liked Barbara Hershey. She tried to be a good person.

What was it about her as a character that called out to you to give her this ending – why did you need to tell her tale?

RW: I don’t know I needed to tell her tale. But I felt I’d been rather cruel to her at the end of The Small House and I felt for a character who was always in the wake of Dredd’s actions. As all the background characters will be. The strip’s called Judge Dredd…

So I wanted to write a story that gave her some agency of her own. It could’ve been just a kickass Long Walk tale with Hershey as some sub-Black Widow figure, I guess, but it ended up being about ‘how does a person deal with their own death and their race being run. I turned 50 at some point when writing it, my mum and a good friend died, so have fun with your subtext readings.

The Hershey series was very different for 2000 AD in that it was all about seeing an older character’s redemptive arc. It strikes me that you put a lot of your feelings towards Hershey into that? And now, with Poison, it feels like you’ve come to it with the idea of doing right by her.

RW:I think trying to do right by her was always the intention of the series. But with the final book of Hershey: The Cold In The Bones, especially. I didn’t want her to go out raging and bitter. I wanted to allow her some closure. I’m very proud of the final episode especially, I think Simon Fraser and I did some very strong work there. It’s a fitting ending for the character, I think.

Going from Poison to Dredd and Dreddworld more generally – how do you navigate around the continuity inherent in something like Poison whilst still keeping it easy for a new reader to jump into and get the story without knowing all the history behind it?

RW: You do your research and some back-reading, but you ultimately trust that The Mighty Tharg is going to call you if you stray from continuity too far. I worried a bit that digging back into the ████████, Dan Francisco, PJ Maybe history would just lose any newer readers, but I try and gracefully exposition our way through a few of those threads as we progress.

You can’t really tell a story with a whodunnit based on a character’s life without going back into that character’s life. 

We’re now at the stage where Dredd is a group effort with plenty of great writers all playing their parts in creating the lore. And of course, John Wagner’s still heavily involved. He may not be writing too many Dredds nowadays, but everything plays back into Wagner’s storytelling.

How do you all coordinate things? Is it now a case of getting together and putting down your flags into parts of Dredd’s world, claiming that territory?

RW: It’s all very organic with us all telling the stories we want to tell, but it all goes through Matt Smith. Matt’s the nexus. If something big is coming Matt tells us, if a story point treads on the toes of another story by a different writer, Matt tells us.

We don’t do a big Dredd’s Writers’ Room. Although I think that might be a useful exercise once a year or something. But yeah, all Dredd roads flow through Matt.

[At this point, we were joined by PJ Holden, as he’d pleased Tharg by getting all his pages for that hour in and was due a moment’s break.]

As for Dredd and Dreddworld, what keeps it all fresh and new for you every time you come back to it?

PJ HOLDEN: Well, for me it’s the prospect that this time I might get it right! I’ve always felt every Dredd job could be my last and if I’m lucky enough to get another go at Dredd especially, I’ll see if I can figure out how to do it better.

I feel like I’ve got Dredd the character where I want him about 90% of the time, and now there’s the rest of Dredd’s world to get exactly how I want to draw it. And I think I’m about 1% there, so lots of ways to go.

RW: For me I think it’s a mix of my having loved Dredd as a 12-13 year old, so there’s that nostalgia kick. I still sometimes catch myself and think “holy shit, writing Judge Dredd for 2000 AD.” But that wouldn’t be enough if it wasn’t an enjoyable experience, and it nearly always is.

Matt Smith allows us a lot of creative freedom, to tell the type of stories in the way we want to tell them. We’re not micro-managed in a way that DC and Marvel editors work. And I, for the most part, get to work with artists I very much want to work with. PJ on Poison, Henry Flint on a bunch of my Dredd stories, Chris Weston on the Judge Pin and Sensitive-Klegg stories. It’s a treat working with these artists, genuinely. All that keeps me excited to write Dredd.

One great thing about Dredd that’s always been there is the visual variety that we see from artist to artist. It strikes me that we’re in another golden age of Dredd artist, many of whom you have the pleasure to work with.

Rob, always interesting to hear the writer’s views on what the artists have done with their story. So, having seen PJ’s work and the work of Peter Doherty on colours, what’s your take?

Feel free to lavish praise on PJ – he won’t take it, won’t like it, but he’ll just have to accept it!

PJH: Rob knows, that, while I will, in print say hush and nonsense to anything he writes about me, secretly this is inflating my ego to unbearable extents and I will bring it up anytime we talk in the future, and there’s a good chance when my kids ask me what’s for dinner I might bellow “DON’T YOU KNOW WHO I AM?” (very real danger they’ll think old age has kicked in)

RW: PJ’s a rather brilliant storyteller, I think, first and foremost. He has an open, energetic style that’s so attractive and easy to read.

He’s a friend so there is a lot of back-and-forth conversation on a story like this, which makes it all a fun experience. He’ll send me breakdowns and I’ll offer thoughts. There’ll be an odd panel where I’ll suggest a different approach.

Mostly I have to tie him down and curtail his urge to draw giant monsters. In the plot there was a fight scene at The Alchemist’s lair where Dredd had to dispatch a juvenile T-Rex but when I came to script there wasn’t room and I dropped it. I think PJ was a bit disappointed so he snuck a couple of Baby T-Rex fighting in the background of one panel. 

And for both of you, while we’re talking about artwork, we have to mention the colour work of Peter Doherty here. What would you both like to say about what he’s brought to Poison?

RW: This was very much a noir-ish grounded Dredd, so I wanted a colourist who could deliver that and thought of Pete. He’s a terrific colourist and artist in his own right, is Pete. I think he did a great job here.

We talked a bit about the cinematography and tone of the story before starting out, which was useful I think. Mostly on comics the art comes back and it’s coloured and the writer has no say. But this one… theme, tone, a couple of little flourishes – the recurring motif of pure white (for the truth) in some panels. We talked all this stuff through going in.

PJH: Well, first let me say I’m a huge fan of Pete’s work, it’s always a little weird when an artist you consider iconic ends up colouring your work. So I think Pete has added a sheen of realism to what my normally slightly excessive cartoony is, and it’s exactly what’s needed in a strip like this.

Oh, absolutely – So let’s take a moment to appreciate the work of Peter Doherty on colours for Poison – whether it’s the relatively bright yet desolate scenes from East-Meg Two or the perfectly ‘downbeat pallet’, as Pete described it, for Mega-City One, he’s brought so much to Poison…

PJ, when you come to Dredd, what’s your approach?

PJH: Read the script, figure out what I might need to draw, do a bit of research if required and then start drawing. Constant forward momentum, otherwise I end up questioning myself over and over.

But I knew the tone Rob was going for so I tried to match that, trying to make it an interesting visual journey over all of these different locations. I really want to make Dredd’s world feel bigger and more alien than we sometimes see it, at the same time that’s counterbalanced by this, in many ways being an intimate tale – it’s not big alien invasions, it’s a hunter going over a cold trail.

And was there a particular difference in doing Poison to previous Dredd stories you’ve done?

PJH: I try and treat every single Dredd as I feel it needs to be treated, so I’m not deliberately thinking “Oh this should look nothing to this last thing” – it really comes down to the script and figuring out what the mood of it is, and whether I can get away with silly stuff or does it need hard shadows/moody tone. Really it’s what I love about Dredd is each story sets its own mood.

How would you describe your own style, both generally and in terms of this latest Dredd for you?

PJH: I think… rock solid storytelling with characters made from granite and a tendency to go inappropriately cartoony? I think that would be a description I’d be happy enough with, flaws and all.

I’ve always been fascinated about where that line between too cartoony and realism is, realism seems to fall down to how a thing is rendered – so as goofy as my Dredd would be in real life his rendering is fairly real? chunky? rock like? But it all takes a back seat to making sure the storytelling is done well (or as well as I’m able to do so at the time).

I suspect my interests in the cartoony/realism debate stem from Dredd, Steve Dillon’s cartoony, light rendering over naturalistic art, Bolland’s hyper extreme realistic rendering over somewhat cartoony faces, McMahon’s full bore cartooning with incredible handling of black/white for weight. All of those things feed in. (I am prepared to be corrected on all of those descriptions, this stuff is all very fluid)

One very noticeable and very nice artistic touch, particularly in those first few episodes was the near full page first pages that you included in many of the episodes.

For example, the very opening shot is one of Hershey standing tall over the Hall of Justice, and then there’s that simply beautiful opening shot of Poison episode 2 of Dredd just standing there looking up at the stars, a contemplative Dredd…

… and then Rob pricks that particular bubble and brings us right back down to earth…

RW: That page was a guilty pleasure. It’s effectively a gag. A splash page setup and then a payoff. But I thought it was funny, so it stayed.

Or there’s episode 3 with Domino in front of the East-Meg 2 buildings, immediately and perfectly setting the tone of it all. The buildings look completely different, the light is different, we’ve gone from the darkness of episodes 1 and 2 into bright, snow-covered Sov territory.

Can you talk us through a few of the artistic and stylistic decisions that went into Poison?

PJH: Well, first, those are all largely “as per script” so entirely Rob’s doing. With the Hershey, I wanted stereotypical Meg inhabitants with all their normal over-the-top silliness, to act as a counter to what Dredd was doing and thinking.

Man, I redrew that Hershey statue a few times – I just couldn’t hit the “action-packed but also a statue” note that I wanted, until my friend sent me a photo he’d taken of his partner in Hershey cosplay that was perfect, and I stole the pose – it’s cool, they know!)

PJH: Dredd with his back, another problematic pose until I ended up taking a photo of the back of my McMahon Judge Dredd statuette and using that for reference.

And on East Meg 2 – well, it’s hard because you want a reader to instantly understand where you are on a page like that but at the same time you’re trying not to rely too much on stereotypes, in the end the stereotypes win because clarity in storytelling is the important point.

One problem (or maybe a bonus for you) is that it’s a tale with at least five different settings – MC-1, off-world colony, East-Meg 2, back to MC-1, Cursed Earth, and then ending down underground – was it a problem or a bonus – and how did you approach all the changes in locale in your art?

PJH: I took it as a great opportunity to draw a whole bunch of different places! You never dwell long enough in one spot for the continuity to get in the way (“Oh wait, last issue we had two solar panels on this roof!”) and you got to invent whole new locations.

I was going through a little phase of trying to make some of these locations feel grand – and like they’d belong on different sci-fi book covers. Rob had wanted something more majestic for the location markers, but in the end the page count/panel count made that much harder to be effective so we sort of scrapped it.

PJ, can you give us a breakdown of how you’re working now?

PJH: It’s all digital now, so get ready for some boring computer talk!

Pretty simple, read the script (paying attention more to dialogue than anything), set up a new clip studio Ex multi page document at print size x1.4 (because that’s the size I used to draw it on paper) create a document with a few extra pages at the end, use those to create the layouts for the strip.

>>>>>>>>>>>>

PJH: I have a little auto action that just creates a simple grid I can use to draw my layouts over. Then I’ll reread the script (now the focus is on the panel descriptions and who gets to talk first), this time making notes on the layout pages (I say notes, I mean I’m drawing the page but at “thumbnail size” – really about 2.5inchs x 1inch, but it’s not terribly detailed) and then once I’ve done that, the work starts proper.

I’ll drop the thumbnail layout of the page on to the page itself and then enlarge it, run an action that basically sets the page up for me to work on (it renames layers, and does some other things I find useful) then sit with the script again and draw it, this read I’m paying attention to the panel description first, I’ll sort of sculpt out the page on one layer, making sure I know where everyone and everything is, simplifying some things.

Then I’ll drop a new layer for proper pencils, and draw much tighter pencils here. Once done, I’ll create an inking layer, turn my clean pencils to a light blue and start inking.

Inking at the moment involves using a clip studio pen that has a slightly gnarly feel of a dip pen, and I’ll draw pretty much everything in that, maybe going back to add some textures of thumbprint or splatter (so much cleaner doing that digitally than with ink).

Check it, make sure it reads ok, then move on to the next page. Every few pages I’ll send to Rob to make sure I haven’t wandered too far off script, and once done I’ll send it on to the Mighty One.

>>>>>>>>>>>

PJH: That all said, I think I drew the first two episodes in pen and ink on paper, and a few other pages scattered throughout (Dredd staring at the stars for one). Partly because I miss the feel of paper and drawing something you like on paper is hands down 100 times better than doing exactly the same drawing digitally and partly because, well, let’s be honest, I’m sure I can sell some of those pages!

(I crawl back to digital because my eyesight isn’t great and digital drawing is much, much easier to do and faster…)

>>>>>>>>>>

Finally, what do we have to look forward from you, both in 2000 AD and elsewhere?

PJH: I’m currently doing some Devlin Waugh for Alěs Kot and the Megazine, I’ve finished a one off and working on a six parter (I think it’s six anyway). Deadline is some way off though, so no idea when you’ll see it.

I’ve a weekly webcomic, Null Space, written by a who’s-who of sci-fi and genre fiction writers and it’s at www.pauljholden.com/series/null-space/

I’ve also been writing a monthly sci-fi/fantasy zine called A4 – a single sheet of paper you can print out and fold into a little stand with a cover and seven pieces of nano-fiction, and it’s at www.pauljholden.com/series/a4

Oh yes, Null Space is a fine, fine thing. Great writers, excellent artwork, incredible tales, really pushing the idea of what short comic fiction can do into all the right places. Highly recommended to you. And A4 is absolutely fascinating stuff as well. Yep, he’s a fine talent is that PJ.

>>>>>>

PJH: And readers of the Megazine will probably already know I’ve two graphic novels out at the moment, Bad Magic, a Skulduggery Pleasant graphic novel with Derek Landy, and Fantastic Folklore collecting the folklore comics I did with John Reppion on Twitter, massively expanded with essays for each story – a perfect stocking filler!

That’s right, you can find double the Holden this month in the pages of Megazine issue 462, where there’s articles and interviews with PJ on his absolutely essential Fascinating Folklore, with John Reppion and his work adapting Skullduggary Pleasant. Both of them are perfect presents to anyone you may know, including yourself. Now, if only there was a big present giving holiday around the corner, eh?  

As for Rob and what’s coming next, well by this stage he’d been dragged back to the script droid pens by one of Tharg’s productivity encouragement mechs. Something about having at least two huge new series to write before he’d be allowed the extremely generous 30-minute Christmas break this year. But fear not, we’ll tell you all about them in a moment!

And as for Dredd in the future, there is that one particular strand of Poison that’s still to be explored… there’s this from episode 4, Prog 2353. There’s a deal that Domino made, a deal with a dangerous man. Anyone want to take bets that Rob won’t be imagining just what he can do with that particular little threat that’s been left dangling, just waiting to be pulled?

Thank you so much to both Rob and PJ for taking the time and trouble of chatting. Judge Dredd: Poison really is rather brilliant Dredd that you should all be reading. You can get hold of it in Progs 2351-2355 and 2357-2359. Catch that final episode in 2000 AD Prog 2359 this week from everywhere that thrill-power is sold, including the 2000 AD web shop!

As far as more from both Rob and PJ here at 2000AD.com, can we point you in the direction of a few interviews and Covers Uncovered pieces?

From Rob – a hell of a lot of Dredd interviews! – The Small House (2017, with Henry Flint), Unearthed (2019, with Chris Weston and Patrick Goddard), The Hard Way (2021, with Arthur Wyatt and Jake Lynch), JD The Musical (2021, with Chris Weston), The Pitch (2022, with Arthur Wyatt and Boo Cook), Special Relationship (2022, with Patrick Goddard), and Buratino Must Die (2022, with Henry Flint).

We talked all things Hershey with Rob and Simon Fraser in an interview here and a Thrill-Cast here. He talks Roy of the Rovers graphic novels here and the Rocky of the Rovers strip inside the Tammy & Jinty Special here.

As for PJ, he talks Noam Chimpsky’s A Terrifically Disturbing Adventure! here (2021) and we’ve interviewed him twice on his Department K series – here and here. For more of his art, he’s featured several times on our Covers Uncovered feature – Prog 2178, Prog 2221, Prog 2234, Prog 2301, Prog 2308, . Megazine 420.

And as far as what to look forward to from Dredd and Rob Williams in 2024 is concerned, we had a couple of very exciting bits of news coming out of Thought Bubble…

Rob’s teaming up with Arthur Wyatt and Henry Flint for Judge Dredd: A Better World, continuing Judge Maitland’s interest in funding education and social reform. Would it actually improve Mega-City One if the Judge Department were de-funded as a result?

And then, a second bit of Williams Dredd announced – Judge Dredd: Rend & Tear with Tooth & Claw with the art of RM Guera (Scalped) and Giulia Brusco (The Goddamned) will be a multi-part survivor horror story where things go badly wrong for Dredd in the snowy wilderness of the territory which once was called Alaska.

And finally, those process pieces from PJ, printed full size and in all their glory!

Poison episode 1, Prog 2351, layouts for the whole episode, then page 1 pencils, inks…

Now episode 2, Prog 2352, layouts for the episode and then page 1 pencils and inks… including all that ‘toothbrush splatter and gnarly old brushes’…

And finally, episode 3, page 1, Prog 2353 – pencils and inks…

There’s a brand new Judge Dredd Megazine out this week and, amongst the thrill power inside, you’re going to see the return of everyone’s favourite ex-Judge turned gumshoe, Galen DeMarco in DeMarco P.I.: A Picture Paints, written by Laura Bailey and drawn by Rob Richardson.

Created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquera back in 1997, Galen DeMarco’s long history certainly has its fair share of triumph and tragedy since she turned her back on the family money and became a rising star in the Justice Department. She survived the cesspit of corruption that was Sector House 301 – The Pit – and seemed destined for life as a top-notch Judge, but DeMarco’s emotions kept getting the better of her and, after one romantic indiscretion too many, she quit the Justice Department and set herself up as a private investigator.

So far, this new life as a P.I. hasn’t exactly been plain sailing, but perhaps A Picture Paints will be a nice and easy, open and shut case for MC-1’s most famous shamus. Okay, probably not, but why don’t we find out directly from the droids as we chat to Laura Bailey and Rob Richardson?

You can find part 1 of DeMarco P.I.: A Picture Paints in the latest Megazine, issue 462, out from 15^th November and all under a perfect-looking DeMarco cover from Alex Ronald. Laura is quick off the mark with praise for the cover…

LAURA BAILEY: To start off, before we even get to the questions, I feel compelled to say that I need to buy Alex Ronald a drink or something. His cover is everything I could ask for a Galen fan. Perfect snapshot of Galen working covertly in a blissfully unaware crowd. Yet she stands out to us, like a special everyman.

Okay then, Laura and Rob, it’s been four long years since we’ve seen Galen DeMarco here in the pages of the Megazine and now you’re bringing her back for A Picture Paints. So, first question, obvious question – what’s A Picture Paints all about?

LB: It’s a four-part story in which Galen is employed by Torridge Warehouses to investigate missing ammunition shipments. Torridge staff are constantly monitored with an oppressive face-identifying CCTV system, so if it was a thief they would’ve caught them already.  

The title is a riff on the phrase ‘A picture paints a thousand words’ because collecting evidence is an important part of Private Investigation. This client in particular will only pay Galen once he has received photographic proof, and sometimes that is not as easy as it sounds…

As readers will immediately see, Galen’s still wearing the scar on her face from the last time you wrote her – in An Eye… (Megazine 409-412), with art by Paul Williams.

That three-parter was really the essence of DeMarco, getting involved far too much, far too easily, caring too much, too willing to bend or break the law because she just can’t help herself.

Are we going to see some comeback from that last tale here – or is that done and dusted and we’re just left to imagine which way it went?

LB: Paul Williams and I agonised over Galen’s knife scar when we collaborated, looking at numerous gory stab wounds to come up with realistic placement and shape. There was always an intention for Galen to keep a scar as she doesn’t have the Judges’ advanced healing system anymore.

Hopefully, we’ll build a sense of continuity for the character and show how private investigation impacts her life. As for comeback from the last tale, the only way to find out is to give it a read!

ROB RICHARDSON: Galen’s scar is a nice visual hook and really adds to her character. Even if we’re unaware of her history, we know that she’s not had an easy time. That she unapologetically ‘wears’ the scar adds menace to this kooky (as I see her!) woman. It’s also relevant, if not fundamental, to this story.

Obviously, Laura, you find her fascinating – what is it about her as a character that you find attractive and so interesting?

LB: The highlight for me is her interactions with Dredd and how she refused to believe falling in love with a Judge to be a crime. She’s totally right and wrong at the same time. Completely threw away her career, all for a completely emotionally stunted man who had zero interest in her. Yet she’s right:  why should she lose her job for feeling an emotion?  

This is why I find her so interesting. At heart she’s a non-conformist operating against a hugely oppressive society, she’s very moral yet works in a very morally ambiguous job. Tough and capable but she’s also really quite naïve, often jumping into one huge mistake after another.

The complexity of her life is very relatable, it’s more fun writing characters who are anything but perfect.

Is there a familiarity by now with DeMarco – do you have her voice in your head so to speak?

LB: Does it sound psychotic to say she lives inside my head?  When I start to write a Galen story and I’m coming up with ideas, it feels as if I’m catching up with her to see what she’s getting up to.  

And Rob, as you’re new to DeMarco, what experience do you have with her tales as a reader and how did you approach this new series?

RR: I hadn’t read DeMarco prior to this, so I did my homework and went back to some of the older stories. It became apparent that what I needed to know was all in Laura’s script, and it absolutely works without the reader being familiar with what’s gone before – an ideal jumping on point!

It took a while to find out who my version was, specifics such as how she walked and stood etc. There were a few panels where the character started coming together and I felt like I was getting a handle on things. I’m sure none of this translates onto the page, but it fills my head as I’m working!

A Picture Paints part 1 sets it all up with a very downbeat air. Seems to me, as you give DeMarco yet another shitty case to keep her head above water, you’ve combined that love of the character with a real habit of putting her through the wringer.

LB: Now she’s left the job security of being a judge and doesn’t have her father’s wealth, Galen is more exposed to the day-to-day grind of the Meg City life.

Private Investigation is a gnarly business and sadly, I don’t think she’ll get any type of “reunite prince charming with Cinderella all expenses paid” type jobs.

So where can we expect this DeMarco tale to go? (To be honest with you, I can’t imagine you’re going to make it easy on her here.)

LB: I’d say sit back and enjoy Galen getting her hands dirty to earn a couple measly creds.

One thing that’s always great about Galen’s cases is that we get to have that different view of this great city, an on-the-ground, non-judicial look at MC-1. And in A Picture Paints, you really do go down to ground level, a grimy, lived-in, distressed look to it all, far away from the gleaming spires and mega-blocks of Dredd’s world perhaps.

In fact, in both this and An Eye… it’s essentially a pulp noir detective tale, simple set-up, not really involving that many sci-fi elements in here.

RR: The city plays a big part in establishing the tone. We’re down on the streets with the proletariat amongst old alleyways, warehouses, neglected buildings, and shopping centres. In the distance, there’s a glimpse of the hulking futuristic mega-blocks.

There’s always plenty to work with when trying to set the scene. I love Will Eisner’s work, and there’s a lot of stuff in there absorbed from The Spirit and his New York-based stories.

I wanted to play up the hardboiled crime aspect, and needed little excuse to delve into my Humphrey Bogart DVDs and soak up the atmosphere. It’s a favourite genre of mine and Laura’s story allowed me to explore classic tropes mixed with sci-fi weirdness.

LB: I like to think of it as sci-fi on a budget.

Is this something that you’re deliberately playing to in your DeMarco tales, the sense of a different location and different rules?

LB: Personally, I want DeMarco stories to contrast the judicial world. The repercussions of Galen making her own decisions is all part of her story, there’s no badge for Galen to hide behind.

Also, what kind of people can afford Private Investigation in the Meg? And why are these people coming to Galen instead of the Law? It’s a whole different world.

Laura, working with a new artist here, have you had chance to see Rob’s finished pages yet and how did the collaboration work?

LB: Rob kindly showed me all of his pages once he had finished, I can’t wait for you guys to see it all. In terms of the collaboration, I don’t like to interfere with the Artist unless asked really, I think if I had to spend hours, days, and weeks drawing, the last thing I’d want is some overzealous writer cracking the whip. 

RR: I’d receive the scripts and get to work! We kept in touch, and there were a few details that I needed to check on before drawing, but by and large we worked independently. Everything I needed was in the writing. Laura creates amazing scenes and situations, and fills them with suspense, drama, intrigue, and humour. The characters are well-defined through their actions and dialogue, and it’s an absolute pleasure to work with her. For me at least, the writer/artist dynamic worked well!

As far as your work at 2000 AD is concerned, we couldn’t have two more different paths into the Prog and the Meg with you two.

Laura, you were the winner of Tharg’s script droid contest at 2017 Thought Bubble convention and we’ve talked plenty on that before I know – although I still do love your pitch plan…

‘I practised a lot beforehand with my friend Soph, she tested me to make sure I could pitch in under two minutes, then it was important to make sure I wouldn’t crack under pressure. She devised a method to make sure I could do the pitch under any conditions, had to pitch drunk while she heckled me and simultaneously played the Countdown music.’

Yep, not sure if any other successful writers have done the drunk practice pitch idea but it sure seemed to work for you! (hmmm actually, let’s go with pissed practice pitch plan – oh, the alliteration!)

LB: The quadruple P strategy haha! It honestly works!! Much harder to pitch drunk than sober. The trick to a successful pitch is to do it without notes and to practice like crazy, you get to know your story inside out and can trim anything unnecessary as it’s got to be under two minutes. Funny enough, I have just finished judging the 2000 AD script droid contest, I got quite triggered by Mike Molcher setting the two minute timer.

Now, six years on from the win, you’ve firmly established yourself in 2000 AD as a writer. Looking back on it now, how have these last six years been?

LB: Cannot believe it’s been that long, surely the Covid years can be condensed into one? The work I’ve done for 2000 AD has been a real positive part of my life.

I can’t describe the feeling of winning the pitch and then seeing the Future Shock I created with Paul Williams in print for the first time. Or coming up with the character Quilli with David Hitchcock and seeing it on the front of the Prog. Even just the experience of going into a comic book shop and seeing your work on a shelf. There are worse ways to earn money aye?

Rob, you’re new to DeMarco, new to working with Laura, and relatively new to the Megazine.  

I’ve talked to you before, back in 2021, when you were a debutante with the Future Shock in Prog 2257, and we discovered we had shared history with the historic Brit comic shop Nostalgia & Comics, you working in the Sheffield branch and me in the Birmingham one – both of which had quite a history of 2000 AD droids either working or shopping at them!

RR: There should be a documentary about that shop and the comics community around it! It’s crazy thinking back to how many well respected artists and writers would come in and hang out. Being in the Sheffield branch, we had The Human League in regularly, who celebrated Dredd in their song, I Am The Law.

You talked there of a love of comics and how much it meant to you to be in 2000 AD, something you’d been reading since you were a kid – before the lure of making money took you into storyboards and illustration for advertising, TV, and games for 20+ years of your career.

It was a combination of Covid and Nick Percival who brought you to 2000 AD. And since then you’ve stuck around with Tharg, with a Dredd in Prog 2267, and then your first big series, Devlin Waugh: Karma Police with Ales Kot in Megazine 449-455. You took over from Mike Dowling there (which was a big ask indeed) but your style soon gelled there and gave us something very dark and very introspective. What was it like getting that first Dredd and then that first big series?

RR: Working on Dredd was a real feather in my cap, having pored over the classic stories when I was a kid. Mick McMahon, Ron Smith and, later, Brendan McCarthy really did it for me.

Getting the Devlin Waugh series was both tremendous and daunting! Mike Dowling’s take on the character was, for me, a definitive version but our approaches couldn’t be more different. I had to focus on how I could make it work in my own way, being fully aware that people would be comparing us.

It’s also a series that’s now inextricably linked to Ales, and early on they sent an email praising what I’d done which helped me to stop worrying about it. It was good to have a longer series that allowed tension to build slowly before things went a tiny bit crazy. In terms of deadlines it was a trial by fire, and I learned a huge amount throughout the process.

And does it still feel as exciting to be here at 2000 AD?

RR: It’s every bit as exciting! I still get nervous about doing a decent job but now, having a few pages under my belt, I can enjoy the process more.

Are you still working elsewhere or have you made the move to comics full-time now?

RR: Occasionally I’ll take small jobs on if time allows, but it’s been mostly comics for a couple of years. I’m happier making comics than doing anything else, so hopefully it’ll continue!

And comics is happy having you!

Okay then Rob, let’s talk a bit of process. How do you work? What’s the way that you put together a page?

RR: I’ll read the script a few times to try and get a handle on what it’s all about, not so much the mechanics of it, but getting a feel for the tone, mood, and atmosphere. Then I’ll start doodling thumbnails, finding how to get the story to play, panel arrangements and compositions. This is the challenging part and I’ll spend ages  getting something I’m happy with.

The process as a whole is a mixture of traditional and digital so I’ll end up with scraps of paper that need scanning, alongside digital thumbnails, then muddle them all together in Photoshop.

For the pencils, again it’s part digital and part traditional. I can work directly over the thumbnails on the computer or, if I’m downstairs of an evening watching Married at First Sight Australia, I’ll print the thumbnails and work on top of those on semi-transparent marker paper.

I stick to a clean line with no shading or hatching, as I’ll be inking them myself and prefer to do the heavy lifting with digital inks over a blue-line of the pencils. I’ve put a lot of work into my inking technique, mimicking how I do things with dip pens and brushes. I like to commit and get the line down boldly, no noodling, in an effort to get some energy in there.

Colouring’s all done digitally, using very basic tools and techniques. I’ll be getting ideas for colours throughout the process, so it’s an integral part of the artwork.

How would you describe the look and the style of this DeMarco work? It seems to me that you’ve gone heavy on your line here, emphasising the darkness of the locales and the story.

RR: Lots of black and deep shadows were appropriate for this story, in keeping with the crime noir genre. I think my style is functional, not overtly showy, and designed to tell the story above all else. It’s relatively quick when I need to be, and not concerned with detailed rendering.

Was it a change of style for you in any way?

RR: My approach is the same, but overall it’s tailored to whatever story I’m telling. I’m getting more competent and constantly learning, so there is a progression from Devlin Waugh.

Oh, and a mention for both DeMarco’s hair, which you do so well, and the fashions we see here. Again, it’s futuristic at times, but mostly it’s very familiar. I’m assuming this is all a very deliberate decision on your part?

LB: just to interject, I loooooove the way Rob has done Galen’s hair. First detail I look for with Artists is to see how much care they’ve put into hairstyles and Rob did this for every single character. I got major hair envy when I saw Galen and as well as another character called Meatball.

RR: Laura had thought of all these elements, so they were in the script and I needed to visualise them. Costume design’s really important, and getting little details in there such as precisely the right number of buttons, an adjustable buckle on the back of Galen’s collar, pleats down the back of her coat- all the things that you can’t actually see, but I need to know that they’re there!

Walt wears an ill-fitting suit, and I pictured him having a romantic vision of himself as a Philip Marlowe/Sam Spade style gumshoe detective and trying to dress like them. In the Mega-City nothing is out of place because absolutely anything goes!

As we’ve already mentioned, there’s a real noir sensibility to the art and tone of A Picture Paints. But on seeing this first issue, I was picking up elements of Charles Burns and bits of Warren Pleece in your art for DeMarco. Am I right, or is it just that I’m projecting my own artistic likes onto the work? [And reader, just as I’m setting this interview up and adding images, there’s one more very obvious look to Rob’s work as well, definitely a hint of Steve Yeowell in there – am I right?]

RR: There’s nothing conscious there, but I do have a copy of Burns’ El Borbah somewhere in my work room, a luchador private detective no less, so perhaps some of that’s seeped in?

We’ve talked before on influences but it’s always nice to circle back to it… so, Laura, Rob, what comics, what creators had that big influence on your writing and art?

RR: I’m mostly into older stuff, with Alex Raymond and Milton Caniff being my top two. Alex Toth is a big inspiration, and many of the E.C. guys. I grew up on Gene Colan, Gil Kane, Herb Trimpe, Sal Buscema and that wave of artists in the 1970s, then discovered Frank Miller when I was 8, and he made quite the impact on me. David Mazzucchelli blew my mind, especially with his Rubber Blanket books. He let me have a go on his brush pen at UKCAC around 1993!

Oh yes, Rubber Blanket, absolutely criminal that we’ve never seen a collection of that one.

LB: This is one of those questions which I could spend paragraphs and paragraphs writing about. If it was to whittle it down to three, my influences are Alan Moore, Junji Ito, and Viz’s the Fat Slags. They are all equal parts of the equation.

A perfect triumvirate there Laura!

When did you both first get into 2000 AD and what strips or characters had the most impact on you?

LB: Dredd naturally was my introduction to 2000 AD and I’d say he was the first comic book character that I ever became a fan of. Even as a child I had zero interest in Heroes, I can’t and never have related to black and white perspectives of good and evil. When I finally was introduced to Dredd, a character who is very much warts and all, it was an immediate hook.

Most impactful is Halo Jones, another character that is so real and relatable to me. I like that I can’t separate where Alan Moore starts and Ian Gibson begins with the body of work, it’s a seamless mesh of the two. I love collaborations like that

RR: I was reading 2000 AD from the beginning and, as a kid, Strontium Dog was the best! Robo-Hunter, Zenith, and The Ballad of Halo Jones really drew me in. Behind me now is a five-foot-tall wooden Halo Jones shop display that I salvaged from Nostalgia & Comics!

One man’s salvage… another man’s steal!

As a fun one – what’s the one character you’d really like to tackle. No limits, feel free to pitch the impossible series!

LB: You know what, I just approached John Wagner for the first time this weekend at Thought Bubble. We spoke of Dredd of course and I mentioned how I was a little intimidated about ever writing a story for the character. He was having none of it and gave me some friendly encouragement. In light of this let me put out into the world, I’d love to write a Dredd one off and especially would like Anna Morozova to draw it.

RR: The greatest series ever created is Flaming Carrot Comics, so I’d go with a Flaming Carrot story scripted by his creator, Bob Burden.

As for the future of DeMarco, any more tales already planned?

LB: Watch this space. I will write more if they will have me!

RR: Are we allowed to reveal that there’s a new DeMarco story on its way from Laura and me?!

Oh yes you are – the official word came down from his Thargness to allow us to tell you that there’s going to be a new four-part Demarco P.I. tale entitled Smoke to be published in the Megazine in the first half of 2024!

And if you had a completely free hand, have you got that definitive DeMarco tale in mind? If so, feel free to tease us with what it might involve!

LB: That is my ambition every single story god dammit! I will say, I’d love to have a closer inspection on Galen’s origins…

Tharg? Tharg? You paying attention? And for both of you, what have we got to look forward to from you, both for his royal Thargness and elsewhere?

LB: I’m working on a few things and I’m too superstitious to say anything till it’s confirmed.

RR: If Tharg’s reading, I’d love to continue drawing stories for the Megazine and 2000 AD.

And there we had to leave it. Thanks so much to Laura and Rob for taking the time to answer questions – particularly difficult timing as it was Thought Bubble weekend and at least Laura was there (she did apologise for a combo of drunk and hungover writing  but if it was good enough to practice her winning TB pitch years ago, it’s good enough for us!)

You can find the first episode of DeMarco P.I.: A Picture Paints in the latest Megazine, issue 462, out 15 November from everywhere Tharg’s monthly Meg is sold, including the 2000 AD web shop.

We’ve previously talked to Rob about his Future Shock debut here and chatted to both Laura Bailey and Paul Williams about their 2017 Thought Bubble wins here.

And now, presenting the full DeMarco process pages from Rob – pages 1 and 2 of A Picture Paints part 1 – thumbnail, pencil, ink, colour, and finished pages…

2000 AD brings you the galaxy’s greatest stories and art in thrill-powered tales every single week – but who are the droids behind these tales? Well, each month, we’ll sit down with one of the creators who’ve been responsible for keeping the thrill-power set to maximum to get those answers – this is the 2000 AD Creator Files!

We’ll tell you more about the artists and writers who keep the Prog and the Judge Dredd Megazine a Thrill-full read! For over 45 years, 2000 AD has been bringing you the best new talent out there and now we’re talking to one of the breakthrough Judge Dredd artists of the last few years… Jake Lynch.

It might seem to many that Jake Lynch has been an art droid for the longest time. But he actually only really broke through into Tharg’s workshop for droids in 2014, so it’s been less than a decade giving us great art and establishing himself as one of those rarest of things, a modern-day great Dredd artist.

So, if you’re ready, strap yourselves in for another Creator Files – and this one’s a long one. Grab a drink of your choice and settle down for a while. It’s long, but it’s damn good reading.

Okay then, are you’re sitting comfortably? Then we’ll begin…

Jake Lynch, welcome to the Creator Files. How are you?

JAKE LYNCH: I’m good thanks. A little nervous, this will be my first deep probing and I understand you to be very thorough Droid.

Let’s go right back to the beginning – where were you born, what was childhood like, and what did comics mean to you when you were young?

JL: I was born around London but we left when I was 4 and moved to the county of Norfolk, which I’ve always considered home despite what locals tell me. I’m a complete bumpkin.

The first part of my childhood was wonderful, though I think I may have been a bit of a weird kid and often wonder if I caused any concern. Very introverted and socially awkward (I hated crowds and noise) and, if I’m honest, a bit of a ‘mummy’s boy’. But that was fine, we lived in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by fields, a river and trees. A very traditional upbringing I guess.  In those days, dads were for discipline and Mums were for everything else – I was very happy.

Sadly, that all changed on my 13th birthday when my mum died from breast cancer. She had been ill for a few years but unfortunately, in order to protect us children, we never knew how ill. A few years after that we had also lost our home. It was one of those turning points when you came to realise that all the ‘pillars’ of your world, the foundations you always considered ‘solid’, were really only ever a push away from collapsing inward. Which is exactly what I spent the next 10-15 years of my life doing.

So, a brilliant childhood and a bit of a shitty youth. I genuinely believe I was made stronger by it, but it took years of tempering to get there.

Jake, you have our sympathies for the loss of your mom at such a young age. It’s a horrible thing to happen to you or anyone. But let’s use this moment to remind anyone reading this to get yourselves checked regularly. And if you have a bit of spare change, support some cancer charities such as Cancer Research UK and Worldwide Cancer Research. Oh, and Fuck Cancer.

What were you reading at an early age and where did it come from?

JL: I was lucky enough to have parents who encouraged me to read comics too. My dad was a huge fan of things like Asterix, so we grew up reading them, also, assorted super-hero comics, Batman, Spider-Man, which I enjoyed but never sucked me in. Yes, MAD Magazine, Beano and the like. Our own first proper foray into comics was Look-In, all about the TV shows of the time.

I was 5 when the first Star Wars came out and it changed my life, but it was a number of years after that when my brother came home with our first copy of 2000 AD. It became an obsession of mine, keying into that Star Wars stuff that was flying about my brain. I simply didn’t know that such a thing existed.

Every weekend my brother and I would have to take turns over who would read it first. Once that drama was over, the Prog would disappear and we would have to find where dad had taken it. 2000 AD worked on so many levels – we were all reading it.

After all that awful stuff happened, we had become really quite poor*, but despite this, 2000 AD was the one thing my dad would make sure we had every week and with the whirlwind that seemed to constantly blow across our lives in those early days, it became a real rock for me. A ‘constant’ to disappear into every week. I think it did for a lot of people.

*I still have a photocopy of a cheque for £17.89 on my studio wall. My father, who had a rather dark sense of humour, made it back in the day. It was once all the money we had in the world and is a constant reminder to me about appreciating what you have.

And here’s that cheque, thanks to Jake for sending it over…

Well, I’ve used one of the few messages to Tharg that I’m allowed to send every year to check about this and he’s come back to tell me that your brother and especially your dad are both officially Krill Tro Thargo. Absolute stars the pair of them.

Okay then, so that was how you got into 2000 AD, but when was it? What Prog number if you remember?

JL: I think the first Prog would have been early 300’s. I think we caught the end of Trapper Hag then into Star Born Thing. I was hooked from the start, I think it was all the different stories. I remember great big connections being made in my brain when I understood a Time Twister or Future Shock, but Dredd was always king closely followed by Rogue Trooper and Strontium Dog.

The next few years were spent collecting everything we could get hold of, filling in the blanks of what had happened before.

And as an artist who I think we can all agree is very much one of the great modern Dredd artists, what was your introduction to Dredd? What particular tales made you a fan? What artists on Dredd really made you sit up and think that this was sheer brilliance?

JL: That’s incredibly kind of you. That’s not something I feel.

Of course you don’t – no art droid we’ve ever talked to thinks they’re any good. It just seems to be part of the artistic mindset!

JL: I love that I have a job that I constantly learn from and get to go on adventures with my childhood hero.

There are far too many artists to name and I fear I will miss a load out now. As a very young reader it was artists like Brian Bolland, Ron Smith, Dave Gibbons, Brett Ewins. Then my tastes grew into the likes of the mighty Mike McMahon, Kev O’Neill, Brendan McCarthy, Carlos Ezquerra. Soon the latter started overtaking the former for me. 2000 AD had always embraced different styles. Indeed, the freedom we are allowed works, I believe, as one of its many strengths. I’ve loved them all and still do. An extra special mention to Cam Kennedy too, who straddled both camps for me and whose artwork has always appeared effortlessly fluid.

I could keep just throwing out names here, but I won’t. You all know them already, you read them too!

Were you an artist from a young age? What path did that take you on and were your parents encouraging of your talents?

JL: Apparently so but you don’t really think about it at the time. My Grandfather was both a painter and commercial artist. My mother was very creative. My father couldn’t draw for toffee but worked in advertising in the ’60s (a real ‘madman’) and I grew up being visited by loads of creative people.

I guess I never considered myself any good by comparison to all these people and their stories. But my parents were always encouraging, allowing me to do loads of 2000 AD-related murals on my bedroom walls. 

I had loads of teachers tell me I had some ability right from primary school, but when you are in it, you can’t see it yourself. I only knew I loved to draw.

On a side note, I ended up playing in a band with one of my old secondary school art teachers many years after leaving and we became good friends, even though it took me a long time to stop calling him Mr Lawson instead of just John. They could all play – I sucked and like to think I dragged them all down to my level.

If I’m right, you went on to art college to study media with the hopes of becoming a storyboard artist? Where did the inspiration for that come from and why did you not pursue a career in comics from this point?

JL: Wow, you have done your research! Is it you I hear in the bushes late at night?

Ooops, busted. But then again, if I don’t do my research, I’ll have Tharg to answer to!

JL: Yes, I studied Media. It was a very new course at the time and in retrospect was not the right one for me. I don’t think I knew what I wanted to be, but did know you were supposed to go on to college. Yes, storyboarding was something that interested me a great deal. Indeed, I have done a little since then and would always be keen to do more. I also didn’t know you could get a job in comics let alone how to go about it at the time!

Due to the earlier events, school/education was not a particularly happy time for me. I was a bit of a ‘grey-man’ just trying to get through it, hanging out in the background. I was obliged to change schools midway through secondary education and didn’t really come out of my shell so to speak.

JL: Similarly, with art I didn’t know what it was good for. The idea that you could have a job drawing pictures seemed so far out of reach to an introverted, grieving kid living in Norfolk. I ended up dropping out of college. Looking back, I truly wish I had stuck it out. I had been approached by the Fine Arts course leaders who had seen my life drawing and wanted me to transfer, but by then it was too late. There are too few times in life where you can purely pursue your interests and I just blew my opportunity.

My dad was NOT best pleased…

Suffice it to say, the upshot was (roll of thunder) I was going to have to get a job (‘ulp)!

Yep, this would be your ‘wilderness years’ where you were out of comics, out of art, and working other jobs to make money. Where did this take you?

JL: I’ve done loads of different jobs, my first proper one was making UPVC windows, then became a glazer for the same company. That company eventually closed down (possibly due to the low-quality glazing work and manufacture) and I took my redundancy and paid for a crash course driving test which I passed. Now no one was safe. I once crashed and totalled two cars in as many weeks.

My dad was not best pleased… again!

I lived in a village called Great Ryburgh then. And it had a Wine Rack Factory which was where I ended up next. This tiny place received the Queens Award for Export while I worked there. I remember this guy with more medals than chest presenting the award while we all drank really, really cheap wine that made the glands in my neck scream. I started on the line there and ended up a power press operator, running the machines that punched the metals. I think it may have closed down since then as, it turns out, the world only had need for so many wine racks (and possibly historic power press management issues).

From there it was onto Blockbuster Video in my local market town of Fakenham. Ah, Fakenham, once voted the most boring place to live in England. Local legend had it that it was named by the Romans as they were attempting to conquer the Iceni and Britain on the whole. The story goes that, as the Romans were passing by, they saw the locals scrabbling in the mud and said, ‘F*ck ‘em’, and the name stuck.

Looking back, Blockbuster was one of my favourite jobs. I’ve always loved film and I had loads of fun, I also met an extraordinary bloke called Kris Mallett who worked alongside me. If you remind me I’ll tell you a great story about this guy later.

Whatever happened to Blockbuster video? Oh yeah, sorry about that. This was the first large corporation I brought down with my reverse Midas touch.

Yes, I was going to mention that – you really did manage to bring down every company you worked for didn’t you?

JL: Dotted throughout this time were both short and long periods of labouring on building sites. My old gaffer was not someone you should have been downwind of first thing in the morning and on too many occasions I was caught in the hurricane when I was obliged to hold his ladder.

This building experience ended up with me in France. Labouring on renovation sites, which was one of the best times of my life. Living in tents or caravans, eating awesome food in the local restaurants or cooking great steaks over a fire. I remember getting so drunk with one of the locals in the pouring rain. We ended back at his place drinking his ‘moonshine’ Eau-Du-Vie and playing boules, getting drenched. I was so hungover the next day, we returned to the Bar Tabac, where we had started the previous night, for coffee. The barman was clearing up the slops from the night before and he put them in a glass in front of me as a joke. We laughed then people started crowding round me. Then the local Mayor came in and I was basically peer pressured by the village into drinking it.

It was time to leave. Though it appears that anywhere I have worked soon shuts down, at this point I should say that I am NOT responsible for Brexit. I bloody loved it over there and can’t believe where we are now.

I have done other stuff but perhaps I’ll table that for later as it’ll tie in with freelancing and falling flat on my face.

Were you drawing during this time or had you put down the pens and brushes for good at this point?

JL: I was drawing on and off during this time. I remember quite clearly, after dropping out of college, making a conscious decision to stop drawing, I just couldn’t see the point of it in the ‘real world’. But I came back to it during my Blockbuster years. I was actually pretty good before I stopped and picking it back up came with the realisation that I had forgotten everything. I think this was a real trend for me in my late teens and 20’s. I was still very broken over my mum and every birthday stung like a bitch. I think it did for all of my family – my father could never remember my birthday, he had just erased the whole date from memory, they were really effing awful times. 

Looking back it feels a little like I may have been self-sabotaging, but maybe I’ve over-thought it, but failing to move forward or commit was a real trend for me back then.

Though I still didn’t have much of a clue of how to get into comics the idea was becoming more and more appealing. I had access to a Fax Machine (!) and cheekily one night sent a fax to the ‘Nerve Centre’ with a very (VERY) dodgy Dredd pic on it. To my surprise I got a tryout Script in the post a few weeks later. It was the first clue about how to break in. This was during Dave Bishop’s tenure and is some indicator of how slowly the gears turn for me – the script was for Judge Dredd: Lawman of the Future which was being produced to tie in with the Stallone Judge Dredd film, so guess that would have been around the mid ’90s and made me very early 20s

There came a point a few years later where I felt I had truly blown it and quit drawing (I thought) for good, but that’s another story…

CLASS OF ’79, HARRY HESTON, AND NEARLY GETTING THERE…

Now, we’re towards the end of the 1990s here and you’re back in comics with the Judge Dredd fanzine Class of ’79.

That first Class of ’79 fanzine came out in 1998? 1999? There’s no definitive date I can see online – Rufus Dayglo’s cover art is dated ’98. That was one of the first of the 2000 AD fanzines – Dogbreath, the Strontium Dog fanzine, came out in 1997. And I’m not sure if there were more that came out before that?

JL: I’m not sure either. I think we were the first, I seem to remember that being said at the time, but, like Rufus, I can’t really remember.  Perhaps it was the first Dredd Fanzine maybe? I do remember it being a great fun time though. I also did a cover for Dogbreath and a strip for Zarjaz many years later I think.

Class of ’79 was something that ended up being rather important in terms of the talent involved, many of whom would go on to feature at 2000 AD. Rufus Dayglo, Henry Flint, PJ Holden, Boo Cook, Gary Simpson, plus the late, much missed incendiary talent that was John Hicklenton – although he’d already been published in 2000 AD by then and was in the midst of his phenomenal Nemesis run at the time if I’m right. Similarly Henry had already had some work in 2000 AD at this stage.

And of course – you were there as well.

JL: Ha, yeah, very much in the background to these talents! But, yes, It does blow my mind how many came through and went on to 2000 AD from Class of ’79 in its VERY short run. Henry was already a mainstay but reached out to us to see if he could do something. Stew somehow talked him into drawing a strip.

Yes, Stew – Stewart Perkins, who put it all together and published the two A4 issues, writing as WR Logan. A lifelong 2000 AD fan, he later worked at the comic’s archives and served as an advisor to John Wagner on all things Dredd. And he’s of course immortalised by Wagner as Judge Logan – now Chief Judge Logan.

So, Class of ’79. How did you get involved and what work did you have in there?

JL: I met Stewart through mutual friend. Stew lived in Norfolk too, out Diss way. I mentioned that we were quite poor and that meant I couldn’t afford to go or stay at comic conventions, so my first meeting with Stew was him coming round my house and taking my portfolio to show on my behalf. I think he sort of took me under his wing.

Stew was ex-Army, very confident and friendly and me being a still quite introverted and insecure individual, we became good friends. He returned with tryouts from Wizards of the Coast and 2000 AD.

Stew and I were also involved with another Dredd Fanzine that he became increasingly frustrated with as he felt nothing was ever happening. He decided he would do it himself and dragged me along with him.

Grainne Forde, Rufus Dayglo and PJ Holden and myself became like the hub of it with Stewart at the head, driving it forward, it soon came together, pulling in so many others as it went.

JL: Andy Diggle had become the assistant editor at 2000 AD at the time and he became a great supporter of us.

Stew and I met John Wagner at the same time at a very small convention (where escapes me). We kipped the night in Stew’s car and were chased off by a caretaker first thing in the morning, when John was guesting. I’ve only ever known John to be a really decent human being. I’ve read all the stories of his ‘straight talking’, but to me he was always incredibly supportive and was really pushing for me to get picked up by 2000 AD.

Were you in there as just a writer (JUST a writer – oh the script droids will love that one!) or did you have any art in there at that point?

JL: I did a lot of the promotional stuff, advertising posters, layout bits and questionnaire kind of things etc. When Rufus came in and stumped up half the print money, a lot of my stuff was dropped. I was going to do both of the covers originally for example. Not a criticism in the least. My art was not strong enough and Rufus’s was simply miles better, it was quite obvious that he was going on to greater things.

I was originally going to do the Harry Heston strip but I asked Stew to see if Henry would be up for it – you just don’t look a gift horse in the mouth!

Ah, yes, Harry Heston – the creation of you and Stewart, with Henry Flint on art – an ape judge that you’ve since managed to work into Dredd canon. We’ll get onto that in a moment.

What were the thoughts of those involved about the creation of the fanzine and the playing in the 2000 AD sandpit?

JL: Part of reaching out to Andy Diggle was to make sure that we could play in the sandpit in the first place and the legal wording stuff. That’s how Andy became one of our supporters. I think we sent him a questionnaire along with our enquiries so he could get a flavour of what we were trying for. The idea was it was a sort of Academy of Law application with joke questions as well as more pertinent ones. I remember there was a blank space that ‘Psi Division’ had supposedly imprinted a psychic image on, with a question of what you saw. Andy wrote that he saw ‘a dog with its head split open’, so we knew we were going to get along fine.

JL: The approach we were taking was to make ’79 a homage to 2000 AD. The Editor would be fictional – WR ‘Whitey’ LOGAN was the first perp Dredd arrested in Prog 2. This also meant we would need a ‘flagship’ character and that really stumped us for a very long time. Heston popped into my head, I’m proud to say, in the bath. I remember a massive grin spreading across my face and I called Stew and told him not to worry but didn’t tell him any more. 

We arranged to meet and I still wouldn’t tell him until we had a couple of pints, down one of his locals in the village of Scole.

The story I pitched was VERY different to the superior one that was printed, but we did agree on the character and we named him together – (Dirty) HARRY (Charlton) HESTON.

I think it may be worth mentioning the mighty Gary Simpson who was approached to write the scripts. They were great but Stew said he was obsessed with killing Harry at the end of each one and seemed to ignore any suggestion otherwise! Stew rewrote his first script and I rewrote the second. I don’t know about Stew, but I only lifted two lines from the second (sorry, Gary), but I had a plan that the next strip was going to be a riff on The Cursed Earth Dredd epic.

I wrote the third script but it sits on a hard drive somewhere these days. I remember it had a massive nod to the Burger Wars in it and cannibalism, with one of the crew realising what he had eaten and throwing up. The strip would end with Harry writing in his journal, ‘Sometimes the human race makes you sick’ – BOOM, BOOM (you’re welcome)!

After ’79 ended, I remember saying to Stewart that I would get Heston to crossover somehow. Bearing in mind that I had no foothold into that world I think Stew regarded me as a bit of a dreamer at the time and in truth, with no more ‘79 we were drifting apart.

With Class of ’79, were you doing this thinking it would be a way into 2000 AD as an art droid or was it simply another case of scratching that particular itch to make art?

JL: I think I was. John was rooting for me, and there seemed to be a sort of wave I was riding. I remember I did pencils on a tryout for the Dredd Sex Dolls script, before I knew Andy and he had picked me out of the pile and was pushing me to ink it up.

The problem was, deep down, I had a growing suspicion that I wasn’t very good. I could do a fair Dredd, but I felt I couldn’t do anything else. I think ultimately and after countless tryouts, Andy felt the same.

I remember receiving a large envelope from Andy some time later. There was no note inside just a few pieces of artwork that I had gifted him over time. The wave had crashed and I had wiped out. I knew the ride was over and I didn’t have a bloody clue what to do with the rest of my life – that was the next time I quit drawing.

No one to blame but myself and my inability to see things through again. But I will never forget that sickening feeling in my stomach as I opened that envelope as I walked back from the Post Office.

Oh bloody hell, Jake. You really did come through the hard way, didn’t you?

As far as Class of ’79 and the other great 2000 AD fanzines, including Dogbreath, Zarjaz, and others, what are your thoughts on them?

JL: I think they are great, ALL fanzines are. They are places to cut your teeth, meet like-minded people, and are just a lot of fun. I have no regrets other than losing contact with Stewart over the period after.

And how important is it that 2000 AD, both then and now, through various owners, have always seemed to have taken a hands-off approach to these works using their characters and properties?

JL: It would have been so easy, of course, for 2000 AD to simply say no, not allowed, not with our characters. Instead, over the years, they’ve allowed them to use the characters, even gently promoted them, seen them as something of a proving ground almost.

I think it’s very important to allow a degree of freedom. Imagine having a bunch of people who love something so much that they want to show the world and then telling them no.  As long as they are not taking the mick, why not, what’s to lose?

THE 2000 TO 2012 YEARS – OUT OF ART, SORT OF…

But at some point you did come back to art – when was this and how did it happen? It was the odd bit of freelancing, wasn’t it?

JL: Well, as I mentioned, through my own ineptitude, I was cut loose with no idea what I was going to do. This started a long period of just sort of wandering about, cleaning work, bar work, and eventually I ended up in care work. I walked past a random care home one day and just walked in. With a bit of training, I took to it quite well and ended up becoming a Senior (running shifts and dispensing medicines sort of thing). Basically rich, private companies give you a couple of extra quid for a massive increase in responsibility. I don’t think I ever made a grand a month despite working full time. But slowly I started finding my feet and it looked like a new direction was opening up for me. 

At the same time I met a guy called Paul Bennett who was a local web designer and he ended up introducing me to Photoshop. This was a ‘lightbulb’ moment for me and started my journey back to art.

Also, Senioring also meant I met loads of other healthcare officials and I got a call one day from a district nurse asking me if I would consider applying for a community based palliative care team that was being put together. At the time I didn’t even know what that was, but I had moved on to a not so great care home so there was no stopping me.

Joining the NHS, after private health care, was a revelation to me and for the next 10 to 12 years I was all in. It was the final piece of my puzzle too. I grew up, I put all my old hang ups behind me and learned what seeing things through truly meant. I worked mainly under the district nursing teams (you should see me do a two layer leg bandage, get blood out of an arm or perform CPR), I also did a stint in psychiatrics with children with severe behavioural difficulties. But I didn’t really enjoy it. I found it too step backish whereas I was used to, by this time, pushing forwards. But my main role was in palliative care, supporting patients who chose to die at home and their families through to the other side of it. The DN’s would identify patients they felt were imminent and my team would go in. It was a great honour.

I also started becoming quite proficient with Photoshop and I started feeling that old urge…

It started slowly. My drawing was rubbish, completely blown, but I could manipulate pixels pretty well. Which led me down the path of small bits of graphic design, advertising leaflets, promotional bumf and even Christmas cards for local businesses. Every job was a reinforcing that I could finish things.

Was it simply the fact that making art was the itch you just had to scratch?

JL: Yes, certainly something was happening.  The drawing part of it grew sort of organically, having to do little touch-ups on these images as part of a job, blending stuff together.

And were there any thoughts at this point of making comics?

No, not really, I was sort of finding my place and comics were not part of that. I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that I have a 10 year period of not reading 2000 AD, it wasn’t part of the plan anymore. I was spreading my wings though. I can’t remember which website I used, but you could pick up storyboarding work. Sometimes paid but often not, the work was for producers to secure funding. This semi-professional period saw me getting ripped off left, right and centre, but you do learn very quickly that there are many people out there who, when wanting work, will say anything and deliver absolutely nothing. 

But I was also learning.

With so many of the artists in Class of ’79, their move to the Prog came quite swiftly. For example, PJ Holden and Boo Cook got their first 2000 AD jobs in 2000, pretty much right after Class of ’79. But you – well, let’s just say you took a little while to move from Class of ’79 to 2000 AD, with your first work at 2000 AD, a StarScan, coming in 2012.

So, what the hell took you so long? Why that decade plus between Class of ’79 and the move to 2000 AD? What were you doing in that time? Were you still freelancing at that point? Working day jobs?

JL: Ha, Ha, yes indeed.  Hopefully you can see why now. I was seriously in love with the NHS and was going to retrain as a nurse, but time was moving on and the service was changing.

Seeing what has been done to the NHS by this Government breaks my heart. I saw the start of that first hand. Each year, another bit was shaved off the wheel until it no longer turned as intended. There was a real push toward bureaucracy too. If to a hammer every problem looks like a nail, to a politician, every problem must look like paperwork and, along with all our duties, we had to start collecting stats. The Affordable Health and Care Act had also essentially privatised the service whilst making it look like record sums are still going in and keeping private the amount that is being bled out. Private business only goes for easy profit so services such as palliative suffer and I was becoming increasingly unhappy as more time went on. As I say, it was heart breaking.

Sorry, rant over…

No need to apologise. One of Britain’s finest achievements that’s being destroyed through government neglect and profiteering, it’s a disgrace what has happened to the NHS.

JL: I was doing work on the side. In fact it had gotten to the point where every job I went for I was being offered. I had also started sending stuff into 2000 AD again and was re-learning how to draw comics. I had forgotten so much and was rejected so many times. But I didn’t mind, I was an Art School dropout and I was receiving an education from an industry professional and all it cost me was the price of a stamp.

And what was it that made you change your mind? Again, I’ve seen you say it was the Karl Urban Dredd movie that put a fire under your ass?

JL: Yeah, that was pretty much it for me. I had heard there was a film that was going to be made and, keeping in mind I hadn’t read any Dredd for a very long time and being quite curious, I joined the 2000 AD Forum to see if I could glean any info. I had never been on one of these sites before and still consider myself to be a novice of this and social media generally. To be honest, I remember asking someone to explain what TBH meant.

Anyway, I came across a Dredd poster competition amongst the boarders there and thought I’d give it a go. To my surprise I won and I included the pic in some samples which is how Matt saw it. From that point, I made myself a deal. I would give it one last go but, were I not commissioned before the Dredd film came out then that was it (yeah sure).

So, you were pretty busy pitching to 2000 AD and getting rejected – what sort of responses were you getting from Tharg and his Earthly representative Matt at this point? And how did you respond to them?

JL: If I have any super-power at all it is the ability to get knocked down then get up, rejection has never bothered me. I think the young, broken, introverted, youth me just assumed that taking a beating was always just a starting point. It’s one of the reasons, in many respects, I feel so much stronger for my past. People who achieve success without setback tend to fall apart at adversity or failure, in my experience. I don’t seek it but when it’s in my face I eat it for breakfast!

I also cultivated a new attitude. I knew I wanted to do something creative or be around creativity. In many respects, due to my history, so much of my life had been about death and it had also become my job. I had, by that point, seen so much of it. I have no issues with it, but it was time to put a line under it, and make life about living.

So I said to myself, what do you want to be? – Comic or Storyboard Artist.
Chance of that happening, you Norfolk Bumkin? – Slim.
Okay, would you be happy being say a picture framer, you know, surrounded by art? – Yes, I think I would.
Okay, working in an art museum, as a cleaner or incompetent security guard for example? – Yes, that could be fine.
You do know you’re talking to yourself right? – I’m not, you are!

So I compromised and I realised there could be so many opportunities that moved me in a happier direction even if not the intended goal. I’m sure that sounds pretty obvious to you, but try to remember that I am and will always be, an idiot.

FINALLY AT 2000 AD – 2012 ONWARDS…

Right then, on to 2012 and your very first work in the Prog. Surprisingly, it wasn’t a Future Shock, not yet. You’d have to wait nearly two more years for that. Instead, it was a StarScan in 2012’s Prog 1771.

How did it come about and was it one of those ‘Oh my God, finally!’ moments combined with a dream come true feeling? Or did you have the feeling that this was just a first step and that you really had to work hard now to get in there with the art on a strip?

JL: Yes, as it happened it turned out to be that poster that Matt had seen in my samples, but I still hadn’t cracked strip work and that was what I wanted.

In Matt’s many, many rejection letters, there would always be a little nugget of information that, in my arrogance, I would ignore. Then, on one occasion I actually tried listening to the advice and my drawing instantly improved (thanks, Matt).  

I sent off this next try-out with similarly low expectations.

I had also gone for another gig at this time on that website and was offered a huge job from it. I was still working full time and I knew that, if I took it, I would have to quit my job. True to form I bottled it and turned it down, I was too scared to go without the security of a job. My father used to say, never take any step forward that you don’t know how to step back from, and this, for me, was one of those moments. He also once said this, ‘Revenge is a PIE best served cold’, but he did drink a lot.

So I was kicking myself, for all my fine thoughts I had again blown it. A couple of weeks later I got a letter from Matt offering me a future commission.

I was in…

The first strip, like so many, was a four-page Future Shock, Dying Wishes, written by another relative newcomer to 2000 AD, Eddie Robson, in Prog 1862 in 2014. So, what was your feeling when you finally got the yes from Matt?

JL: I remember the first feeling was astounded excitement. Stuff like this doesn’t happen to me!

I was on a late shift that day and I slipped the letter to the back of my clipboard where I kept my health service paperwork, so I could look at it again from time to time.

When the script finally dropped, the next thing I felt was anxiety. Would I really be able to do it? I am well aware of many of my limitations and that could have easily been exposed right there but, as I read it I thought, hey, I can do this.

One of my biggest weaknesses throughout my past was my inability to see things through, to finish the job and it was something I had consciously worked on, but this was the real test of that time. By complete coincidence, I also had a week off work when the script dropped.

In did it in 5 days I think.

Did you imagine at that point that a career was happening, that you could make a go of it with 2000 AD?

JL: Like anything, you would like it to be so, but experience had taught me to never assume, so I never did. Even to this day I don’t consider myself with my feet under the table.

In those days I said I had a foot in the door, but there was a long hallway I’d have to travel down first before I even entered room where everyone was. These days I’m standing in the back of that room, pretending to look at the decor, hoping no-one will notice me, just as I would at a real party!

Looking back at the art of Dying Wishes – yes, I know it may be difficult, artists never liking to go back to early days and all that – but what do you think of it now?

It’s light years away from the art you’re doing now for sure, but there’s definitely elements in there that you’ve taken through your art as the years rolled on. How would you describe it now? Has your line changed all that much, are you inking differently? I think it’s way more static than your work has become, although there’s definitely a good storytelling flow to your art even at this stage. And your tendency to use interstitial panels in between images is there at this earliest of pieces.

But the whole point of Future Shocks at 2000 AD is to get artists onboard early in their career, it’s all about seeing them learning their craft in the full gaze of the readers.

JL: I haven’t looked at it since doing it. I don’t look back at any stuff generally. I suspect I did it the best that I could, but my attitude has always been, the best piece in the next piece and I still live by that. Love the work you do intensely but as soon as it’s done forget about it and move onto the next. The only time I review stuff is just before I send it all in.

Since I now have longer runs on stories and often they call back to events from past strips, that’s the only time I look things up. The setup I have now just automatically backs everything I do up so it doesn’t even sit on my computer for very long. Once it’s done it’s gone.

It’s all about forward momentum for me. Something’s not working, got a problem? Just flow around it and come back. Don’t get hung up on some little thing that’ll drag you down. Always keep pressing forward. Learn from the past but don’t live there. I hope I have improved as a result.

As a little call back for you though, there is a race in Proteus Vex, that I drew from memory, from that first strip, that pops up from time to time, keep an eye out in Vex book 3 especially.

Sorry, that was a rather long winded way of saying I can’t really remember!

Layout on the other hand is one of my true loves and I find it endlessly interesting. It’s the secret art form and I would strongly recommend any aspiring artist pay close attention to it. That being said, I know I can be very guilty of being too flashy with it, but I hope not at the expense of the story. But, as I said before, this job is about constant learning. I hope one day I will get good at it.

I cringe at the thought of all the stuff I have put out there and am so grateful for everyone’s patience…

JAKE LYNCH – COVERS STAR…

Now, very early on you got your first cover, on Prog 1895. And it’s a nice one – a great Dredd on Lawmaster.

Since then, you’ve gone on to be a regular cover artist on both the Prog and the Megazine – 21 in all I make it, which I reckon is pretty damn good for nine years of work.

We’ve talked quite a bit about your covers over at Covers Uncovered, but let’s go back to that very first one. What was it like to be handed the keys to the kingdom so early on? A first cover, a first Dredd? And looking back, what do you think of the cover?

JL: If memory serves, I still like that cover and not just because it was my first. I think my colour work was stronger back then. I do (very happily) so much black & white work these last few years, my colour has suffered for it. But I adore black & white, whereas I know I often hide in my colour.

My dad was very proud of me when I got into 2000AD, but he went over the top when I got the cover and bought loads to send to his friends – the silly sod.

It was, like many of my covers, a spec idea I sent to Matt, and marked me learning a little more about how it all worked.

Your dad keeps earning the respect of Tharg!

With your cover work, one thing I have noticed is that Tharg does like you doing Dredds and they’re very often stripped-down Dredds, minimal background, maximum impact, that sort of thing.

It’s something that puts me in mind of several artists who’ve kept things simple and design-led, but I suppose the one who immediately comes to mind is the work of Jock. Is that a deliberate decision on your part or was it simply a case of you did a few and Tharg liked them that way so you tend to go that way more and more?

JL: I don’t try to over-think them. I will have a sort of narrative in my head as I’m doing them but mostly it’s just about trying to make a strong composition. Matt is often quite easy-going but will very occasionally make observations to improve them.

I see a cover as like an invitation to potential readers, so just try to grab their attention.

HEADING INTO DREDDWORLD – ORLOK, DREDD, & THE SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP WITH WRITERS…

Going back to the interior work, we’re not going to go through everything you’ve ever done here – as readers will see at the end with the bibliography, there’s an awful lot of work in the last nine years of 2000 AD that you’ve made!

What we’ll do is shift around a little and group various things, starting with Orlok and that writer/artist bromance you have with Arthur Wyatt.

But first, after that first Future Shock, you had a couple more one-off things, a Black Museum and a Sinister Dexter.

JL: A great deal of my memory of those times was panic, feeling very out of my depth. I would particularly like to apologise to fans of Sinister Dexter, I could never find my way into those characters. I knew what I wanted it to be in my head, but I just could not express it. It always felt messy to me.

And then you were suddenly dropped into Dreddworld. Or rather, Dreddworld-adjacent shall we say, with the two Orlok series in 2015, Eurozoned and The Rasputin Caper. These were not only your first multi-parters, not only your first experience of drawing the world of Dredd, but also your first time working with Arthur Wyatt, who’s gone on to become the writer you’ve worked most closely with.

(If you need the stats, of the 34 strips so far, 10 have been with Arthur, 6 with Mike Carroll.)

What’s the attraction for you of working with writers like Arthur and Mike? Or is it more that you have certain polaroids in your possession and they simply can’t say no?

JL: I have a strange quirk (I’m not entering Polaroid territory here!), where I have to have this weird ‘connection’ to a writers script, to kind of ‘feel it’. A script is a funny thing, it isn’t just the mechanics of a story, it’s the way the writer tells it to you as an illustrator. When I was scrabbling around in those early days, I connected very easily with Arthur’s writing style, which was such a relief at the time. I would hint and push to work with him as much as I could back then and still love to work with him to this day.

Often it’ll take me a few goes to get ‘inside’ a script’s style. Mike is a good example of someone that took me a while. I’m currently going through the process with Rob Williams, who is a writer I truly admire. I don’t feel I’ve fully connected with it yet, but I’m confident I will. The flip side are writers like Arthur and Al Ewing and, although I’ve only done one of his stories, Kenneth Neiman, whose writing style is extraordinary and roars out of the page to demand you follow! This feeling is a funny thing to try to put into words which is why I’m not a writer and they are some of the best in the business.

Especially with Arthur, there’s been a through-story to your work together from Orlok in 2015 right through to Regicide in 2022, the Euro crime syndicate tale.

Did you have any inkling back in 2015 that things would go that far, a seven-year epic Dredd tale that you would be involved with?

JL: So yeah, Arthur and I did Orlok together and it was challenging, but so much fun. I’d happily do him again in the same style, which came about as me just try to make it look like something from comics of the time. I know Arthur had planned out a third instalment, and what he told me of it, it was going to be really great, the best of the lot. I’ve mentioned that I don’t look back on stuff but whenever I think about it, I feel very fondly about it.

It is amazing to me how everything spiralled out from there. To have still be drawing the Red Queen after all that time was remarkable. We killed her a year or two ago and it felt a little like the end of an era for me.

JL: Also, toward the end of the second Orlok was around the time that I left the Health Service. I had tried to go part-time, but my new line manager was having none of it. I had been burning the candle at both ends and if I’m honest, I probably jumped a little too soon, but I was knackered and I asked Matt if he would consider to continue to use me, which he kindly said he would.

My final day was sweet. I remember emptying out my car of all my kit and tunics, and handing back my ID Badge and driving away. I am a huge fan of the series ‘Spaced’, and I had deliberately chosen the track ‘The Staunton Lick’ by Lemon Jelly for the car ride home. It was the song played at the end of the second series, when Tim Bisley had fulfilled his ambition of becoming a comic artist, just like me, though I suspect I may have had more in common with Kenny Who? after all that time!

After Orlok, you had your first Dredd inside the pages – although of course you’d done your Dredd version on covers by this point. Your first Dredd strip was with Mike Carroll in the 2000 AD Sci-Fi Special 2015 and the story Let’s Go To Work.

Now, at this point, what was the feeling of getting a Dredd and what do you think of that first Dredd work from yourself?

JL: I remember feeling very excited about getting my first Dredd. Then, as I did it, the creeping realisation came that I was not ready to do one. Mike is an incredibly supportive gentleman, and he was very kind about it, but nothing could lift my sense of disappointment with it at the time. 

I had always wanted to draw Dredd and I genuinely thought I may have blown it and I’d never be invited to do the character again! It was also my first experience of Mike’s scripts and, as mentioned I hadn’t melded with the style then.

I don’t really feel I had found my technique or style back then. I think I only really have in the last few years. So much of this stuff feels very chaotic, like a cheap firework, firing off in every direction then going quiet before extinguishing with a lacklustre puff!

HARRY HESTON & THE APE TALES WITH ARTHUR WYATT…

We said we’d circle round to this one again and here we are.

Your Harry Heston tale, again with Arthur Wyatt, again part of the long, complex, involved and rather great Red Queen saga, ran through Monkey Business (Meg 376-377, 2016), Ape Escape (Meg 386, 2017), and Krong Island (Meg 392-395, 2018) and was a call-back to your work with Stewart Perkins and the Class of ’79 fanzine.

We’ve already heard you talk of the creation of Heston, the genetically modified gorilla, an ‘uplift,’ with a love of justice thanks to Dredd’s inspirational text, ‘The Comportment Of A Judge’.

It was Stewart’s dream to see Harry become official 2000 AD canon and that’s something you and Arthur made happen with his appearance in Megazine #376. Sadly, Stewart passed away unexpectedly in May 2016, before the strip was published. But it must have been so satisfying to be able to finally bring back Stewart’s creation?

JL: Class of ’79 had ended and Stewart and I had drifted apart. I had made the ridiculous statement that I’d get Harry to crossover – me the bloke who had burned every bridge on his way to obscurity. But surprisingly that time had come.

I had taken to a new hobby of Matt-bothering, where I would pitch ideas to him and he would patiently explain to me why that particular idea was the dumbest thing he’d ever heard. 

I’d been holding off on Heston for a while but figured I’d give it a shot. So I put a page together featuring all the times Apes had appeared in Dredd and emailed it over. Still very much thinking of Heston as a Justice Department experiment, he would have been used to police the ‘Meg-illa Burbs’ which was a sprawling shanty town growing outside the City walls, predominantly inhabited by Apes and Muties.

Matt liked the character but pointed out that Justice Department genetic regs would not allow that, but he would consider him as a Jimp (Judge Impersonator). 

JL: I had a little think about it and the idea actually started to make a lot of sense. Harry was created in a Fanzine, he was born out of a love for Dredd and in an ‘unofficial’ publication – sounds just like a Jimp to me! My only request was (as with Gary Simpson), you don’t kill him at the end and that was it, he crossed over.

Naturally, I asked for Arthur to write him and he gave him a lot more heart than I ever imagined.

On a slight aside, sometime before all this, when I was still working full time, a couple of my colleagues asked me if I was on Facebook (I wasn’t) and they insisted they sign me up. Within an hour of logging in I received a friend request from Stewart. It wasn’t like the old days, but it was nice to hear from him again. So when Heston crossed I felt honour bound to let him in on it, so I had to pitch it to him too. If he wasn’t happy I think it would have put me in a difficult position, but fortunately he loved the idea.

When I actually started on the strip I sent him the artwork on the sly, as it felt like the decent thing to do, and he was very happy with it. 

A short time after that, Arthur sent me a link, which led to a Forum listing saying that Stewart had died. I’m very glad he got to see the artwork, but disappointed that he never saw it in print or got to read the story.

JL: I will always look back fondly on my time with Stew, as an introverted youth, he was a great person to be around. After he was gone and getting to know his then new partner, I wondered how much I really knew him at all but I’ll ALWAYS be very glad that I did.

Anyway, back to Harry, the cast has expanded over time too. Just like Dredd he now has an evil twin, Serpico, who has gone off to have a few adventures of his own interweaving with the Red Queen’s crime organisation also.

Arthur and I were talking about Harry the other day actually.  Arthur has another adventure for him and I hope he will up for another adventure soon.

THE SAGA OF LA REINE ROUGE, WYATT & LYNCH’S BIG STORYLINE…

Again, jumping around the timeline of your bibliography a little…

You’ve talked about the Red Queen saga a lot already in connection to Orlok and Harry Heston. After the Harry Heston tales, the work with Arthur continued into The Red Queen saga with The Red Prince Diaries (Meg 404, 2019), The Red Queen’s Gambit (Meg 409-412, 2019), Grand Theft Royale (Meg 423, 2020), The Hard Way (Prog 2250-2255, 2021 – with Rob Williams), Regicide (Meg 445-446, 2022), and Sentinoid’s Big Idea (Prog 2297-2299, 2022, that one by Rob alone).

It brings together all the threads introduced in the Orlok and Harry Heston tales so wonderfully well and it’s really your and Arthur’s big contribution to Dredd (so far), carving out your own little area in Dreddworld.

JL: I remember very clearly designing the Red Queen. One of the funny things about my job is you should have a visual interest in as much as you can. She highlighted my complete disinterest in fashion and hairstyles and became a real growing moment for me. Her hairstyle came courtesy of Google and was something from some Film Noir – I loved it because it looked like an octopus!

I was so pleased when I saw her make a comeback and, as mentioned, her death was the end of an era for me. It does blow me away how long I’ve worked on her.

HAVN – LYNCH’S ONLY 2000 AD CREATION SO FAR & MORE DIFFICULT TIMES…

HAVN was your first creator credit for 2000 AD, back in 2017. Set in Nu-Iceland, 2139 AD, you and Si Spencer gave us a very different bit of Dreddworld.

You did the first two episodes with Henry Flint coming on for episodes three to six. What happened that you had to give way to Henry, and were you happy with HAVN or is it something of a missed opportunity for you?

JL: HAVN came toward the end of a difficult time for me. My father had become very ill and both my Brother and I had moved back to look after him. My brother would take the role of main carer and would look after him Monday to Thursday and I would take Friday to Sunday and work on those other days. It was exhausting. I would put dad to bed around 11pm on Sunday, go up and work for a few hours before going to bed, waking before 6am, doing the weeks shopping, before coming home and starting work. I’d then take a nap around 6pm for a couple of hours then start work again for another 9-10 hours. Then repeat. Fortunately, I only had to do the shopping once a week!

That was it for about two and a half years. Dad passed away just as I was starting the third episode but, as you say, Henry took over and instantly made me look like an amateur!

I, on the other hand, was beyond exhausted. So my memory of that strip, with apologies to all involved, is incredibly fuzzy. I do remember my croaking voice when I talked to a shop assistant around this time. I had been so locked away working that I hadn’t uttered a single word to anyone for 4 days and my voice was straining.

JL: On a couple of slight asides, if you would endure me. Did you know that the longest period I have ever worked at the drawing board was 28 hours? This wasn’t then, but thought I’d throw that out there.

My father was a very hard man. After his work in advertising, he got his Captain’s certificate, bought a boat, aimed it at the West Indies and set sail. He had some remarkable adventures out there which included fighting pirates who boarded his boat, threatening and holding my mother hostage. He didn’t suffer fools gladly. He drank and smoked hard and at times was not someone you wanted to get on the wrong side of. He dragged two traumatised children back from poverty after they lost their mum and when things were bad, it should be remembered he did it all while dealing with his own grief. Years and years of fighting to get our head above water and he did it.

The greatest tragedy was he didn’t die spitting in the face of someone dangling him off a cliff, but pretty much bed bound in a hospital bed at home in Norfolk. When he went, we were both with him and able to say thank you and how much we loved him.

It’s always a good thing to be able to say you said goodbye and thank you to loved ones. Again, our sympathies are with you there Jake.

STEPPING IN FOR HENRY FLINT – ZOMBO & PROTEUS VEX…

Speaking of Henry Flint, you’ve taken on two of the Flint droids creations recently – Zombo and Proteus Vex.

JL: I’ve actually taken three of Henry’s strips. The first was outside of 2000 AD but within another Rebellion publication – Action, a strip that Henry had written himself called Hell Machine. 

Well, so much for the excellent research – Tharg’s gonna be knocking at the door any moment, I can feel the anger from here! And especially since I interviewed you and Henry about that one! Oh dear.

JL: Sorry! With Hell Machine, I got an email from Keith Richardson over at Rebellion asking if he could give me a call. This was unusual and in my usual spiralling thought patterns I thought perhaps this is how Rebellion fired you, you know, give it the personal touch! 

But as it happened, it was to talk me into taking the gig. Henry had taken ill and the job had become quite short on time. Keith was great and as soon as he told me the title I knew I was going to take it. But it was one of those times in life where, if you say you’re going to hit a target, you better damned well do so!

JL: I also consider it a bit of a turning point for me artistically.  The short time limit meant I had to work out a quick method of production. I also had access to a couple of pages of Henry’s art and a few pages of designs. Somehow the two influences came together and started me down a different path.

I am very conscious about looking at other people’s art. I’m trying to walk my own line here but on this occasion, I think it was justified and really helped me grow.

I think it’s also worth pointing out the colour work of Jim Boswell at this point. He’d started working with me a strip or two before this one and really helped sell it. He’s been saving my neck ever since.

Yes, Jim, along with all the other somewhat unsung heroes that are Tharg’s colouring and lettering droids, deserve all the praise!

JL: From that point, I started getting offered some other of Henry’s gigs. Henry is always in incredibly high demand and rightly so. He always delivers something mind-blowing that leaves the rest of us wondering why we bother. But for once, this demand actually worked in my favour.

Your Zombo in the 2020 Sci-Fi Special was a sheer joy. Written by Al Ewing, The Immigrant had Zombo in a holding cell meeting Dredd. It was a comedy masterclass from you and Al, letting you really let loose with the gags.

Having talked to you before this, I know you’re a funny guy, but comedy isn’t something we’ve seen in your work much. Was it good to get to really go for it with The Immigrant here?

JL: That one off Zombo with Al was such a great experience. Reading a script that made me laugh out loud – he is such a great writer. I did ask permission from both him and Henry before starting and they were both very supportive. I’m not sure I would have been comfortable doing more than a one-off special though. My imagination is nothing like as unlimited as Henry’s and there is a certain kind of magic that happens when both he and Al work together and with a character as fun and unique as Zombo, it would be sad to see.

It wasn’t especially hard to do, it was, once again, all about the writing, it was very easy to bond with, Al is brilliant.

Yes, yes he is. As is Henry. But we have to say that the fans (and Tharg) think you’re pretty good too Jake! Not that you’ll take the compliment!

JL: [silence] 

Okay, okay, moving on then to Proteus Vex – with you taking over from Henry on the strip that he and Mike Carroll created. You joined with series two and, so far, you’ve done series two to four, The Shadow Chancellor, Desire Paths, and Crawl Space.

It’s absolutely epic sci-fi and one that you’ve stamped your style on completely by this stage. It’s also one of those 2000 AD strips that look nothing like anything else. Obviously so much of the alienness of it all was there in Henry’s first series and his designs. But what do you think of the strip and how much input have you had with Mike to put your own style on it?

Presumably, you and Mike are working on more Proteus Vex right now?

JL: Yes, I have just started Proteus Vex Book 5. I wish I could tell you more but I will say that I think it’s the best of the lot. It’s mind-blowing how Mike has weaved so many elements through it, tied them together without, it seems, any force. Everything about it feels like it should be there – it’s just remarkable.

Vex has been a career highlight for me. I’ve been incredibly lucky to have been allowed to add on to Henry’s foundations and have made a good friend in Mike, who I respect a great deal. 

I don’t know much about being a writer. But if it’s like art, then you have to work hard to make something look easy – and Mike makes it look effortless, just you wait and see.

WORKING OUTSIDE 2000 AD…

2000 AD not only acts as a proving ground for writers and artists with Future Shocks and other one-off tales, but also as ready source of talent for other companies, particularly US comic makers. But not for you?

As far as I can see, your work in comics has been completely 2000 AD-based. You’ve had work in 2000 AD, the Megazine, and a couple of things like The Vigilant and that Action Special. But nothing outside of the 2000 AD family. Now, surely this can’t be because no one has asked or because no one believes you’re good enough. I imagine it’s more a personal choice. So, what is it about 2000 AD and working there that’s kept you with them for the past nine years?

JL: I always remember, In the NHS, you would have to do these yearly assessments where you would be asked where you would see yourself in the future. I would answer that I want to get good at what I was doing and I had no interest in getting promoted into incompetence.

I am really happy where I am and don’t really see why going onto America should be seen as a promotion. I don’t find superheroes that engaging, I’m a sci-fi nerd and am still just that little kid watching Star Wars for the first time.

I realised very early on that everyone needed to have a job. Something they could do for the rest of their lives. Well, I figured, if that was the case you need to cover two bases: one, you have to make a living and two, you gotta be happy, which is exactly how I am. Now, that’s not to say that if the right project came along I wouldn’t consider it, but I would do that for anything.

I have to say I don’t think 2000 AD has been in better hands, from Matt to Rebellion itself. It was highlighted to me a few years back when Covid was hitting and we were all going into lockdown. I was reading horror stories of big publishers cutting their creators loose. It’s one of the fears of freelancing I guess but, in their hour of need, publishers appeared to be prioritising themselves over the people who help make them – it was a scary time.

An email dropped from Rebellion, just letting us know that they had our back and we were going to get through this. A completely different business ethic and one of the reasons I am very happy working for them. I’ve seen Mr Kingsley (Sir Jason? – how am I supposed to address a Knight…does anyone know?) interviewed talking about Chivalric Code, but this was experiencing it first hand and I’ll always be grateful to him and Matt for giving me a chance and having my back.

Like so many comic artists, you’ve done work outside of comics, including contributing to The Sandman Netflix adaptation. First of all, how did that Sandman gig come about and, secondly, is it another case of the sad reality of comics being that commercial illustration is almost a necessity to pay the rent?

JL: This is the perfect point to tell you my Kris from Blockbuster story that I mentioned earlier.

So, back in the day, when I worked at Blockbuster, I met another employee called Kris. He was a lovely guy, really just decent and the sort of person you could work alongside easily. He was studying make-up at college while working there, which I thought was pretty weird, until I discovered he wanted to do the prosthetic make-up used in film and theatre. So he was a sort of kindred spirit to me. 

We’d be working at the counter and when no-one was in, I’d be drawing big pictures of Dredd and he’d be punching hair into a mannequin’s head – you know, the usual.

To give you some small measure of what a small market town in Norfolk can be sometimes, I remember Kris telling me that he had told someone he knew about his ambitions and was told that he should give up as stuff like that didn’t happen to people like us.

Anyway, Kris soon after goes and does a make-up course with someone called Nick Dudman who, among so many other things, was doing a lot of work on the Harry Potter films. Kris was then ‘discovered’ by Nick and started working with him from the third Potter onward, learning his craft proper. It was amazing and also, for someone who suspected his earlier friend may be right about the rest of us, sad to see. But I was very happy for him, he had worked hard and totally deserved his break.

JL: We would get in touch from time to time, Kris started his own business, KM Effects Ltd, and it was growing and he was employing others. He had made a real go of it and I was ridiculously proud of him. I had also been picked up by 2000 AD and through some strange quirks of fate, Kris reached out to me and asked if I would like to submit some designs for a few of the shows he was working on, which included, at the time, Sandman and the School of Good and Evil, both for Netflix.

He has done some amazing work, but the thing that makes me happiest is the circular nature of it all, back working alongside each other, just like back in the day in that small market town, where none of us were supposed to amount to anything.

That old Blockbuster eventually became a Costa, and I used to thumbnail scripts in a quiet corner of it from time to time basking in the difference.

The sad truth about commercial art is, I can make more money in two days with Kris than two weeks in comics. But you should only work in comics if you can accept that. I live very simply, no-one forced me to do this and you won’t find me complaining.  

JAKE’S STYLE AND ART PROCESS…

At what point in your development did you think that you made the jump from hopeful art droid new to the Prog to an artist that’s not just recognisable but wanted by Tharg?

JL: I’m not sure I will ever feel that way. I think the nature of freelancing is learning to accept there is a degree of working without a safety net. 

At the beginning, you feel very conscious of it, but you learn to live with it, but it is never fully out of my mind. I do worry about what I would do if it all ended as I’m not sure I’m fit for anything else or capable of being integrated back into society!

One thing that Rob Williams said of you in an interview you did for The Hard Way was this – ‘I think you can see bits of Henry Flint, a hint of Jock, the odd McMahon, and a Cam Kennedy influence on the page. He draws a very good Dredd. Jake feels like a contender in the next generation of great Dredd artists stakes.’

JL: I think Rob is being incredibly generous there. I hadn’t read that. I look forward to working with him again so I can really get to grips with his writing. I see good things in the future.

So, how’s it feel to be part of that next generation of great Dredd artists?

JL: Hopefully you may have noticed by now I don’t take compliments at all well though am very flattered by the comparisons. I would never consider myself ‘great’ or one of the greats but I do hope I have the attitude to learn enough for ‘greatness’ maybe one day – it keeps me hungry. 

I always think about the ‘Dunning Kruger Effect’, particularly as it seems so prevalent in our government at this time. Put simply, the more you actually know about a subject the more you realise how little you know, the opposite being true for the beginner. The funny thing is we ALL suffer from this in one shape or another and our inability to recognise it in ourselves proves the point!

When it comes to your particular style, what is it, do you think, that marks it out as yours? What elements, what look would you say makes it a Jake Lynch thing?

JL: I have studied my ‘craft’ quite deeply, it is infinitely fascinating. Though they are different art forms, when I work I am storyboarding a film of the script, picturing camera moves and cuts and picking the best place to take a snapshot for the comics panel. Then it’s about arranging it pleasingly and keeping it readable while using the form to spin another level on the ideas – it’s so much fun.

Obviously, every art droid starts out with a huge list of influences – what are your particular artistic Gods – as Rob already mentioned, there’s a heady mix of Henry Flint, Jock, Mick McMahon, and Cam Kennedy in your art.

JL: There are too many early influences to mention, but if I were to give any advice, it would be that it is absolutely right to learn from these masters, especially when starting out. 

But I think you should never aim at being the NEXT anything, you should try to be the first you, even if, artistically, it takes you a long time to find out who that is. Never stop learning. If I compared my work to these people I wouldn’t be able to see it, because I reached my style organically. I think I earned the lines I use and even though I would never put myself amongst them, I would hope that one day, with a great deal more practice, who knows? This sort of thing isn’t for me to judge and have never really thought about it.

I think one word that really comes to mind with your style is angularity. There’s also that sense of finding the interesting and unusual perspective, something that’s come more and more into your art, it seems to me, as you’ve grown in confidence.

How has your artwork developed over the years? Has it been a case of slowly growing into a style or was there ever a point where you made a deliberate decision to push your art in a certain direction?

JL: That’s a tough one to answer. Sometimes you try to steer your style, but I’ve never had huge success in doing that. I do what feels right at the time and by my natural reaction to the scripts I get. 

What I would normally do is identify some issue I was having from a previous strip and tell myself that I have to consciously work on that aspect on the next strip. So I’m focused in on a weakness which will hopefully feedback into the style. 

Either way I should, in some way, be improving. I sometimes wonder if the only reason I have reached a passable level these days is years of focusing in on these weaknesses finally paying off!

Sometimes though it can be quite stagnant and that can be so frustrating when you are trying to push forward.

Of course, every artist changes styles over the years. Taking Mick McMahon as the epitome of this, he’s an artist whose style has gone through some radical shifts, always experimenting, always looking brilliantly McMahon but always surprising you with whatever he comes up with next.

Is that something you can feel confident to aspire to yet? Or are you still at the stage of refining your initial style to get it just right?

JL: That’s another great question. McMahon is a huge hero to me, I’m constantly astounded by his ability to change. I don’t think I’m there yet, to be so deliberate with ‘natural’ ability is not something I have mastered. But yes, it would be an amazing skill. Who knows what the future will bring..? 

There’s also an elongation in your art, your figures stretch beyond their panel borders at times.

Again, that’s a Mick McMahon thing, but also Mick Austin and many others who’ve gone towards art that’s less figurative and more experimental. Again, in concert with the angularity and the interesting choice of ‘camera’ angles, it can really make a Lynch page stand out.

JL: Thank you, once again, it comes out as it comes out.  It will always be in reaction to the writing – always (and maybe just a little spin on the form).

And just as an aside, Mick Austin gets a bad rep in certain areas of 2000 AD fandom for that classic and infamous cover he did for Prog 618 – all sinewy Dredd and stretched out beyond reason – yet it’s so striking, the whole point of making a cover memorable.

JL: I love that cover…

Yes, that would be this cover from Mick Austin – and while we’re at it, a certain recent cover from the legendary Mick McMahon with that same vibe…

It’s something that’s happened, seems to me, as you became more and more comfortable in your artistic skin here.

And of course, you do do a damn fine Dredd chin and have a thing for McMahon-style BIG boots!

JL: Chin – Check. Boots – Check. What, no mention of my Eagle!?

Okay, okay, the Eagle’s pretty damn good too!

Going into your process here, I don’t want to be in any way insulting, but artistically you have what could be called a mixture of tight line and lots of thin, scratchy stuff going on. Has there been a switch in your inking over time, the line seems to have grown thinner with time?

JL: I think as I’ve gotten a little more seasoned perhaps I’ve gotten a little more technique. I basically work over my thumbnails and then scale them up. It cuts out a sort of pencilling stage and keeps the images quite loose and hopefully energetic. 

These little thumbnails, as you would expect, are quite small and I use quite a fat pen to easily fill the area. When you don’t give yourself a lot of room, you have to keep yourself focused on what are the important lines.

Though I work digitally, I don’t use any fancy brushes or pens.  It’ll mostly be a case of a small degree of clean up, toning and texturing and weighting the lines.

A LITTLE REFLECTION…

What do you think of your career so far? It’s been nine years plus since that first strip for 2000 AD and you’ve established yourself as one of the major artists in the Prog. Are you happy with your progress? Happy with your work? And reflecting on the last near-decade of work, would the younger Lynch have been rather chuffed to be where you are now?

JL: I have loved and continue to love my time with 2000 AD.

It is true, I am my own worst critic, but will always remember the advice that Andy Diggle gave me – don’t sweat every line. It’s comics, it supposed to be fun. He was right.

I think if I were to see my young self, I do think he would be chuffed, but I think the thing I would most like to say to him would be, hey, everything is going to be okay, you are going to end up strong, married to an amazing woman, and very happy with your lot. Oh and don’t hang off that tower block’s balcony in Spain, you dozy prat, I’m still getting flashbacks!

Oh, the stupidity of youth! But also a very good bit of advice to youth there, it will get better in the end.

AND A COUPLE OF STANDARDS TO END WITH…

Okay Jake, just for fun – what’s the one strip/character/idea that you would absolutely love to run with? Imagine you have carte blanche from Tharg to do anything, use any character, come up with whatever insane idea that’s been percolating away in your brain!

JL: Ooo… that’s a good one.  I have a few: ABC Warriors, but as they were originally. Armoured Gideon, but set during the Second World War, fighting Hitler’s occult forces.

I’d like to have a crack at a short run of Rogue Trooper (but that’s being very ably filled by the awesome Patrick Goddard), but just to see if I could. Robo Hunter – yes I like drawing robots, so let’s also throw in Banzai Battalion too!

I did pitch an idea for Movie Dredd, which I would have loved to do. It was about Tek Div creating a device to bring Dredd back from Deadworld. He was understandably much changed from his time there but essentially the same man. Naturally the device had unexpected results and a few other dead world beings were also been brought back and deposited around the city and Dredd has to go after them. Except it turns out its not Dredd they brought back, it was Kraken and one of the others that got out was ‘Deadman’ Dredd.  Sadly, they had stopped the series by then or possible because of this pitch.

Well, for a while we had positive Jake, but here we are back to the Jake that believes he’s cursed to bring things down!

And FINALLY! What’s next for you? Have you already got plenty of 2000 AD work on the horizon?

JL: Nope, I’m booked out until May on an extra-long Proteus Vex and can’t take anything else on. 

There’s also a personal project I’ve got called Pablo, something that I’m sure I’ll never get time to finish, but would really like to one day (it’s actually quite a good story). I have 2 children’s stories inside my head that doubt will ever get out! Pablo was something I wrote years and years ago. I started working it up in between comic commissions, but I am very happy to say I don’t get the downtime anymore!

JL: I’m blissfully ploughing my own furrow, in my own little world, like the harmless bumpkin I am. Thanks for stopping by and sitting a spell y’all.

Oh, before you go, perhaps one last story if you would indulge me? A small tribute to my old man who did so much for us perhaps?

As I mentioned he had many adventures. He would tell us stories of going into offices of big corporations who had welched on advertising payments and would start removing furnishing from their waiting rooms in front of their clients and leaving them on the pavement outside for collection. That would always make them pay up and I think dad always really loved punching up against a bigger opponent.

But the story I would like to leave you with was his constant battles with local authority.

He was always the type to ask forgiveness rather than permission and then forget to ask for forgiveness. And he enjoyed warring with the local council who he would refer to as bearded men with clipboards. One day, after he done another thing wrong, one of these people came into the garden to see him and read him the riot act.

My father took a moment, then spoke: ‘You see that gate over there? That’s not to keep you out, it’s to keep you in. But I’m feeling particularly generous today and I will let you choose the tree you’re going to swing from’.

The reason they came to see him is another story, but perhaps we will save that for another time…

Goodnight.

And that, one and all, is where we left things. Thank you so much to Jake for really opening up to us about his life and his work for the Creator Files. It might have been long, but I think we’re all even more impressed by the Lynch droid after reading it!

As for more from Jake, there’s plenty of his excellent work at Covers Uncovered – Progs 2017 , 2172, 2181, 2203, and 2297, plus Megazine 446. Then we also have a few interviews with Jake – The Red Queen’s Gambit (with Arthur Wyatt), The Hard Way (with Arthur and Rob Williams), Jake & Henry Flint talk Hell Machine from the Action Special here, and then there’s talk of Dredd, Y-fronts, and more with his wonderfully daft Dredd & Zombo strip, The Immigrant, in the 2020 Sci-Fi Special. There’s also an illuminating 2000 AD – From The Drawing Board video to view here.

Finally, for more behind-the-scenes videos and info from Jake, be sure to go and sign up to his Patreon and follow him on Twitter, Instagram.

JAKE LYNCH COMICS BIBLIOGRAPHY

Now, we always like to end with a bibliography. And in Jake’s case, it’s rather large! However, a caveat here, as Jake says, ‘I don’t keep records of what I’ve done, as I am normally trying to forget!’ So this is a collation of records anywhere and everywhere I could find them! If I’ve missed anything, please don’t tell Tharg!

List of covers:
2000 AD – Progs 1895, 1922, 1945, 1955, 1957, 1990, 2017, 2043, 2104, 2147, 2172, 2181, 2203, 2297, 2339, 2348.
Judge Dredd Megazine Volume 5 – issues 376, 382, 392, 411, 446.

Comics work:
Star Scan: Judge Dredd – 2000 AD Prog 1771 (Feb 2012).
Future Shocks: Dying Wishes – 2000 AD Prog 1862 (Jan 2014), written by Eddie Robson.
Tales From The Black Museum: And Death Must Die – Judge Dredd Megazine Vol 5 #348 (May 2014), written by David Baillie.
Sinister Dexter: The Generican Dream: Congo – 2000 AD Prog 1889-1892 (July 2014), written by Dan Abnett.
Orlok, Agent of East-Meg One: Eurozoned – 2000 AD Prog 1912-1917 (Jan-Feb 2015), written by Arthur Wyatt.
Orlok, Agent of East-Meg One: The Rasputin Caper – 2000 AD Prog 1924-1929 (Apr-May 2015), written by Arthur Wyatt.
Judge Dredd: Let’s Go To Work – 2000 AD Sci-Fi Special 2015 (June 2015), written by Mike Carroll.
Tharg’s 3rillers: Repossession Orders – 2000 AD Progs 1973-1975 (Mar-Apr 2016), written by Eddie Robson.
Judge Dredd: Monkey Business – Judge Dredd Megazine Vol 5 #376-377 (Sept-Nov 2016), written by Arthur Wyatt.
Judge Dredd: The Cube Root of Evil – 2000 AD Progs 2007-2009 (Nov 2016), written by Arthur Wyatt.
Havn – Judge Dredd Megazine Vol 5 #382-383 (Apr-May 2017), written by Si Spencer.
Judge Dredd: Ape Escape – Judge Dredd Megazine Vol 5 #386 (Aug 2017), written by Arthur Wyatt.
Future Shocks: Alt-Life – 2000 AD 2049 (Sept 2017), written by Rory McConville.
Sinister Dexter: Snake-Skinned – 2000 AD Prog 2051 (Oct 2017), written by Dan Abnett.
Judge Dredd: Krong Island – Judge Dredd Megazine Vol 5 #392-395 (Jan-Apr 2018), written by Arthur Wyatt.
Judge Dredd: The Paradigm Shift – 2000 AD Progs 2082-2086 (May-June 2018), written by Michael Carroll.
Anderson, Psi Division: Dark Angels – 2000 AD Prog 2100 (Sept 2018), written by Alan Grant.
Judge Dredd: The Red Prince Diaries – Judge Dredd Megazine Vol 5 #404 (Jan 2019), written by Arthur Wyatt.
Judge Dredd: Citizenship – 2000 AD Prog 2123 (Mar 2019), written by Rory McConville.
Judge Dredd: The Red Queen’s Gambit – Judge Dredd Megazine Vol 5 #409-412 (July-Oct 2019), written by Arthur Wyatt.
Doctor Sin: Tribunal – in The Vigilant: Legacy (Aug 2019), written by Simon Furman.
Anderson, Psi-Division: Judge Death: The Movie – 2000 AD Prog 2150 (Sept 2019), written by Alan Grant.
Judge Dredd: Future Crimes Unit – 2000 AD Prog 2167-2168 (Feb 2020), written by Rory McConville.
Judge Dredd: The Relic– 2000 AD Prog 2171-2173 (Mar 2020), written by Kenneth Niemand.
Hell Machine – Action Special 2020 (Mar 2020), art on p.7-15, written by Henry Flint.
The Immigrant (Zombo & Dredd) – 2000 AD Sci-Fi Special (June 2020), written by Al Ewing.
Judge Dredd: Grand Theft Royale – Judge Dredd Megazine Vol 5 #423 (Sept 2020), written by Arthur Wyatt.
Proteus Vex: The Shadow Chancellor – 2000 AD Prog 2212-2219, 2221-2223 (Dec 2020-Mar 2021), written by Mike Carroll.
Cadet Dredd: Lawbreaker – 2000 AD Regened Prog 2233 (May 2021), written by Liam Johnson.
Judge Dredd: The Hard Way – 2000 AD Prog 2250-2255 (Sept-Oct 2021), written by Rob Williams & Arthur Wyatt.
Proteus Vex: Desire Paths – 2000 AD Prog 2262-2274 (Jan-Mar 2022), written by Mike Carroll.
Judge Dredd: Regicide – Judge Dredd Megazine Vol 5 #445-446 (June-July 2022), written by Arthur Wyatt.
Judge Dredd: Sentinoid’s Big Idea – 2000 AD Prog 2297-2299 (Aug-Sept 2022), written by Rob Williams.
Proteus Vex: Crawl Space – 2000 AD Prog 2312-2324 (Dec 2022-Mar 2023), written by Mike Carroll.
Judge Dredd: In The Event Of My Untimely Demise (from part 6) – 2000 AD Prog 2338-2340 (June-July 2023), written by Mike Carroll

In the new Judge Dredd Megazine #459 – out now – we’re going back, back, back once more to the very beginnings of Judge Dredd – 45 years back in time to 2099 AD, in the second episode of Mega-City 2099, The Thin Blue Line, by Ken Niemand and Conor Boyle.

It’s the very earliest days of Judge Dredd in 2000 AD, reimagined for right now…

We’ve seen plenty of strips looking back to the early days of both Dredd and the Justice Department over the years, including John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra’s magnificent Origins or Mike Carroll and John Higgins’ Dreadnoughts, currently midway through its excellent second series in the Megazine, not to mention the prose novels and Regened’s Cadet Dredd tales.

But Mega-City 2099 is very different from all of those – they looked back with modern eyes and a modern style. Mega-City 2099 goes right back to the beginning of Dredd in 2099 with a look and a feel that’s pure 1977. Hell, they even brought back thought bubbles!

The first episode, Rampage, kicked things off in Megazine 451 with a story of protest against the Judge’s increased powers and how one young Judge’s actions against the protest puts him square in Dredd’s sights. The second, The Thin Blue Line sees Dredd dealing with hostage-taking perps and a Mega-City Police Department too full of cops all too eager to sit back and let the Judges take a bullet.

Mega-City 2099’s artist Conor Boyle sat down to talk to us recently about what it means to go back to the beginning of Dredd in 2000 AD…

Conor, let’s get straight into things with Mega-City 20999. You’ve now completed two episodes, Rampage back in Megazine 448 and the new one, The Thin Blue Line – here in Megazine 459.

The first tale, Rampage, took us straight into the action with Dredd having to deal with a rogue Judge taking things too far in response to the troubled political times.

So, can you tell us what to expect from this second episode, The Thin Blue Line?

CONOR BOYLE: This next episode involves a hostage scene, some takeaway food and a fair amount of laughing in the face of gravity. And a lot of bullets. All the bullets. 

I did ask Tharg about Mega-City 2099 [I get one message a year allowed without punishment, so I have to choose wisely] and he told me that ‘Ken Niemand pitched the idea of a different kind of Dredd story, harking back to the early iteration of the strip where regular cops mixed with the Judges, and the stories were full of oddball SF ideas.’ He also said that he ‘picked Conor because I thought he could do a good job on the retro vibe.’

So… high praise indeed there from TMO. How do you feel knowing that Tharg has placed his trust in you here?

CB: Humbled? Terrified? Grateful? This question is a trap, isn’t it? Where’s my lawyer? 

As Tharg said, Ken Niemand pitched the series and then you got involved. What do you remember of being asked and how did you feel about it?

CB: Well, you don’t say no to Tharg, so the next thing I knew I had the concept and a series of messages detailing how it’s was all going to work.

I absolutely loved the concept – Ken sent over a handy write-up of the things that would be going in, complete with a clear definition of what wasn’t.

It was a real kick to think this was going to be something very different with Dredd and Mega-City One and I was going to be a part of it all. Think I had a grin on my face for about a week.

The whole idea of going back to look at the history of MC-1 and Dredd has been covered plenty of times before but it strikes me that this one feels and obviously looks different.

What artists and artistic inspiration can we see in your Dredd in Mega-City 2099 here?

CB: Part of the brief from Tharg and Ken was this is purely Case Files One era, with that Dredd continuing on and evolving.

So artistically you’ve got the freedom from forty-odd years of design progression and development, (and the pressure of having to follow it) but a lot of what remains is fluid, with Carlos tweaking his designs as he goes along.

I stuck with the design of the original four strips (including The Bank Raid) – as trying to produce a hybrid of Carlos and Ian Gibson’s work, while providing me more access to more design avenues, would’ve just ended in a visual mess.

Have you been going back in time yourself, diligently studying those very early Dredds to make sure some Internet warrior isn’t going to bombard 2000 AD Towers with complaints that you didn’t get this or that detail right?

CB: Ha! While I’ve included everything Carlos threw at those stories, I learned a long time ago that you can’t keep everyone happy. If someone spots a missing element, then well done. Award yourself a nice cup of tea and a biscuit!

Obviously, you’re showing off the classic uniform, Lawgiver, Lawmaster etc. But what other elements have you integrated into the strip to make it look and feel timely?

CB: The thing that grabs you is Dredd’s face – Carlos didn’t depict early Dredd with the snarl or grimace, even hinting the evidence of a bottom lip, so there was a bit of work involved in keeping him stony-faced, the Dredd ‘aura’, but without the frame and the excessive chin we all know and love.

The other main aspect I was asked to highlight was the city itself. You can really place the vibe of the series with all the crazy architecture in the background – but it would be alongside landmarks that we have in our world too.

Can you tell us a little more about how you adapted your art to fit the ‘retro vibe’ required or was it simply a case of your style being the perfect fit for the look needed?    

CB: It wasn’t so much of an adaptation – I pretty much put my style aside, to be honest.

This is a call back to the original stories so I thought it was neither the time or place to try and stamp anything else on it. There was a large amount in the storytelling that Ken wanted to capture and I didn’t want to add visual clutter to a tight story.

I took those first four strips and devised a style of linework that would echo them, incorporated some greyscale and that was about it. Keep it simple, strong and stylish, y’know? 

And what about the process you’ve used on Mega-City 2099?

CB: When we started with this strip I’d only done one story for Tharg – How I Lost The Waugh, (written by Liam Johnson, coloured by Barbara Nosenzo, lettered by Jim Campbell) part of The Darkest Judge epic that came out last year – so I kept my layouts tight.

When working with new teams I do try to keep roughs as clear as I can (though they’re still MUCH rougher than a lot of layouts I’ve seen from other artists!) so I think the layout you see here will have been the tidied version, and a rougher version preceding it that I must have deleted along the way.

I had to draw this and the previous strip digitally. Our house sprung more than a few leaks the previous winter and we’d had to move out to get the repairs done, so my studio was packed away in a storage unit. It would’ve been great to ink traditionally but with all the redraws to get the uniform and the Lawmaster right, it was probably for the best!

Once Tharg approved the layouts, I put the digital inks straight over the top with maybe only a few tweaks to allow more space for lettering or to straighten out the storytelling.

As I said, Tharg, in his benevolence, asked to see a lot of the city itself. So with the process of story and figure work being pretty quick and straightforward it did leave me a lot of time to indulge in echoing all those crazy Ezquerra-styled buildings in the backgrounds.

As you said, you’re relatively new to 2000 AD, with your first artwork for Tharg coming only recently, Devlin Waugh: How I Lost The Waugh, in Megazine 448, part of The Darkest Judge saga that put forth an alternative to Judgement Day (You can find that one here in the 2000 AD web shop!)

CB: I am. It’s still very surreal. Genuine lifetime ambitions and all that… The inner critic has been very quiet recently. 

An artist managing to quiet his inner critic – a real rarity!

How does it feel to be helming something that covers the early days of Dredd and MC-1?

CB: It’s kinda mind blowing to be honest with you. The first story Tharg gave me had Preacher Cain, Judge Anderson, and Johnny Alpha show up in the second panel (thanks, Liam Johnson!). Oh, and please can you follow the Judge Anderson style from Arthur Ranson!

I’d barely had chance to get back to earth when this story came along. Carlos has designed Dredd and Mega City One. Now it’s your turn!

There’s so much stuff that you can pick up and work with that didn’t really get expanded on the first time round. Judges aside, I’ve got a lot of fun out of the police uniforms and cars, as well as clothing designs for citizens and perps alike.

What about the future of Mega-City 2099? What can we expect as the series unfolds – or is it one of those where you discover what Ken’s doing as he sends you the scripts?

CB: Ooh, there’s much more – SO much more – from the initial concept that is yet to be explored, but that would be all the spoilers.

I’m not a fan of movie trailers that last three minutes, telling you the whole plot. My idea of giving things away in comics is much the same. Page One, Panel One of our first strip should tell you all you need for now!

Okay, now as it’s the first time chatting with you Conor, let’s go into your background a bit – where you from?

CB: All over the place. Nowhere? Kent, Yorkshire, London, take your pick. That sense of where you’re from that’s important to some folks doesn’t mean anything to me. Nothing dramatic, I just don’t have it.

And what’s your background in comics, both reading and making?

CB: There were comics in our house as far back as I can remember. My parents were keen on me and my sister reading, so comics, along with books on Irish folk stories, were definitely a part of it.

Our cousin Chris Kelly was a few years older than us and had mountains of comics. We ditched Beano and Dandy comics in a hurry when he started handing us 2000 AD, MAD comics and other stuff that was equally subversive. I can remember reading them and knowing they were for older kids so it was a rush.

Well, Krill Tro Thargo to cousin Chris for that!

CB: I read comics from then till about the age of 14 or 15, then fell back into them around the age of 26 or 27, something like that. I was in a dead-end job at that point and comics were suddenly an amazing escape all over again.

Lizzie and I started making our own comics in 2010 and launched our own publishing name Disconnected Press in 2011. We made 13 or 14 books, mostly anthologies with people we’d met at conventions along the way.

That’s Lizzie Boyle, known round these parts for Monster Fun, Misty, Cor & Buster, and Tammy & Jinty.

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How long have you been making your art and what sort of work have you done to this point?

CB: I’ve been drawing ever since I can remember. The easiest way to keep me happy as a kid was to hand me a pencil and some paper. I was off in my own little world – be that at the dining table, the floor, long car journeys, other people’s houses – it didn’t matter, as long as I could draw.

I started drawing comics with an eye to being published (and to begin with I had absolutely no idea how to even go about that) around 15 years ago. It might be longer than that, come to think of it… I met the legends Dave Evans and Richmond Clements of FutureQuake Publishing over a series of conventions and I drew a couple of five-page stories for them.

Thinking that I then knew everything, (spoilers; I really, really didn’t) I convinced Rich McAuliffe (who has since written for Scream & Misty) to write some scripts around the Dark Judges and we suddenly had a 36 page book (Dark Judgement) on our hands, which seemed to go down well enough to allow a sequel a year or so later.

It wasn’t long after that that Lizzie and I started Disconnected Press, which lasted about six or seven years until we both became too busy with other publishers to keep it going. Things have kinda snowballed from there, really.

To date I’ve worked for 2000 AD, Heavy Metal Magazine, Vault Comics, Titan, and a lorry load of other publishers, big and small. 

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What’s your history with reading 2000 AD? When did you first discover the Prog etc?

CB: It involves Prog 226, a rough, night crossing on a ferry to Ireland and a kid who was way too young to be reading about Judge Death and Nemesis being hung, then coming down from the noose to wreak havoc on his enemies. I was never the same after that.

What about favourite characters?

CB: Oh man, there’s a list! Outside of Dredd, obviously, I’d say Dirty Frank, The Wally Squad, Anderson, The Dark Judges, Mean Machine Angel, Button Man, Durham Red, The ABC Warriors, and Henry Dubble.

This list will undoubtedly be added to tomorrow, but they’re definitely on it.

Mark Harrison’s run on Durham Red got me back into comics, I still find Shaun Thomas’ work unsettling on a level I can’t describe, his initial Black Museum pages are haunting. Also, everything that Jim Murray had a hand in. Absolutely next-level stuff, which I keep re-reading.

Finally, as we always like to do, what work do you have coming out, whether from 2000 AD or elsewhere, for us to look out for in the future?

CB: Most of my time now is dedicated to wrapping up a 5 issue series for an American publisher, a Cold War tale about dodgy goings-on in post-war Europe. I can’t wait to tell everyone about it, but alas we’re not quite at that stage just yet! 

Well okay then – we’ll just have to wait and see!

And that was where we had to leave things with Conor, he had some of that drawing stuff to be getting on with.

Thank you so much to Conor for the chat. You can find Mega-City 2099: The Thin Blue Line in the new Megazine, issue 459, out on 16 August. It’s available everywhere Thrill-power is sold, including the 2000 AD web shop. It’s only two episodes in but the Niemand and Boyle droids have absolutely nailed the brief – it’s a glorious slice of retro Dredd and a joy to read.

You can find Conor online at Twitter, Instagram, and his and Lizzie’s Disconnected Press site is here.

2000 AD brings you the galaxy’s greatest stories and art in thrill-powered tales every single week – but who are the droids behind these tales? Well, each month, we’ll sit down with one of the creators who’ve been responsible for keeping the thrill-power set to maximum to get those answers – this is the 2000 AD Creator Files!

Here’s where we’ll tell you more about the artists and writers who keep the Prog and the Judge Dredd Megazine a Thrill-full read! For over 45 years, 2000 AD has been bringing you the best new talent out there and here’s another one of the many talented newer names you’ll have seen in the Prog & the Meg recently – Honor Vincent.

Honor Vincent first came to Tharg’s attention when she won the 2000 AD & Thought Bubble Script Contest in 2021 with her pitch for a Future Shock, Relict, her tale of an immortal time-travelling mouse looking to save humanity, only to find that we’re really not worth the effort.

Since then, she’s seen her winning entry published, followed by another two Future Shocks,Smart Home and Echo, a Terror Tale, Rites, and the Anderson, Psi Division: Allied Forces episode in the recent zombie takeover of the 2000 AD Universe, The Darkest Judge!

Honor, hello and welcome to Creator Files! First of all, you’re New Yorker born and bred right?

HONOR VINCENT: I am indeed! I was born in Queens, raised on Long Island, went to college in the city, and moved back there a few years after college. I recently moved out west to Colorado, though, so I had to sheepishly hand in my New Yorker card when I picked up my Stetson.

So how did you first get into comics and, particularly as you live Stateside, how did you become aware of 2000 AD? Where were you getting your comics reading from at this point?

HV: My dad has been a comic fan since he was a kid, and has a massive collection of comics – not as massive as it could have been, had my grandpa not tossed a trunkload of them in the 70s (he swears there were some early Supermans in there).

Usually, it’s Mum that throws out the comics!

HV: When I was learning to read he saw them as a good bridge between picture books and chapter books, and he was right! So I’ve been a comic reader for a long time.

In terms of 2000 AD: I think I found it a few different oblique ways. I don’t remember when I first heard about Dredd, but I certainly knew of him before I started reading 2000 AD – saying “Y’know, Judge Dredd?” to people over here almost always garners an “Oh yeah!”, even if they haven’t heard of 2000 AD.

I’ve long admired Grant Morrison and Alan Moore’s work, and when I was hunting down more from them I happened on some of the early-2000 compendiums of Future Shocks, and loved them.

What was school/college/university like for you? Were you a voracious reader through those years and what authors and comics did you gravitate towards?

HV: I was! I come from a family of readers – my grandmother and I would routinely go to the movies and then the bookstore together, and I’d always go home with something. My dad’s favorite haunt is Barnes and Noble, and my mother is probably my hometown library’s biggest customer. She reads at an insane pace; I feel like she can read a book a day.

I did an ad-hoc degree (I wrote my own major so I could study abroad and take weird classes), and took a lot of writing workshop classes, which included lots of reading. My favorite was a science fiction writing class, which was wonderful, and led me to be a regular reader of sci-fi mags (I collect vintage ones now, and they’re a lot of fun to read). Around that time I also discovered George Saunders, Karen Russell, Daphne du Maurier, Edith Wharton, and Jorge Luis Borges, who remain some of my favorite authors. I also went through a doorstopper-classics phase, where I read and loved Anna Karenina and Les Miserables.

In terms of comics, I really started my own collection in earnest around my freshman year of college – there was a great local shop a few blocks from my school on the second floor of a nondescript office building, with tables and tables of long boxes. It was wonderful (and has since closed, unfortunately). The first series I bought every trade of was Bill Willingham’s Fables. I also loved the Green Lantern storylines of that time (2007-2011), Y: The Last Man, The Walking Dead, and anything by Moore and Morrison.

Another fairly formative experience in terms of my appreciation for books was a two-year internship at the Morgan Library and Museum’s Reading room (I actually turned down an internship at Marvel because the Morgan one paid). There’s a beautiful reading room where scholars work, and then a labyrinth of underground stacks that I got to wheel a cart through and pull stuff from for them, with a special elevator and everything. It was, and is, a wonderful place. They have things like a Gutenberg Bible, original Dickens and William Blake books, medieval manuscripts, papyri, reams of letters… I was not allowed to touch all of that, of course! For me that time solidified how important physical books are as artifacts. And that is how I justify having a giant book collection to my very patient husband.

Were you always going to be a writer from a young age or did the calling come later in life – although having said that, later in life for you isn’t necessarily the same as later in life for me – how long ago did you finish your schooling?

HV:I graduated from college in 2011, but I don’t see that as the end of my schooling – I think that will be when I die. I was sure I loved to write by the time I got to high school, and I knew writing was going to be a major part of my life by freshman year of college, which was when I realized I couldn’t prevent myself from doing it. I had a roughly two-hour long (and blessedly smart phone-free) commute to college, walking and on the train, which meant a lot of time to think and read! I’d listen to music and ideas would come from that, or when I was staring glazedly out of the train window.

As far as the writing was concerned, you began with poetry and prose, with your first published work coming out in 2018. But how did the transition into comics come about? And was it something you’d always thought about doing or simply one of those happy accidents?

HV: It’s funny – I read comics for as long as I’ve read anything else, but I didn’t think of making them myself. The main barrier was not being remotely able to produce a page of comic art, and not having the money to pay someone to do it. Breaking in really felt like a black box until I realized that people were able to successfully fund work online.

Not too long after that I had an idea for a book that I couldn’t imagine in any other format, I found a wonderful artist to collaborate with in a Facebook group (who knew!).

Also, because you mentioned poetry I will mention a pet opinion: I think poetry and comics are extremely similar, and I love them for a lot of the same reasons. They’re both mediums with interesting constraints, and doing them well requires pulling out the most evocative bits of action or detail out.

As with so many writers, you didn’t go from education to professionally writing immediately did you? There was a period where you went into the fashion industry, right? It’s one of those dream jobs for so many people, but what took you in that direction and what was it like to actually get one of those ‘dream’ jobs?

HV: Well, it wasn’t a dream! It also wasn’t the worst stereotype of those types of jobs. I worked with a lot of lovely, dedicated, creative people and I got to do things that were in retrospect very cool, and very much what I dreamt of when I thought I wanted to make fashion a career. I started off with magazine internships in college, and then I bounced between a lot of different functions, trying to find something I liked (I started out in retail and ended up doing a digital strategy/marketing/event production work by the end).

The issue was there was a disconnect between the level of stress and military precision required and what we were doing – I found myself getting worked up about things that weren’t deeply important to me. I still love fashion as an art form, and watch the shows online.

I was kvetching about this to a good friend one day, and he mentioned a programming retreat he was going to that summer was hiring. I applied, was very surprised to be hired, and have been working there happily for almost 9 years now. Every year I get to meet hundreds of really thoughtful, creative people from all over the map and watch them do ambitious work that really lights them up. Being in that environment is catching, and it’s had a big effect on my own ability to focus on what I want to do (write!).

And right now, you’ve moved out of New York and are in Colorado for work. What took you out to the mid-west?

HV: Mid-west! Them’s fightin’ words.

Ooops!

HV: I’m lucky to be able to work remotely, so I’m at the same job at the programming retreat. We essentially got priced out – our rent went up by over 20% last year and we got a $700 power bill out of nowhere, which made me untenably angry, lots of stomping around and shaking my fist in the real estate industry’s general direction.

My husband is from the real Midwest – rural Iowa – and the city was also starting to grate on him. We’d always talked about Colorado wistfully as a place we’d retire to, but then I checked the rent prices, and we had soon after booked a UHaul. It was quite a drive – we had three cats with us in the cab and all of our earthly possessions in the back. I hope to never touch Nebraska again.

Like so many modern writers, particularly in comics, you haven’t yet made the jump into full-time writing. The economics of comics, particularly for newer writers, are punishing of course. But is the eventual plan to push on and go full-time with the writing?

HV: Punishing is a very good word for it! I’m grateful to have a steady job I love that can support what is currently a very expensive hobby; otherwise I wouldn’t be able to produce my own books, or take classes, or work with freelance editor to refine things.

Writing is the main thing I do outside of work time, and frankly I feel lucky that anyone pays me to do it at all. But yes, down the road it’d be wonderful if I could do that all day. I have no idea when that will be – I’m having my first kid in August, so I don’t think it’ll be soon!

Congratulations!

Now, seeing as you went from poetry and prose to comics, how did you manage that? Did you study comics scripting at all, consult things like Eisner or McCloud’s works, talk to some comics making friends or acquaintances, or was it simply a case of jumping into it, fingers crossed?

HV: I did indeed read McCloud’s Understanding Comics, which was extremely helpful! I’ve accumulated a bunch of books about writing and craft; I also love Framed Ink, How to Write Comics the DC Way, What It Is, The From Hell Companion, and (of course!) The 2000 AD Script Book.

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HV: The most useful exercise I did when I was getting started was to reverse engineer some of my favorite comics: I’d read through them and map out how many pages and panels the team used for the different story beats. And I read and reread more comics and tried to push myself to check out new stuff, which is the best way keep learning.

How have you refined your comics-making process over the last few years as you’ve been getting more work at different places – and can you give us an idea of how that process goes?

HV: I’ve been meeting with a writing group for the last 4 or so years, and this is a running joke that after I try something as a short story, maybe a novella, suddenly the story becomes a comic. I’ll usually get an idea I can’t shake, and those usually come from happening on an article or video or talking to someone about something fun and terrifying like immortal mice. I’ll then write a short story to work out the kinks in the idea.

After I do that it’s easier to see if it’s something I can, say, pitch for a Future Shock or if it’s something I’d want to make longer, and once I know that I’ll do a page-by-page outline and then a very bad panel-by-panel sketch to see how things roughly work. After I’m happy with that I finish up the script. Every project varies, but if I’m able to see the art before it goes to the letterer, I’ll do a last pass on the dialogue and captions to refine them a bit.

Moving onto your comics work and your first published comic, Andraste. How did that one begin – I believe it was originally poetry? What was it that caused you to shift medium and develop it as a comic instead of publishing it as poetry?

HV: I couldn’t get it to work any other way! I thought about how to come at that story for a really long time, and I couldn’t figure out another way to write it that felt right. Whenever I thought about the characters and the story I saw them so clearly. So I did what everyone highly recommends* when you’re just starting out – I planned a 12-issue historical fantasy series.

[*No one recommends this.]

Unusually perhaps, you found your artist on Facebook – Was that Unai Ortiz de Zarate? It’s an interesting way to do it – what was the reasoning for that?

HV: It was Unai! That was one of the more fortunate things that’s happened to me in comics, and certainly the most fortunate thing to ever happen to me on Facebook. I didn’t know anyone in the industry at that point, so I poked around on Reddit a bit, and then joined a Facebook group called Connecting Comic Writers and Artists, and that’s its sole purpose – I trawled it quietly and when Unai posted that he was looking for work I reached out to him. His good friend is DC Alonso, who does the colors on Andraste and New Rat City, my other creator-owned book.

Other artists involved include Abel Cicero, George Quadros, and Carlos Nieto on art, with DC Alonso on colours, Micah Myers on letters.

Andraste is a series about the Boudican rebellion in first century Britannia. As you put it on the PR, ‘It’s also about what war does to families, the Roman propaganda machine, Druidic rituals, interdimensional mastiffs, and mouthless death goddesses. You heard me.’

So, why choose this subject? Was it something you’d always been fascinated by?

HV: I’ve always been very drawn to war stories. I saw Boudicca’s statue in London when I visited in 2010 and proceeded to read whatever I could find about her – it was really her daughters, who are riding on the back of her chariot, who grabbed me, though, and they’re who the book centers on.

I imagine this, more than most projects, meant a deep dive into the history books for research?

HV: It certainly did! I actually did a tier for the Kickstarter where I sent a few folks a history book I used during the process. It’s a lot of guesswork, though. The Romans wrote about her many years after she died as a kind of allegory, so you can’t really trust that as the truth. And a lot of the Roman writing about Britannia was sensationalism – an island of giants at the edge of the world! There are Roman historians in the book who struggle with writing what’s true, what’s exciting, and what the emperor wants put down for posterity.

It’s a full colour piece, with some lush artwork. Was it published just as a webcomic or did you make print comics of the series?

HV: Both! I have single issues I bring to conventions, and I printed a run of trade paperbacks of issues #1-3 for a Kickstarter campaign. It’s also available on Zestworld and GlobalComix.

Yes, I’ve read them and so should everyone else, it’s really a good first comic from yourself and your artists. Are there plans to do more?

HV: Thank you, I appreciate that! There are – I want to finish the story. Unai is back on the book after recovering pretty heroically from an illness, and he’s just wrapped up the inks on Issue #5. I’m hoping we’ll have #6 done before the end of the summer, but that ball’s in my court now.

What sort of pitfalls came with self-publishing your work? I’ve spoken to many writers and creatives over here in the UK who admit that their very first self-published things are a steep learning curve, and often things that they don’t revisit too often, far too many things they’d alter if they did. But it’s also a perfect training ground for a writer and artist, getting the kinks out, honing what you do, making your mistakes and improving, improving.

How did you approach this, your first ever comics work?

HV: There are absolutely things I’d do differently if I was starting that book now. But one thing I’ve learned is that you have to find the balance between giving something your best shot and being so precious about putting something out in the world that you never do. If I hadn’t started putting Andraste out there when I did, I wouldn’t have gotten valuable feedback on it, or gained some of the confidence to keep going. Like you said, you have to hone your skills, and you need some external friction to hone anything.

Those three issues of Andraste then made up the first collection that you raised funds for on Kickstarter. There are both wonderful tales of creatives being able to connect with a whole new audience out there and also various horror stories of delays and disappointments involved.

Is it a method you’d use again, either to continue with Andraste or to fund more collected editions of your future works?

HV: Kickstarter is wonderful, and I’ve used it for three campaigns so far – Andraste and my two New Rat City campaigns. I’ll absolutely be back when I’m ready with another book. There’s a great community of creators on Kickstarter, and I met some great friends there. Their comic audience is also much bigger than the group I’d be able to reach on my own, which is a huge benefit when you’re just starting out.

There’s one big caveat to my opinion: for some sick reason I enjoy the repetitive manual labor of shipping hundreds of books, and the numbing work of putting in print orders and making spreadsheets of rewards and addresses. If you do not like to do those kinds of things, and can’t afford to pay someone else to do them, consider another route!

When there’s a campaign that doesn’t deliver, it makes things harder for everyone (which is terrible, but understandable – people want the books they pay for!), and likely impossible for you to crowdfund later on (as it should – get people their books!).

You first came to prominence, at least as far as 2000 AD was concerned, with your win at the 2000 AD & Thought Bubble talent search in 2021.

HV: I would definitely agree with the unqualified ‘first’ there!

Well, I say ‘at’ the talent search, but given that this was in peak plague times, it was a zoom thing with the contest moving online for a couple of years. For you, this was a fortunate turn of events as you hadn’t been able to make it across to Thought Bubble.

What was it that caught your eye about the 2000 AD & Thought Bubble contest? Had you seen it before then but hadn’t entered for whatever reasons or was this the first time you’d come across it?

HV: I’d heard of the contest in 2020 – Twitter, I think? – and thought about entering, but I didn’t feel like I had something that was worthy of a Future Shock. I stewed on it for about a year, in which I also happened to learn about mouse experiments from some friends, and was selfishly glad I could still enter online when the time came!

As far as the contest itself was concerned, I know we’ve spoken about it before but I wanted to ask you about it again as it’s such a big part of what’s put you where you are today. (We spoke before about it in April 2022 – you can read that interview with Honor and the winning artist, Lee Milmore, here.)

The writer’s pitch was allowed to be pre-recorded that year, wasn’t it? So no endless practising to get it absolutely right? Although I imagine the process of pre-recording it was one of endless retakes?

HV: I am… not very video-adept, so it took quite a while to get to an angle that worked, where I didn’t sound like a dope, where a cat didn’t march in and scream, and so on. I wrote out the pitch and then a shorter script for myself to read.

Would you have preferred to have done the pitch in person or did the virtual, pre-recorded pitching process suit you better?

HV: Oh, probably video, though it would have been very cool to be able to go to Thought Bubble! My voice sometimes does a fun surprise wobble when I talk in front of a lot of people, which compounds and makes me feel great, so it was preferable to be able to sit in my office and essentially talk to myself.

That Thought Bubble win meant you and winning artist Lee Millmore were assigned your Future Shock pitch, Relict, as a job for the Prog, which eventually saw print in 2000 AD Prog 2279 (April 2022).

Let’s talk for a moment about what that moment of winning meant to you. How did you find out?

HV: I saw the an email from Michael Molcher letting me know I’d won first thing in the morning, and I ran around my apartment excitedly before figuring out that the videos of the judging panels were going live very soon (3 pm GMT was 9 am for me!), so I somehow sat down and my husband and I watched them with our coffee.

And was it more of a thrill to win or to finally see your work in print in 2000 AD the following April?

HV: It was all pretty thrilling, but I do think holding the Prog in my hands was the more exciting thing – it was when I got to see the absolutely incredible work that Lee did to bring that whole world to life, and that mushroom cloud in the last panel was all him, and was killer.

What sort of feedback did you get from the TB judges about Relict? Were there lots of changes necessary to get it to publication or was it pretty much print ready?

HV: I sent a script to Matt a few days after the contest, and he got back to me with some helpful notes about clarifying and amping up Stephen’s narration, and on the big stabby scene on page 3, which made the whole thing stronger. After I made those changes it was sent on to Lee.

And how did you find the whole experience of Relict – presumably this would be the first time you’d had a comics script edited?

HV: I’d run scripts by friends for feedback, but this was the first time I’d had a finished script edited in this kind of context, absolutely. I was nervous! But it was only helpful, both on the level of that particular story and in improving my writing in general.  

So, looking at Relict, what was the inspiration for this particular first Future Shock?

HV: The seed of it came from a talk someone gave at work about experiments on senescent cells in mice, and how it’s technically possible that the first immortal mouse had been created. And then I started thinking about what that mouse would be doing a thousand years from now, and what it would think of us – would it become intelligent enough to introspect and build, given so much time? I hoped so, because that would be adorable.

The more I thought about it, the more I thought that he wouldn’t be very happy with us, if he knew the whole story of how he was made. He’d come to that slowly, as he woke up out of mousey ignorance over the course of a thousand or so years.

How long did it take you from first imaginings to finished pitch?

HV: I heard of this immortal mouse situation in early September of 2021 and wrote a short story version of Relict shortly after that. I thought it would make a pretty neat Future Shock, so I got a pitch together in October, so it was pretty quick!

There’s a focus on animal experimentation in Relict as one particular test subject, Stephen, finds himself a relict in a far future time, long-lived and self-educated, able to travel back in time to warn of the impending doom – only to find that the ‘makers’, us, just aren’t worth saving.  

One issue that seemed far-fetched on first reading it is the idea of senescence (the biological process of ageing) resulting in an extremely long-lived mouse, the immortal mouse you mentioned. However, after a fascinating deep dive into it all, I see that making DNA repairs on mice has meant that scientists have been able to manipulate the ageing process. Which is one of those things that just makes you realise how incredible biology can be.

HV: It is! That’s my favorite kind of science fiction, where you go “No way, that’s ridiculous…wait. OH SH*T.” As I was working on this story a friend who is a neuroscientist and has done a bunch of mouse experiments and is also in my writing group sent me a bunch of papers – people have done lots of interesting things (most of them brutal) to mice.

Was it a case of you and Lee working together to develop the finished FS or did he pretty much work off the finished script?

HV: He worked off the finished script! I didn’t see the final artwork until publication, which made it all extra exciting.

And looking back, how did you think Relict ended up? Were you happy with it on publication?

HV: I really was, and still am! I can’t say enough good things about Lee’s artwork and the tone – grim, sad, but also fantastical – and the deep understanding of 2000 AD history he brought to the story. And having that Future Shock tag on the first page was a trip.

Your second published tale in 2000 AD was another Future Shock, in Prog 2280 (May 2022) – just one short week from your debut. That was Smart Home with art by VV Glass, appearing in one of the regular Regened Progs.

So how did that second one come about – although they appeared in short order, did you get commissioned for that second FS immediately after the win or was it some time later?

HV: Matt emailed me about that story in February 2022, so it was a few months after I’d sent in the Relict script and a few months before it was published. He asked if I could write something for the Regened issue, and I pitched him a couple of ideas, including Smart Home.

Smart Home was something set in pretty much present day, with a present day fear, that of all those AI powered household devices gaining sentience and taking over. Here it’s another experiment, this time a boy genius working on a Roomba and creating Rosie, something very special that eventually may just end up saving the world.

As it was a Regened FS was there any change to the way you wrote the tale or is it more a case of enjoying giving the kids a scare but toning it down just a touch?

HV: Matt said ‘minimal violence, fairly light in tone’ for the Regened issue, and I like a blood spatter here and there, so I did have to do a little self-editing before I sent in any pitches!

It strikes me that it’s an example of how Regened tales rarely seem to talk down to the kids they’re designed for. The storytelling is complex, requiring the reader to understand the concepts of AI, the position that Rosie finds itself in, and the impact its sentience has. Then you throw in a jump forward in time and Rosie MkII, complete with an ending that requires the reader to grasp just what Rosie MkI has averted.

I think it’s obvious from that that you’re a writer who appreciates just how knowledgable and visually literate children are.

HV: Well again, thank you! I agree that Regened stories don’t talk down to kids, and I don’t think literature or comics should do that in general – kids are smart, and they’re ambitious readers, and just like anyone else I don’t think the ones reading science fiction comics would take kindly to being pandered to!

I also have to remember sometimes that kids now have a relationship to technology that’s way more intuitive and natural than mine. My friends’ kids are generally polite to their Alexas and Google Homes, and will not be at the top of the bad list come the singularity.

Your third 2000 AD work came in September 2022 with another Future Shock, Echo with Liana Kangas (2000 AD Prog 2301).

This one was a play on Vegas in space, with one unlucky punter getting in far deeper than he ever imagined. Was that one based on your own experiences of falling foul of Vegas?

HV: It was not! I’ve only been to Vegas once, and that’s using ‘been’ generously: my husband and I passed through the airport and quickly drove out of the city on the way to Zion National Park in Utah, because we’re no fun.

I did go to Atlantic City in New Jersey once – that’s Vegas’ sad old uncle, for the uninitiated. It was terrifying in its own way, and there’s a little splinter of that experience here: the star’s actual form is the Atlantic City to the Vegas of the hologram form her fans see.

Again, as another short FS, it’s all about getting the idea over in such a short number of pages. Is there a particular mindset you have to get into to pare down the story and get to the essence of what it’s all about to deliver a full tale, beginning, middle, end in just 5 pages?

HV: I often think of the saying “If I had more time I would have written you a shorter letter,” when I’m working on something short. It takes more time, because I have to figure out the ‘bulkier’ version of the story, then cut it down to the absolute minimum of words and images to get what I’ve got to get across. And as that’s happening, there’s always the little voice asking if the story will hold up over 4 or 5 pages that way – not everything does. Some stories need more air, or room to get into backstory or a longer conversation, and then they go in the Not Quite a Future Shock folder. When you have twenty-odd pages or more you can wander a little, and be less strict with yourself.

I like both forms – Future Shocks are a little like deciding to write a sestina. You can’t be as freewheeling, but that form or length constraint forces  you to do really interesting things, and find different words and images you wouldn’t have found otherwise.

Again, a bit like buses, just after that third Future Shock you had your first strip in the Megazine, Anderson, Psi: Allied Forces. It was part of the Prog/Megazine alternative Judgement Day storyline – The Darkest Judge – for the 30th anniversary of the original story. It appeared in Judge Dredd Megazine 448 and featured two classic characters – Anderson and Johnny Alpha – as drawn by Boo Cook.

How did that come about?

HV: In April 2022 I got an email from Matt asking about doing a 5-page Judge Anderson story for a special that was coming out later that year.

At this point, you’re a new writer to 2000 AD with just three Future Shocks to your name – so when you got the call, what was going through your mind, getting to play with the great characters here?

HV: It put me in a very similar mental state to when I got the call about the Thought Bubble contest! I was so overly excited I sent an Anderson story idea over before he had a chance to send me the spec for the actual issue…

Then there was also the added pressure of writing a beloved, awesome character – I really didn’t want to screw that up. I’d read a bunch of Judge Anderson’s stories at that point, and loved her, and shortly after I got that email I read Alec Worley’s Year One novel and got my hands on all of the stories I hadn’t read yet.

Now, because it was part of the overarching story of Johnny Alpha coming back to destroy all those zombies, did you get given pointers with that one as to where you needed to take it or was it more structured than that?

HV: I got a brief on the larger event, and what needed to happen in the 5-pager. Since it was such a big event with so many stories, there was some back and forth about what the state of things had to be at that moment – how Anderson had gotten to the Radlands, what Johnny knew and didn’t, and so on. I imagine Matt had one of those red string maps detectives use.

So it’s Judge Anderson and Johnny Alpha fighting zombies – it’s a bit of a whoah moment I’d imagine?

HV: There is no horror genre I like better than zombies, so that was definitely a cherry on top of everything. The image that came first was of Anderson sitting on top of a high rock spire to stay out of their clutches, overheated and getting a little frustrated.

Did you find yourself going through lots of old Anderson/Stront tales to get a feel for the characters?

HV: I did! When I learned that it wasn’t just Anderson, but Anderson and Johnny Alpha, I then went and read the Search/Destroy Agency Files and got to shed a tear for Wulf several decades late.

Finally, for 2000 AD for now, your fifth published piece came in Prog 2316, Terror Tales: Rites, published in January 2023 with art by Steve Yeowell.

It’s one that shows just how impressive these short tales can be – this one was just four pages long – with the storyline doing a wonderful switch to put the reader off balance.

It all pivots on one fascinating idea again, that of a society where mass hauntings started. You don’t go into the whys of it, no time for that, but the outcome you develop, of ghostbusters ridding houses of the ghostly presences for cash – one up from babysitting if you will – it’s a great concept. And then, just when we think we know where it’s going you do that great switch, completely throwing the reader and giving the story a real sense of terror when you realise just what it all means.

Again, was this something that came out of an interest you had in the supernatural or just from a random thought that developed into an idea and then into the story?

HV: This one came from apartment-watching for a friend a few years ago – I would go and check his mailboxes, and make sure everything was in order when he was out of town. When I went in one day, a few of the shelves on one of his bookshelves had collapsed and thrown books everywhere, and I got embarrassingly, primordially scared for a few minutes. Before she died, it was his mother’s apartment, and I apologized for bothering her out of instinct, without really knowing why.

On my way home I thought: what if it was someone’s job not to watch an apartment and get mail, but to stop a ghost from making trouble until it had moved on? What if that was as common a job as being a cleaner or an exterminator? And it went from there. I (again) wrote it as a little short story I was never quite happy with, and then I wrote it as Rites and it worked.

Now, away from 2000 AD, you’ve also written for Zenescope in the US – ‘fun, pulpy horror and takes on fairy tales and stuff,’ as you put it.

That includes work in Zenescope’s Grimm Tales of Terror Quarterly: Back To School (June 2022), Grimm Tales of Terror Holiday Special (December 2022), Grimm Tales of Terror Valentine’s Special (February 2023), Myths and Legends: Black Knight (March 2023), and Grimm Tales of Terror Heart’s Desire (April 2023). There’s also been a piece, Lost & Found, in Scott Snyder Presents: Tales From the Cloakroom anthology (August 2022).

What were those like? Again, it’s you flexing the writing muscles on short stories, a real training ground for any new writer to hone their skills.

HV: Writing the Tales of Terror is a lot of fun – each story in those books is about 17 pages, with a thread narrated by Keres, Goddess of Death, knitting it all together. For these books I get outlines from Zenescope’s editors and run from there, so it’s a very different process – constrained and generative in a different way. And they are blood-y, which I enjoy writing – the most recent Tales of Terror has my top two favorite deaths I’ve written so far.

I also got to do a 72-page book in their main Grimm Fairy Tale Universe, about the Black Knight and Morgan Le Faye fighting their way through Camelot and Wonderland and downtown New York City. The Johnny Alpha/Anderson story trained me well for that, because it involved a lot of research and mental-model building for a set of characters and parallel worlds.

The Tales from the Cloakroom Anthology was put together in a heroic effort by some fellow students (not me! I only wrote the short) in Scott Snyder’s Comics Writing class Discord – the prompt there was to write something involving a jacket, and the stories have a great range.

You’re also writing New Rat City for Scout Comics in the US , although this is another that you first released through Kickstarter – what’s that one all about? ‘Rats, roaches, and ecological mayhem,’ is how the web site describes it.

HV: It’s another tale of a future world and animals, with pest controllers attempting to keep the world livable for the few remaining humans in New York City after the disaster and the abandonment of the city.

Where did the idea for this one come from?

HV: That one is a deep cut! I’m from New York, and my dad was an exterminator for years when I was a kid. He also very sincerely loves animals (he’d trap and release when he could), and I always found that interesting. And I’m not only saying this because of my dad, but despite the goofy way they’re often portrayed, exterminators are really curious, thoughtful people. They do work most people don’t want to do, they have to do a lot of detective work, and if they do their jobs well they bring a pretty immense amount of psychological and practical relief to people.  

So one day I was thinking: what if exterminators were the most important people in the city, and they all loved animals? What point would the city have to get to for that to be the case: how abandoned, how screwed up? It all spun out from there: it’d have to be a little ways in the future, but at that point wouldn’t our regard for and understanding of animals be reflected in our laws? What if exterminators—ahem, pest controllers!—couldn’t kill anything? Where would they put all the rats?! It’s basically my worst-case scenario for NYC. And, I say stridently, it happened before the mayor started his anti-rat campaign (maybe he should read the series to see how well that’ll go).

So, that brings us up to date with your published work.

What else have you got in the fire right now? I hear there’s a longer collaboration with Lee Milmore in the offing? Any clues on what that one entails?

HV: I’m expecting my first kid in August, so he’s quickly becoming my main project, physically and mentally! It’s also (no offense meant to him) giving me ideas for some fun body horror stories…

But yes, by the time this is published I will have a script in (goddammit!) for a longer story about Stephen and the mice of Relict get up to after the Future Shock. I’m still working on Andraste as well – I’m hoping to finish the script for #7 of that series before the end of the summer.

Will you keep pitching to 2000 AD? And will that be for more one-offs or have you some ideas for new series you fancy?

HV: I will keep pitching until Tharg blocks my email address. I have a little folder of potential Future Shock and Terror Tales pitches I need to revisit soon and cull, and a few stories I want to polish up for longer pitches, but I think I’ll hold on to those until the fall, when I’m surer of the shape I’ll be in to write! Depends on how this impending kid sleeps.

And when it comes to pitching, are you a writer who finds it relatively easy to come up with concepts?

HV: I’ll usually have a lot of ideas rolling around at once, and I keep them on post-it notes and text documents until I’m ready to work them out. It then takes me a while to knead them into something sensical, and I usually have to write them a few different ways so I can move them out of primordial lizard-brain soup mode and understand what they are.

The more I pitch, the easier and less heartburn-inducing that gets, though I am always frankly a tiny bit scared and think I always will be.

One for fun now… if you could cherry-pick a dream project to write for 2000 AD, from any point in the comic’s history, what would you pick? And have you already got an idea for the direction you’d take it?

HV: PRESSURE! If I’m being bold and presumptuous in throwing ideas out there, a dream would be a Slàine/Wulf Sternhammer time-hopping crossover where they have to fight snake aliens and a big old Fenris wolf. I’d also love to write a Western where the Texas City Judges deal with the disastrous return of Ratty, my favorite hatted rat.

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We always like to end with a quick look at whatever you have coming out, either in the coming months or planned in the far-flung future. What sort of comics can we expect from you in the next year(s)?

HV: The remainder of Andraste will be coming out in a trickle from me over the next couple of years! I’m planning to publish it digitally on GlobalComix and Zestworld, and to crowdfund print campaigns.

The trade paperback of New Rat City will be out in November 2023 from Scout Comics.

Beyond that, we’ll see! I have some plans for horror one-shots, and a much bigger science fiction book that has been chewing on me for a couple of years now, that I hope to get rolling in 2024.

Thank you so much to Honor for taking part in the Creator Profiles, it’s a big, big interview and we’re always grateful for creators to take part.

Be sure to have a good read of her interview with Lee Milmore about her win at the 2000 AD & Thought Bubble new talent search contest and her first published 2000 AD work, Relict, here.

You can find Honor online at her website and Twitter, and be sure to subscribe to her newsletter. 

HONOR VINCENT – COMIC BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adraste (Mar 2021), self-published through Kickstarter – art by Unai Ortiz de Zarate, Abel Cicero, George Quadros, Carlos Nieto, colours by DC Alonso, letters by Micah Myers.
New Rat City part 1 – issues 1&2 (Jan 2022), self-published through Kickstarter, art by George Quadros.
Future Shocks: Relict (April 2022), 2000 AD Prog 2279 – art by Lee Milmore.
Future Shocks: Smart Home (May 2022), 2000 AD Prog 2280 – art by VV Glass.
The Flayer – in Zenoscope’s Grimm Tales of Terror Quarterly: Back To School (June 2022) – art by Dario Tallarico, Massimiliano La Manno, Leonardo Paciarotti.
Lost & Found, in Scott Snyder Presents: Tales From the Cloakroom (August 2022) – art by Mustafa Karasu.
Future Shocks: Echo (Sept 2022), 2000 AD Prog 2301 – art by Liana Kangas.
New Rat City issue 1 (Sept 2022), Scout Comics, art by George Quadros.
Anderson, Psi Division: Allied Forces (Oct 2022), Judge Dredd Megazine 448 – art by Boo Cook.
New Rat City part 2 – issues 3&4 (Oct 2022), self-published through Kickstarter, art by George Quadros.
Zenoscope’s Grimm Tales of Terror Holiday Special (December 2022), art by Dario Tallarico, Massimiliano La Manno, Alessandro Uezu, Juan Franciso Mota.
Terror Tale: Rites (Jan 2023), 2000 AD Prog 2316, art by Steve Yeowell.
Zenoscope’s Grimm Tales of Terror Valentine’s Special (February 2023), story by David Wohl, Dave Franchini, and Honor Vincent. Art by Juan Francisco Mota, Alessandro Uezu, Dario Tallarico, Ricardo Osnaya, Massimiliano La Manno, Leonardo Paciarotti, Jorge Cortes, Maxflan Araujo, Walter Pereyra.
Zenoscope’s Myths and Legends Quarterly: The Black Knight Fate Of Legends (March 2023), story by David Wohl, Dave Franchini, and Honor Vincent, written by Honor Vincent. Art by Ricardo Osnaya, Juan Francsico Mota, Dario Tallarico, Maxflan Araujo, Leonardo Paciarotti.
Zenoscope’s Grimm Tales of Terror Heart’s Desire (April 2023), story by Honor Vincent, David Wohl, Dave Franchini, written by Honor Vincent. Art by Massimiliano La Manno, Eduardo Garcia, Dario Carrasco, Alessandro Uezu, Eduardo Garcia, Maxflan Araujo.
New Rat City collected edition (Nov 2023), Scout Comics, art by George Quadros.