Tag: interview

Judge Dredd: Special Relationship is running right now in the pages of 2000 AD, a thrill power packed political thriller bringing Mega-City One and Brit Cit to the brink of war.

We sat down to talk with writer Rob Williams and artist Patrick Goddard about what to expect from Special Relationship and just how bad things can get…

Rob, Patrick Your new Judge Dredd serial, Special Relationship, began in 2000 AD Prog 2289, a slow-build thing that promises to blow the relationship between Mega-City One and Brit Cit to pieces.

With the first three episodes, there’s an awful lot going on – Sov hackers, diplomatic negotiations, the Atlantis colony being taken over by Brit-Cit, MC-1 dispatching Dredd and a group to take it back, not to mention how difficult it is to get good quality snacks if you’re working in the Sov Hacker farm.

So, Rob, can you give us your take on the story – what’s it all about, who’s involved, and just how big a problem will this end up being in Dredd’s world?

ROB WILLIAMS: For my sins, I thought it’d be fun, and more dramatically compelling, to tell this story out of sequence. Sometimes you need your head seeing to, as it makes for a bit of a headtwist as a writer making sure you have the timeline correct.

But it’s indicative, I hope, of a very small argument escalating and getting out of control to the point where an actual war between MC-1 and Brit-Cit looks likely – with the pesky Sov intelligence unit pushing all the right buttons behind the scenes and MC-1 trying to catch them in the act.

The Black Atlantic Tunnel was destroyed in The Hard Way – a story myself, Arthur Wyatt and Jake Lynch did last year. MC-1 and Brit-Cit, at start of our story, are having tense negotiations about who should pay for this. And then a sensitive piece of intel is dropped in Brit-Cit’s lap. And suddenly two small commando teams – one lead by Dredd – are sent to the rebuilding platform in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean to claim it for their respective cities. While the nukes are getting slowly warmed up in their silos.

How many episodes do we have to look forward to with Special Relationship?

RW: Six for this one.

It’s a series that’s both slow build and action packed, but it feels, more than anything else, like an espionage thriller to me – all the political aspects, the shadowy intelligence agents, the behind the scenes stuff, no-one knowing the whole picture. Is that what you were going for here?

RW: Yeah, I’m a big Le Carre fan and his influence is writ large here. The fact that Smiley was called ‘Smiley’ may have given that away!

But I loved the idea of how a major World War could build from very prosaic things. We open with a vending machine where the one remaining crisp packet won’t drop. Fast forward six episodes and two Mega-Cities could easily be dust and craters. 

Yep, it’s all about that damn vending machine really, isn’t it?

One thing that adds to that sense of mystery and intrigue in the storytelling is the split timeline – pre- and post-hack scenes mixing things up – why go this route with this particular story?

RW: Because I like giving myself headaches. And I felt doing it this way built tension. It conveyed the sense that no-one’s got the big picture here, and that while Dredd is being… well, Dredd… across the ocean actions are occurring that effect every bullet he’s firing.

It’s also the first time we’ve seen Patrick on art for one of your big storylines Rob. What do you think of what you ‘ve seen so far?

RW: Paddy’s terrific. Great visceral storytelling. He’s also quite willing to give himself a meltdown drawing insane Mega-City One cityscapes etc. 

We did a little two-part Dredd a few years back but this is the first time he and I have done a longer Dredd story together. I’m sure we’ll do more.

Yes, that was the 2-part Unearthed in Progs 2124 and 2125 (co-written by Chris Weston).

Are you glad to get onboard with a longer Dredd this time Patrick?

PATRICK GODDARD: Yes, he’s a busy man to pin down but glad I’ve managed to do it eventually!

Patrick, how did you approach it all – have you been following what’s been going on in Dredd with Maitland, The Red Queen, Atlantis, etc, etc?

PG: Short answer would be…no (for my shame), I was aware of Maitland and co and what happened at Atlantis but I’m always full of gratitude to Tharg for supplying the necessary ref. I just get little time to read comics these days, my “to Read’ pile is getting ridiculous!

What sort of mood were you looking to bring to the story with your art this time round?

PG: I try and tackle Dredd the same way I always do, make it sort of liveable and that it could exist. I didn’t get the whole script at the beginning so I was as much in the dark as anyone as in what direction it was going in too. But it had a mix of everything that you’d expect from Rob; action, humour, consequence and a heavy dose of espionage and setup.

Rob, there’s also something of a sense that things are all connecting up, with stories from Rob, Arthur Wyatt, Rory McConville, all playing a part in each other’s stories recently, all of them looking beyond the borders of MC-1.

You and Arthur rather set things in motion really with the pushing forward of Judge Maitland and her revelation of what could transform the Law in MC-1. But there’s also all that’s gone on with the Red Queen storyline that Arthur’s been busy running over in the Megazine with Jake Lynch. And of course, you all came together recently in The Hard Way (Progs 2250-2255) where Dredd and Maitland were targeted by The Red Queen.

For those that haven’t had chance to catch up… how would you describe how things have gone on? Can you give us something of a catch-up to this point?

RW: Arthur and I have this slow-burn Judge Maitland storyline that we’ve been working on for a few years now. We’ve just written the latest ‘move the Maitland storyline on’ story – The Pitch – and we have the ending all planned out.

It’s Maitland, head of Accounts for the Judges – telling the Council of Five that the whole Justice Dept. system doesn’t work and all they’re doing is funding a non-stop war with the citizens they can never win. Maitland wants to put more money into education to try and stop that war. Will they let her?

The fun thing of running this story so incrementally over a number of years is that both Arthur and I can go off and write other stories that sort of spring out of this narrative spine.

The Hard Way was the Red Queen hiring mercenaries to kill Maitland. Atlantis was blown up at the end of that. That leads to the rebuild, which is an inciting incident in Special Relationship.

We have a couple of other stories that sort of come out of my & Arthur’s big master plot for Maitland too. I have one with Jake Lynch coming up, Sentientoid’s Big Idea. Arthur and I have another in the works. It’s really plot points suggesting other plot points. It’s fun.

Obviously the big take away from the first three episodes is the threat of war between Brit Cit and MC-1, with the conflict escalating on Atlantis Port.

But there’s also a huge political aspect of it. We’ve got three sides here, the Sovs in some form or other, Brit Cit, and Dredd and MC-1… and so many potentially huge submit-plots percolating, Logan’s lies, Brit Cit’s Circus, the mysterious (and threatening) Modric.

Essentially, it feels like you’re definitely adding in a lot of different and new elements to it all. Are you leading up to something big here?

RW: No comment. You’ll have to read on to see.

Dammit!

It’s also a very political tale in more ways than one… as both MC-1 and Brit Cit could be accused of breaking international law ‘in a limited and specific way’… as has been the fashion from the current British government and it’s nearly resigned mop-topped muppet of a PM.

Is this a deliberate little swipe at the goings-on of the modern world that you wanted to get in?

RW: Oh, probably. That’s all in there but not in a concrete too ‘on the nose’ way. It’s more thinking that MC-1 and Brit-Cit have always been allies but why? Why the Special Relationship? Each state lies to each other and attempts to twist any deal in their favour.

The Sov state, meanwhile, was pretty much destroyed in the Apocalypse War but they still keep hitting MC-1 in other ways, with the Chaos Bug being the most obvious. Special Relationship shows them using espionage. Getting in the ears of the Brit-Cit leadership via wealth and influence.

That’s all very Brexit and the way the oligarchs embedded themselves in London and with the Conservative Party. Trying to influence the US election to get Trump in. Putin clearly realised you can go to war with a country without invading. That’s what Dredd, Logan and co are facing here. 

Of course, all of this huge interconnecting storyline originates with you and Arthur Wyatt bringing Maitland to the fore in Carry The Nine (Progs 2200-2203). It seems to me that’s a short tale that’s been a real springboard for a hell of a lot of things going on in Dredd’s world.

In an interview about Q-Topia (Megazine 444) recently, I asked Arthur about his plans for Maitland with this.. ‘now that you and Rob Williams have made her a star, you’ve got plans for her haven’t you? But are you ever going to convince Tharg to let you do the ultimate Maitland storyline, where she gets to put her plans in place, solves the crime problem and becomes the greatest Chief Judge of them all?’

Arthur said ‘maybe’… what do you have to say Rob?

RW: I too say ‘Maybe.’ Actually, no, we have talked through that Final Act storyline. We know how it plays out. I hope we’ll get the chance to tell it soon-ish.

Personally, I can’t wait… well, I can, because I want to see Maitland’s story play out for many years, but I also want to see how it all pans out – dammit!

Patrick, I’d imagine Special Relationship is one of the fun jobs to deal with as you’ve got a great mix of things going on here, a lot of variety in what you’re doing?

You’ve got the out and out action of Dredd and Brit Cit going to war in Atlantis, you’ve got the political stuff, lots of talking heads and the chance to impress in so many different ways. And then there’s the strangeness of the Brit Cit mystery scenes, the highly detailed and opulent British surroundings almost going back to the Victorian era.

PG: It’s always more fun when you switch it up, you never draw the same page twice so it’s always exciting to tackle a page every day. I’ve always liked Brit Cit and the mishmash of architecture and design; I could quite easily take a month designing stuff but sadly you just don’t get the time.

Although, I hadn’t realised the bridge/command centre was going to feature so much and would’ve done things different in hindsight (I made things awkward for myself with later scenes regarding its layout). I enjoyed drawing some of the quiet scenes that appear in an Italian restaurant and trying to portray the tension/feeling amongst the characters. 

Although, having said all that, I imagine it’s less of a headache than continually referencing all that MC-1 architecture when Ken Niemand sends you a Dredd script with Mona Plankhurst surfing her way through the city!?

PG:I find drawing MC-1 quite enjoyable if i’m honest, especially in those kinds of scenes where you just need an impression of the background. Anything goes in the Meg so you can manipulate the city-scape to fit your composition, add what shapes or shadows that work best.

The only thing I don’t draw are those single lane sky highways that seem suspended magically in mid-air, I just can’t get my brain to draw them! I need to ground it in some way so i know how it works.

Looking back at the last few years, you’ve found yourself increasingly involved with Rebellion and 2000 AD. Just in the last year or so we’ve had Special Relationship and Working Girl, the second Mona Plankhurst Judge Dredd storyline, as well as your work with Garth Ennis on the Battle Action Special and Captain Nina Petrova.

How are you feeling about where your art is right now? Not tempted to go back to teaching? (Don’t!!!!)

PG: Haha no fear of that, I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t want me anyway! I think I’m like most artists, you get your good and bad days, I just hope I keep learning and hopefully improving. There’s a lot of exciting new artists out there (annoyingly!) so it’s nice to be continually inspired!

Looking over your work and bio, one thing we’ve never talked about is your involvement with Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor Who. I believe some of your concept art was used to develop her costume?

PG: I’ve worked with Ray Holman the Doctor Who costume designer for quite a few years, since Calpaldi had a slight change of look, I think.

I’ve done a lot his designs over the years; aliens, special guests, cybermen, villains and I drew out Jodie’s first look months in advance so that was quite exciting. I used to draw them traditionally in colour but you soon realise the revisions needed so switched to digital for an easier life. Unfortunately the BBC kept all my originals, a few early ones were displayed at the Doctor Who centre at Cardiff Bay before it closed.

Are you splitting your time now between storyboarding/concept work and comic art like so many artists seem to be doing?

PG: Not so much, comics are very much my full-time job and keeps me busy. I did draw some costume designs for Tom Hardy’s Netflix film Havoc during lockdown but they came to me, I don’t go out looking for that sort of work it’s always been blind luck that it’s found me. There are way more talented people out there than me!

I’m pretty much focussed on comics right now and will be busy drawing my current strip until Christmas I reckon so it’ll be nice without any distractions. Unfortunately I can’t say what it is yet but hopefully people will be excited about it when it gets announced! 

Finally, when it comes to Special Relationship, can you take us through your process for getting the work to the finished pages we see? You’re still working traditionally I imagine – no temptation to move into digital yet?

PG: Yep, still all dirty ink and traditional! My process has always been the same, immerse yourself in the script and start working away at your thumbnail sketches, once they’re done, I move straight to the artboard drawing with my trusty blue pencil and then onto ink. I go through phases of pencilling and inking a page as I go but I’m currently pencilling all the pages first and then going back to see if any changes are needed before I ink them. I then hope I’ve left enough room for speech balloons as you never want to suffer the wrath of a letterer!

Here are some process pieces for you – I did a rough colour guide for the ‘commando’ costumes but I didn’t know who was colouring the strip, Quinton [Wnter] had already started work so there was no point in sending them but this was how I saw them…

PG: My rough thumbnail sketches which often evolve (and barely readable!), switching panels about to try and fit everything in…

One last thing – feel free to hype up whatever is coming next from you – whether it’s 2000 AD or beyond. 

RW: Sentientoid’s Big Idea is probably next for me on Dredd. It’s a three-parter drawn by Jake Lynch. Then I’m working on a new six-part Dredd drawn by Henry Flint that I’m enjoying writing a great deal. And Simon Fraser and I are still working away on Hershey Books Three and Four. Four will be the final book in our Hershey tale. It’s looking gorgeous.

Thanks as always to both Rob and Patrick for taking the time.

Judge Dredd: Special Relationship began in 2000 AD Prog 2289 and runs through Prog 2294. Who wins? Who loses? Will Brit Cit vote in another useless waste of space politician with no concept of what the real world is like? Actually, I may be confusing fiction and reality there – but these days, that’s very easy to do.

You can pick up Special Relationship from wherever you thrill power is sold, including the 2000 AD web shop.

For more interviews with Rob Williams, have a look at these – with Chris Weston talking Judge Dredd: The Musical, all about doing it The Hard Way with Jake Lynch and Arthur Wyatt  – plus, listen to him talking End of Days on the Thrill Cast here. And not to be out-done, Patrick Goddard has plenty of process chat with his Covers Uncovered – Prog 2021, Prog 2185, Prog 2205, Prog 2219, Prog 2244, and Prog 2264.

And because he’s so nice… more Patrick Goddard process work – ‘A couple of Brit-Cit commando judges and their weapons, plus some commando MC1 helmets I quite liked but didn’t fit the story.’

And finally, a little Dredd in peril…

Marking 2000 AD‘s 45th birthday, 2022’s summer special has a musical theme as the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic continues to celebrate 45 Revolutions Per Minute with Comic Rock!

Out on the shelves, right now, it’s the Sci-Fi Special at the speed of 45, including a stunning Judge Dredd story written by Michael Carroll and with a superb art job by Stewart K Moore, all suggested by Mike’s favourite music, Alphaville’s Ascension Day. We talked to Mike already, now it’s SK Moore’s turn to tell you all about it…

Okay, so this was all meant to be done and sorted last week, but art droid Moore was bogged down with work (and not work for Tharg either… bad art droid, bad art droid!)

However, if you’ve ever seen any of Stewart’s wonderful Covers Uncovered pieces, you know this one’s going to be absolutely worth the wait – and here he’s pulled out the stops once more to give us a full breakdown of the process behind Judge Dredd: Ascension. We’ve got images, we’ve got words, and we’ve got video for you…

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Hi there Stewart, let’s talk a little about Judge Dredd: Ascension, Mike Carroll’s story inspired by his favourite band, Alphaville and their track Ascension Day. So, given that Mike got the choice of music, how was it for you?

STEWART K MOORE: I don’t think I realised all the stories in the issue would be similarly inspired by music. Michael had the song reference mentioned at the top of his script, I saw that and just thought it was there to be helpful in some way to me. I draw to music all the time and differing music styles are important to how I work. But it wasn’t until a few days in that I clued-in that this was an over-arching theme. I might have been told, but I can’t recall. I just get stuck in and may have missed that.

Since it was inspired by a song, did you get elements of Ascension Day, whether from the lyrics, the mood, the pace of the song, into your storytelling here?

SKM: I did aim to link to a few lyrical elements. I also referenced the film Alphaville in another way. The band take their name from the French New-Wave science fiction film Alphaville so I put the director Jean-Luc Godard in one panel. I drew a man who looks a bit like him, anyway. That man is getting help from a paramedic in one panel.

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Ascension Day is also a Christian tradition referring to Christ’s ascension – physical ascension – into heaven. The villains runaway ego suggests, maybe, something of a ‘God Complex’ going on with the villain in this story. He seems to see himself as a potential saviour but he’s more an antichrist type.

So, on the last page, I have him being ‘raised up’ with his arms outstretched as though crucified. Dredd, bathed in light, for another reason, might be a spoiler, so I won’t define that, but another key element of Christ’s ascension. Suffice to say also, in essence here, a Pontus Pilate. Medical ‘crosses’ dot the panels.

Stewart, when you’re given something like this, how do you go about fleshing it all out? Is it a case of read and re-read the script whilst listening to the Alphaville track to get the tone and feel of it all down?

SKM: Yes, I get the script and hit the couch and read it over a few times, fairly slowly because I’m seeing it as I read. I watch it in my head and mostly it flows. But here and there I stop and re-read because I’m also composing panels and I’m thinking about the order in which people speak, so that affects my compositions.

I also don’t commit to thumbnail sketching until I’ve seen it all in my head. I then think about how to open the story and close the story with strong pages. A powerful opening page is very important.

I then look for a few key pages in which I can build panels on panels, as though coming at you in time. This is hard for me to explain, but it’s a prominent quality in Dredd comics. Henry Flint does it particularly well. It’s very hard to get right.

Then I thumbnail sketch everything. And then I blow up my thumbnails and drop them into pages in Clip Studio and grey them out and switch them to blue pencil so they are very light. Then I rest on that for a few hours. In this case over night and began inking in the morning.

Was it something where Mike’s story laid out all the story beats for you already or were you instrumental in getting the pacing right?

SKM: I’m not sure how to answer the beat question. A lot is right there in scene description. But we artists have these other considerations when it comes to drawing. I guess my aim is to get 100% of what The Writer gives me down on the page with another 100% from me in terms of the scene direction, characterisation, setting, attitude.

SKM: Sometimes I think I came up with some element or other only to see it was in the script all along. In this case only one gang (I think) is named, so I gave an opposing gang the name ‘The Demon Fleeto’. ‘Fleet’ or ‘Fleeto’ is a word long found among Glasgow gangs. I gave them demon masks as another theological reference. There’s just not a lot of time to think about it all because my actual drawing takes a bit of time, so I kind of forget how I did this or that.

Stewart, it’s another story from you where I just know there’s so much going on, so many wonderful details in the art that we could spend an entire month zooming in to almost microscopic detail to find them all. But how about picking a few and telling us all about them?

SKM: Well, the villain is obviously a bad guy but he’s not entirely wrong about the Justice Department. At any rate, this may only be his jaundiced view, but I drew the top of the med bay as an inverted Tick, as though it’s feeding off the city. There is also a device on the last page that is also, basically, a Tick.

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SKM: Mega-City One is eerily quiet in places and very often so in the comics. So I have two panels that glimpse the teeming millions. Both took a while. One is a market and the other several levels of activity across a section of streets. I felt the first street scene I saw in my head had been done to death and I would not be bringing anything new to the strip by drawing what flashed in on default. So I discarded that thumbnail. I then tried to think of a street scene we have never seen in MC-1.

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SKM: Like the Tick, this panel has a hidden image. You can glimpse a chyron I added that plays on the WW2 era public service posters but it changes ‘Keep Calm And Carry On‘ To ‘Keep Left And Move On.’

[Another feature of talking to Stewart – I always learn something new. Case in point, Chyron, noun, ‘an electronically generated caption superimposed on a television or movie screen.’]

SKM: On the wall, there’s a Pacman-like symbol. Below that is a crowd and competitive eater (eating in his spare time).

Now, if you pull back you can see that the staircase and Chyron and overhang form a larger version of that same Pac-Man and the crowd on the stairs are in its mouth.

Michael had described in his script a beating in the street to show the oppression of MC-1 and then I tried to find a way to imbed that impression in another visual way, the city devouring the people. Aiming to give the reader more every time they look at that strip.

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And now one of Stewart’s great process videos showing you how the Mega-City One street scene above was put together –

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SKM: Another example I can share is ‘iOS the KILL-BOT’

If you look closely it’s basically a flattish drone but keep looking and you might note that it’s kinda similar to the classic assassin. Hat and coat collar up, one eye squinted as it lines up the shot.

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After all that Ascension work influenced by Alphaville’s track, has Mike turned you into a big fan now? Or more to the point, do you use music to work to at all?

SKM: I remembered their hits and I like what I hear but I’ve not explored. I use music to motivate. I have a horror playlist for when I drew Defoe and I have a 2000 AD list for sci-fi action, you know, to keep me in the zone.

But I don’t listen to any of that music for leisure…but then, I don’t actually have any leisure time because If I have time to listen to music then I should really be drawing. I mean, I watch shows on the weekends but reading and just ‘hanging out’ suffers because I have so much to do. I’m always drawing something.

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And to end with, what’s coming up from you in the future?

SKM: Well, I’m working on something for the Christmas issue of 2000 AD, so look out for that. I just completed an oil painting yesterday that leans toward a Frazetta-like atmosphere for a new collection of a classic British comic character TBA.

Plus, Clover Press are just about to publish my graphic novel of Shakespeare’s Macbeth based on the performances of the Prague Shakespeare Company, originally produced by me as a small-press piece. And in October, I think, we will see the final volume of Project MKULTRA : Sex, Drugs and the CIA, also from Clover, a total of 262 pages. So I have to complete a special edition cover for that.

Plus plus, Shift will be publishing my adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Thrawn Janet in their next issue. I’m also starting a new optical illusion portrait like my Sharon Tate portrait.

In other work, I had a part in Wheel of Time season 2, so I’m curious to see how that pans out. Nothing big, they just needed somebody that could ride a horse while speaking :D, multitasking you might say, so I’m curious to see how that panned out. It wouldn’t be the first time I hit the cutting room floor :D.

Yes, Stewart’s also an actor when he’s not painting and making comics – and here’s Stewart the actor in Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys where he played the corrupt clockmaker…

SKM: Beyond that most nights I’m burning offerings before my framed picture of Tharg (that I keep in a special grotto in my studio) in the hope of receiving some mighty beneficence in the form of scripts…….always. Need me to draw anything?

And with that Boys From The Blackstuff image, off he went… like I said, it might be a bit late but, damn, that was worth it!

A massive thank you to Stewart for going above and beyond yet again!Judge Dredd: Ascension is the opening track in this years’ 2000 AD Sci-Fi Special 2022 – available right now from wherever Thrill Power is sold, including the 2000 AD web shop.

If you want to see more and read more from Stewart, you can go be amazed at the Covers Uncovered for 2000 AD Prog 2179 and the sort-of Covers Uncovered for the special poster in the 2000 AD Sci-Fi Special 2020, the 2000 AD Encyclopedia, and the wonderfully long version for 2000 AD Prog 2239.

You can (and should) follow him on Twitter, go look at his website, and his incredible Graphic Novel, PROJECT MK ULTRA: Sex, Drugs, and the CIA Volume 1 is available right now, with Volume 2 coming very soon.

Now, more of those great process videos that Stewart’s sent along for our enjoyment… first Lawmaster Leap, looking like this in the finished Sci-Fi Special…

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And then there’s this one… Inking Judge Dredd, featuring this panel…

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And another – Direct Inking… showing how this panel was constructed…

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And finally, those magnificent SK Moore Mega-City Punks that you’ll find all across this panel…

Every week, 2000 AD brings you the galaxy’s greatest artwork and 2000 AD Covers Uncovered takes you behind-the-scenes with the headline artists responsible for our top cover art – join bloggers Richard Bruton and Pete Wells as they uncover the greatest covers from 2000 AD!

This week, it’s the return of art droid Jake Lynch for Judge Dredd Megazine Issue 446 – out on 20 July.

This week though, something a little different, as the Lynch droid sent in his own timelapse process video and a few notes to go along with it… from which we’ve pulled a few screenshots to show you the essential bits of the process.

So, sit back, stick some music on, turn the fan up to ice blast, get yourself a nice cool drink, and try to relax and be amazed at how the magic gets done (and all while Mother Nature does her very best to turn you into a melting heap of human goo)

All ready? Then we’ll begin…

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First up, as you’d expect, the Lynch droid gets his head together and puts together some loose cover ideas for the Meg cover, based on the idea Tharg had suggested…

JAKE LYNCH: Rough ideas first. The first is what Tharg/Matt requested and then a few variations to see if any others suit. Number 1 was selected.

This time it looks like the Betelgeusian Gods were smiling down on the Lynch-droid as Tharg was obviously in a good mood and chose a cover sketch rather than making the Lynch-droid spend a few days coming up with another hundred.

The next step is transferring the thumbnail to the cover template and sizing it up…

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With the sketch in place, albeit on the wrong cover template (droid malfunction, droid malfunction… blame the heat!) it’s all about getting it publication-ready.

Now, it might look like it takes very little time on the video, but Jake tells us the whole story…

JAKE LYNCH: The vid was a Timelapse with portions of screenshots (used after the idea I was demonstrating, on my Patreon, was done). The cover took around 2.5 – 3 days maybe.  Can’t remember offhand, but that’s the usual time these days!

This is the sort of thing to make all of us non-artists amazed when we get to see the magic happening in front of us. With our usual Covers Uncovered pieces, we see the move through from sketch, pencils, inks, flats, colours, and of course we appreciate the work that’s gone into it. But seeing Jake painstakingly pull everything together, step by meticulous and brilliant step, it just really makes you in awe of what these talented artistic types do, whether it’s a cover or interiors.

So, from adding the template to getting to the final published cover, it’s a case of a whole series of steps, adding and adding to the image, tightening things up, pencils, inks, tones, colours… all of it in incredible detail.

First we get pencils and inks, although when working digitally there’s not really the same absolute distinction between pencils and inks as there is when artists are still…

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After this, well I suppose it’s tones, backgrounds, tightening up, doing all the fiddley stuff that takes hours and hours and hours. Or, as Jake puts it…

JL: Tonal Work-up. Trying to work out how it will ‘pop’.

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Next we have all the colours added, stage after stage on adding colours, changing them, adjusting them, altering them, messing around with a perfectionist’s eye, as you can tell from how Jake describes it…

JL: Colouring over the tone as a starting point (always looks awful), keep working over the top of it until you call it done! (I always leave a bit of ‘play’ in my covers so Matt can move them about or re-scale if required.)

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And then, after many, many hours and much work… it’s done! 

And finally… here’s Jake Lynch to introduce his video guide to making the cover of Megazine 446…

Thank you so much to Jake for that!

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. For more from Jake here at 2000 AD.com, be sure to check out his interviews on The Red Queen’s Gambit (with Arthur Wyatt) and The Hard Way (with Arthur and Rob Williams).

You can find Megazine 446 wherever you pick up your monthly dose of thrill power, including the 2000 AD web shop from 20 July.

Marking 2000 AD‘s 45th birthday, 2022’s summer special has a musical theme as the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic continues to celebrate 45 Revolutions Per Minute with Comic Rock!

Leading off the Sci-Fi Special in explosive style, we have a very special Judge Dredd tale by Mike Carroll and Stewart K Moore, Ascension – inspired by Alphaville’s Ascension Day.

This years’ 2000 AD Sci-Fi Special, is a very special celebration of 45 years of 2000 AD with the 45 Revolutions Per Minute theme bringing back Comic Rock – first seen in Prog 167 with Pat Mills and Kevin O’Neill’s Terror Tube, inspired by The Jam’s Going Underground and featuring the first appearance of Nemesis the Warlock.

For Comic Rock 2022, we get six tales all inspired by their writers’ favourite pieces of music, including Judge Dredd, Sinister Dexter, Fiends of West Berlin, Psi-Judge Anderson, Judge Death, and Middenface McNulty – it’s 2000 AD thrills to the speed of 45RPM!

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Opening the show with a heartstopping thrill ride, it’s Judge Dredd in Ascension by Mike Carroll and Stewart K Moore, inspired by Alphaville’s Ascension Day.

Hi there Mike. I suppose first of all we should find out why you chose the song you did and how you’ve worked it into the tale you’re telling?

MICHAEL CARROLL: The song I chose is “Ascension Day” by Alphaville, from their 1994 album Prostitute. I often find that on listening to a new album for the first time there’s at least one track that immediately makes me go, “Hold on, what’s this?” and in the case of Prostitute — the band’s fourth album, released *five years* after The Breathtaking Blue — “Ascension Day” grabbed me from the start.

Lyrically it’s a very dark song, and in many ways it’s less subtle than most of Alphaville’s lyrics, and less optimistic, but it’s still very open to interpretation. The band’s lead singer and chief lyricist Marian Gold has a penchant for lyrics that are not about what they seem to be. Their biggest hit, “Big in Japan”, is a perfect example of that. The name comes from the old cliche of western bands who aren’t as successful as they’d like to be at home, but they assure the interviewers that, actually, the band is really big in Japan. At its core, the song is about wishing for a better life.

Likewise, “Ascension Day” is, at least for me, about someone who realises that the world is falling apart and the only way to survive is not to rail against the darkness but to embrace it. (Of course, other interpretations may differ…!)

That wasn’t the only reason I chose the song for a Judge Dredd tale: its fast beat and heavy bassline lend themselves well to an action-based strip. My favourite Alphaville track is “Beyond the Laughing Sky” from their most recent album Strange Attractor (2017), but that one would have been tricky to reinterpret as a Dredd adventure!

MC: With “Ascension Day” I made a few attempts to directly use specific elements from the song, and in fact my first go at the script was a very literal interpretation – the line “Send in the parasite clowns on their horses” was used as a caption for a panel depicting Judges speeding through Mega-City One on their Lawmasters – but that just wasn’t working: the song doesn’t have the structure I needed to tell the story, so I opted to use the atmosphere instead, which was how the original Comic Rock strips in 2000 AD were done.

Mike, knowing what a huge fan you are, it was hardly the world’s greatest secret to hear that you’ve chosen an Alphaville track to riff off for this Dredd story. But what is it about this one band that truly obsesses you?

MC: That’s hard to pin down! I was eighteen when I discovered Alphaville, and they arrived at the right time in my life. I was in a job I didn’t like, I was socially very shy and awkward – I still am – and my dreams of a career doing something creative seemed absolutely unattainable. Science fiction and comics were my escape, but I’d rarely heard any music that really spoke to me until Alphaville’s first album Forever Young. 

When their second album – Afternoons in Utopia – was released in 1986 I was even more impressed! I started an Alphaville fanzine and pretty soon had penpals from all over the world. Seventy-five of them, in fact. People have occasionally asked me where I learned to write… well, that’s where: Writing four or five letters every day to like-minded Alphaville fans, most of whom didn’t have English as their first language!

Obviously part of the homework for me here was reading the comic and then listening to the track and working out the whys and wherefores of it all. First of all it’s a damn fine song and has actually made me want to listen to a lot more Alphaville, so if that’s what you were looking for, you’ve at least succeeded with me!

MC: Hooray – my work here is done! It’s funny, though… being a fan of something that’s flown under most people’s radar is very different to liking a popular thing. One of my other favourite bands is Pink Floyd. No matter where you go on this planet, you can find another Floyd fan. But it’s much rarer to bump into an Alphaville fan… so on a couple of occasions when I’ve heard someone mention them my initial reaction has been, “Uh, no, you can’t talk about them. They’re mine.” 

Yes, I think a lot of people have that one band, maybe a couple, that they love beyond reason and feel connected to – I’m going to say That Petrol Emotion for me, I’m sure many readers have their own beloved bands.

In Ascension, my interpretation of it is that you’ve gone with a thematic read of the song – the idea of a dark world and the nightmarish reality of living in it, plus the notion of one man thinking he can rise above it all and change what he sees as the wrongs of the world. You’d think the man in question would be the hero… but not here, not in Dredd’s world.

But can you take us deeper into the ideas you took from the song and how it inspired the Dredd storyline?

MC: I don’t want to give away too much of the story, but I will say that it was the song’s sense of looming, inevitable destruction that sparked the tale.

The reader follows the protagonist as he realises — or, rather, concludes — that one sure way to survive the storm is to *become* the storm. Of course, it was paramount to me that the story worked even if the readers are unaware that it’s based on a song, so that was how I ultimately approached it. 

Listening to Ascension Day while reading Ascension, I can see how you’ve paced the story to match the tempo of the song – an incredibly fast-paced opening as Dredd finds himself between two rival gangs, followed by a brief lull in the proceedings before ramping it all up again for the finale. Or is that me reading far too much into it all?

MC: No, you’ve pretty much hit the nail on the head there… but then most comic strips follow that arc anyway! You’ve gotta have the quiet moments in order to appreciate the thunder!

How much fun was it do something like this, something a little different from the usual Dredd outing?

MC: The chief difference is that usually the theme of a story is formed from its events and impact on the characters (and on the readers too, hopefully), but in this case the theme came first and I constructed the story to fit it.

Mike – given that you’ve shown us your favourite Alphaville song, what else would you suggest? Where would you point someone like me who only really knew them through Forever Young and Big In Japan?

MC: The band’s website is a good place to start, and their official YouTube channel has links to most of their releases, including a whole album’s worth of new and remixed tracks that were released free during the early days of the Coronavirus pandemic.

Alternatively, you could buy their albums in the order they were released and experience them as us long-term fans did… and you won’t even have to wait years and years between each one!

We’d be remiss not to mention that, although Mike’s far too humble to bring it up, he happens to run Cosmic Meadows, an exhaustive labour of love of all things Alphaville!

A massive thank you for Mike for going above and beyond. And many apologies to Mike’s better half for dragging him away from a holiday to answer these questions for us! Like I say, if you think you know Alphaville from just a couple of songs… you could well be pleasantly surprised by what else they’ve done – I know I was.Judge Dredd: Ascension is the opening track in this years’ 2000 AD Sci-Fi Special 2022 – it’s out on 13 July 2022 and available from wherever Thrill Power is sold, including the 2000 AD web shop.

And you can listen to the whole Sci-Fi Special playlist here on Spotify.

We’ve shown you the first Comic Rock tale, Terror Tube, but there was one more Comic Rock that led into a full-length Nemesis the Warlock series, in Prog 178 & 179 – Killer Watt. Here’s the first part from Prog 178…

Marking 2000 AD‘s 45th birthday, 2022’s summer special has a musical theme as the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic continues to celebrate 45 Revolutions Per Minute with Comic Rock!

Two incredible female icons come together with Anderson: Psi Division: Half Of A Heaven from Paul Cornell and Emma Vieceli, as 2000 AD’s premier psi-Judge stars in a strip inspired by Kate Bush’s Suspended in Gaffa.

Out now, the 2000 AD Sci-Fi Special is one for your eyes and your ears, bringing back the Comics Rock concept introduced by Pat Mills and Kevin O’Neill’s Terror Tube in Prog 167, a strip inspired by The Jam’s Going Underground and one that introduced Nemesis the Warlock. rocking out to the tune of six tales inspired by six pieces of music. Inside this years’ Sci-Fi Special there’s six thrill-powered tales all inspired by the writer’s favourite tracks, so expect to see Judge Dredd, Sinister Dexter, Fiends of West Berlin, Psi-Judge Anderson, Judge Death, and Middenface McNulty all soundtracked to music including Alphaville, The Beatles, Stealer’s Wheels and more!

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Today, we’re talking to Paul Cornwell and Emma Vieceli about their Judge Anderson story, Half Of A Heaven, inspired by the wonderful Kate Bush and her track Suspended in Gaffa!

Paul, Emma, in the Sci-Fi Special, your story is Anderson, Psi-Division: Half Of A Heaven, suggested by Suspended in Gaffa by Kate Bush.

First of all, Paul, can you tell us a little of what we can expect from Half Of A Heaven and what was it that made you choose this track and how did it suggest this Judge Anderson story?

PAUL CORNELL: I picked Kate Bush’s ‘Suspended in Gaffa’, one of her most abstract songs, which I sometimes think is about any artist’s struggle to overcome imposter syndrome.  I’m a huge fan of Kate, who once sent me a fan letter (!) after my Doctor Who episodes aired.  

I chose it because I wanted to use a Kate track, but a lot of her work is very narrative, and I didn’t want to put one story on top of another.  And in a handful of pages it’s hard to have an adventure, so I just did a little look into Anderson’s awareness that her life, anyone’s life, in the Mega-City is not all it could be.

Emma helped me pack the story with visual references to the rest of Kate’s work. Her art was amazing as always, great colour art too by Barbara Nosenzo.  

What would you recommend for someone coming to Kate’s catalogue if they’ve not heard anything before, or maybe if they’ve only heard of her from Stranger Things and the resurgence of Running Up That Hill?

PC: I’d recommend, from the rest of Kate’s catalogue, starting with something easy like Never For Ever, and then maybe something modern like the second side of Aerial, which is one, long, very beautiful piece, and then the hard core stuff is The Dreaming.  I love The Red Shoes, because it’s got Kate/Prince collaborations and wonderful stuff about magic, but it’s not widely loved, maybe because it ends with something heart-rending.  You can tell I’m into this!  

Emma, seeing as it was Paul who picked the track this time, which track would you have picked as a fave to illustrate?

EMMA VIECELI: Thankfully Paul has great taste and picked an icon of a performer who is visual art herself 🙂 If I’d had a choice, maybe Paranoid Android by Radiohead?

Emma, were you already a Kate Bush fan when you got the story from Paul?

EV: I don’t think I qualify as a fan as my knowledge is fairly limited, but I do like her a lot. And oddly this is the second time I’ve illustrated a comic based on one of her tracks!

[If you’re wondering, it was Wuthering Heights as part of Phonogram: The Singles Club, Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie’s epic tale of music and magic.]

And when getting the story, was it a case of settling down with the script and Suspended in Gaffa on repeat to get the right feel for the artwork?

EV: I watched the Suspended in Gaffa music video a fair bit… partly because it’s just mesmerising, but also for reference on that outfit and hair, haha! Beyond that I just trusted in Paul’s script.

I think you’ve absolutely nailed the imagery, both in the elysian beauty of the psychic landscape inside the girl’s head and those great shots of Anderson realising that it’s a beauty she won’t be able to experience.

EV: Well that makes me very happy to read, thank you ^_^ And of course Barbara Nosenzo made the pages super special with her colours!

That she definitely did!

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Emma, can you take us through some of your process and how you went about making these Anderson pages?

EV: It’s all digital these days and there’s not much to say beyond the obvious, really, but I took Paul’s script, sketched out layouts and made sure he and Matt were happy with those before I moved onto inks.

We had a little back and forth trying to work out just how much BushRef (c) we could fit into the pages, especially the mindscape garden. I’d love to know how many readers can spot 🙂

Emma – given that Paul’s told us of his favourite Kate Bush song, what else would you suggest?

EV: This Woman’s work, for me. Shivers every time. But beware watching the music video if you’re a Blackadder fan. It may…distract from the song’s power. Trust me on that XD

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And finally, what have you both got coming up in the future that we’ll want to be looking for? (Feel free to mention anything, old Tharg has just finished yet another concoction he calls a Betelgeusian Brain Blaster and has something very loud and very screamy pouring from his headphones right now.)

PC: Out right now from Legendary is my fantasy rom-com graphic novel Three Little Wishes, with Steve Yeowell, Pippa Bowland, and Simon Bowland, about a tricksy wish-granting fairy who meets his match in a finicky contract lawyer.  

EV: Oooh, well. I recently came to the end of writing Life is Strange for Titan Comics. That’s been an amazing few years and I’m so proud of what we achieved with the title.

Because of that I’ve been a bit careful with what I pick up right now as I want to keep my schedule relatively open to work on some very patient projects; not least of all finishing BREAKS! I’m drawing the final scenes of it at the moment and Malin and I can’t believe we’re finally close to telling the end of this tale. It launched back in 2013.

For those of you who don’t know, BREAKS, co-written by Malin Ryden & Vieceli, with art by Vieceli. is a wonderful comic saga best described as ‘A love story…but a little broken’ and ‘the story of two young adults coming to terms with who they were, who they are and who they’ll become.’ – you can read some of it here, absolutely recommended.

EV: That said…I do have a few bits coming up for other publishers. I wrote a small two-parter backup strip for DC; an origin story for Nightwing as he appears in DC vs Vampires, nyohoho! I’m on art and letters for an eight-pager to be included in an upcoming anthology, and I’m excited to be working with a new studio on something quite large as overall projects go, but which starts for me as a four-parter that I’m writing and drawing. More on that when we can share!

A massive thank you for Paul and Emma for talking comics and Kate Bush with us. Seriously, if you’re a fan, go re-listen right now. But if you’re not a fan (yet!), do yourself a favour and head to wherever you get your music and immerse yourself into her work – it’s just an amazing body of music she’s made over the years.

You can see Judge, Psi Division: Half Of A Heaven in the 2000 AD Sci-Fi Special 2022 – it’s out on 13 July 2022 and available from wherever Thrill Power is sold, including the 2000 AD web shop. And you can listen to the whole Sci-Fi Special playlist here on Spotify.

Now, we promised you full-size versions of Emma’s amazing artwork, and here it is… enjoy!

And as an extra bonus… a couple of Emma’s pages from Phonogram: The Singles Club – the first time she brought one of Kate Bush’s songs to life…

Once more, before we leave you, a little more of that Pat Mills and Kevin O’Neill Terror Tube, the first bit of 2000 AD Comics Rock…

Marking 2000 AD‘s 45th birthday, 2022’s summer special has a musical theme as the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic continues to celebrate 45 Revolutions Per Minute with Comic Rock!

Up next in the series of interviews about the 2022 Sci-Fi Special, we go absurdist as Judge Death joins Judge Dredd for the duo you never saw coming in Kek-W and Steven Austin’s Judge Death: Common Enemy.

Out on 13 July, the 2000 AD Sci-Fi Special takes its inspiration from Comics Rock, first brought to the pages of the Prog back in 1980 when Pat Mills and Kevin O’Neill introduced Nemesis the Warlock in Terror Tube, a strip inspired by the Jam’s Going Underground. Now, 22 years later, the Sci-Fi Special rocks out with six music-inspired strips for today, featuring Judge Death, Judge Dredd, Sinister Dexter, Psi-Judge Anderson, Fiends of West Berlin,and Middenface McNulty. It’s Thrill Power with a soundtrack!

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So, now we’ll turn to Kek-W and Steven Austin, the creative team behind Judge Death: Common Enemy, inspired by the classic Stealer’s Wheels tune Stuck In The Middle With You.

Kek, Steven, in the 2022 Sci-Fi Special, you’re going way back in time to the moments after Judge Death was banished (once more) to the empty universe by Judge Anderson in Prog 427.

Common Enemy sees Judge Death and Judge Dredd actually teaming up in a story suggested by the Stealer’s Wheels classic Stuck In The Middle With You.

First things first why did you pick that track, how have you worked it into the tale you’re telling, and can you give us an idea of what the story is all about?

KEK-W: Tharg asked me to write a Judge Death story based on a song, I so I immediately jumped on Stuck in the Middle With You by Stealer’s Wheel (Gerry Rafferty, Joe Egan and friends). It’s a song I grew up with back in the 70s and I kinda wanted to reclaim it back from Tarantino (laughs).

More importantly, though, it’s my wife’s favourite song. She used to play it in the car a lot when the kids were little and they’d sing along to the chorus. So I guess that’s stayed with me.

It’s good to start with something that has a personal resonance – it makes it easier for me to engage and work with – but I also needed a song that the majority of readers might know rather than some obscure Japanese psych track from the back of my record collection (laughs). I’d already been down the Black Metal / RPG route with the recent Dark Judges tale in the Christmas Prog, so I was looking for a take on Judge Death for the Sci-Fi Special that was lighter, more fun, more, er… summery.

Oh, if you don’t know the song… but we’re sure you do, locked in a memory somewhere… Stealer’s Wheels with Stuck in the Middle With You…

KEK-W: The title, Stuck in the Middle With You, immediately gave me the story’s shape. Who would Death be stuck in the middle with? Easy: his old nemesis, Judge Dredd. What would they be stuck in the middle of? Why, a block war, of course (laughs). So it quickly became apparent that this would be a team-up tale, the comic-book equivalent of an Unlikely Buddies movie.

The story seemed ripe with comedic possibility, with the pair bickering and arguing as they fought back-to-back – a sort of twisted version of Lethal Weapon or 48 Hrs. Dredd and Death as Freebie and the Bean (laughs) – a comedy duo with two straight men. The straighter you play it, the more fun you can have with something like this, I think.

I wanted to use the classic 80s version of Judge Death – the early Dreddverse version rather than the darker contemporary Deadverse version from Fall of Deadworld – and channel some of the brilliant daftness of the great Wagner & Grant Mega-City One stories. The idea was to create a fun, read-in-a-deckchair romp that slotted into 2000AD canon and had Easter Eggs for long-term readers, but which also worked as a stand-alone story for casual readers.

That’s what’s great about Judge Dredd: the character is in its 5^th decade and is well-established yet ‘elastic’ enough that, like other ‘mature’ characters such as Batman, etc, it can serve as a vehicle for a wide variety of stories ranging from horror to police procedurals to action-adventure to comedy and social satire.

It felt like this tale needed a slightly Old Skool approach and, luckily, The Mighty One agreed with me. Steven completely nailed the vibe I was aiming for and threw himself wholeheartedly into illustrating this, crafting a very fresh and modern take on the Death meets Dredd set-up. It channels the flavour of classic Dillon, Bolland, Robinson, etc while still feeling contemporary and being very recognisably Steven. BTW, that’s a terrific chin-shot on panel two of the last page, Steven!

Okay, Steven, given that the writer’s got the choice of music (maybe Tharg will do it again with artists’ choices some day?), how was it for you?

STEVEN AUSTIN: Well, my first thought on reading that the song title was, Stuck in the Middle was ‘Wow! As, unbelievably, the first time I heard the Stealer’s Wheels track was when I was 11. It came on the radio one Saturday morning whilst I was reading my ‘first’ ever copy of 2000 AD at our kitchen table in Fulham whilst my mum prepared breakfast!! Actually, that isn’t true, but what an incredible story that would have made had it been, aye!? 

I don’t actually remember the first time I heard the track, but it’s one I’ve always quite liked, in small doses. That said, its more appealing in the Death story than on the radio. I didn’t actually refer to the tune prior to drawing the strip –  I was too gobsmacked at the fact I was actually getting to draw Dredd and Death in a story together, something I never imagined I would have the opportunity to do!

On reading the script I was a bit stumped as to how it tied the song into the story and then ‘BHAM’! The punchline hit me and I laughed out loud, all of a sudden everything fell into place and made sense, and then there was the twist at the end, another little unexpected stroke of genius – it was full of surprises and the most fun I think I’ve ever had on a script.

And just for the record – which track would you have picked as a fave to illustrate?

SA: And with regards to a track I would have picked, hmmmmmm, I guess to have the impact with the reader it would have to be something not too ‘random’ so All Along the Watchtower by Jimi Hendrix. Lyrically its got loads of visuals that I think could be tied into a cool lil’ tale of Dredd.

KEK-W: Yeah, I could definitely get with some classic Hendrix and Dylan too, Steven! Dylan’s Hard Rain is another one laden with incredibly visual lyrics…

Well, that’s two for the future for you both then!

So, we’ve got Dredd, we’ve got Death, we’ve got the song… can you give us an idea of what Common Enemy is all about?

SA: It’s a retro story, as you have mentioned, set just after prog 427. Death is dragged out of limbo by some unseen force and cast back into Magistrate’s Court-1 where he goes on the hunt for Dredd, only to end up fighting back to back with him against a Common Enemy. It’s bizarre, dark, great fun with a bit of gore and violence thrown in for good measure.

KEK-W: Yeah, I mentioned to Tharg that maybe we could set this somewhere in the past, maybe somewhere round The Four Dark Judges, after Death and Dredd had met for the first 2 or 3 times, and he agreed and found the perfect point we could slot it into continuity.

Now, Kek, seriously, I know you’ve explained just what made you pick the song, but are you sure it wasn’t really one of those inspirational moments when something popped into your head one day and you thought, ‘Yes! I’ve got to get that into a Dredd storyline!’? Because that’s what immediately popped into my head as soon as I saw the Bob Pennywise Block and the Jared Leto Block getting into it. So, was it really a wonderfully long setup to get the line in?

KEK-W: No. (laughs) Like I said, the title of the song gave me the rough outline of the story. Then, later on, the chorus lyrics told me who or what would be the protagonists in the block war. It was a no-brainer to slide the chorus lyrics into the story somewhere. When my initial email pitch got a chuckle from Matt Smith I knew I was on the right track (in more ways than one)…   

Seriously, it’s a great story that’s made all the better as soon as you see the gag coming – one of those great bits of absurdist comedy that runs all the way through Dredd over the years.

KEK-W: Funny you should mention ‘absurdist’ (laughs). I mentioned in the script that maybe it might be fun to base Ubu Roy, the leader of the Pennywise Block simp-clowns on this theatre version of Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry – and Steven gamely ran with it. Seriously, I can’t praise Steve enough for his work on this – he soaked up so many ideas, possible visuals and moods from this script and brought them to life. 

Yeah, totally agree with you about Dredd: it’s part of what helps make the character so great, that he’s an unwitting, stone-faced straight man to the endlessly strange, surreal and silly street-theatre that is daily life in Mega-City One. Our very own Buster Keaton.

One things for certain, you’ve actually managed to change the long-standing association of the song with Reservoir Dogs for me. I know I’ll hear it now and only be able to see the payoff to the gag you set up here – congrats on that one!

KEK-W: Good! My work here is done (laughs).

Steven, how about you – when you got the script, how long did it take until you were seeing the gag pay off?

SA: Well on reading the script for the first time (and it had a working title of Stuck in the Middle)  I had made the association with the clowns and jokers from the get go, as the script unfolded and Jared Leto Block and Bob Pennywise were introduced I had assumed that was it, a link to the song Stuck in the Middle. But then the punchline popped up unexpectedly but in such an obvious context that it was so deliberately brilliant, that I thought, ‘Kek, you clever sod’, all the while laughing out loud, and then of course there they were, Dredd and Death ‘actually’, stuck in the middle – between the two gangs – brilliant.

Kek, It’s as much of a Dredd strip as a Death strip, so I imagine you were pleased to be involved with both?

KEK-W: Yes! (laughs) I’ve been lucky enough to have written plenty of Judge Death stories in recent years, but this is my first Dredd. Hopefully, not my last!

What do you both think it is about Judge Death that has made him such a fertile character over the years, able to be used for stories of absolute horror all the way through to the sort of comedy you’re setting up here?

KEK-W: Yeah, I touched on this a bit earlier. It’s an interesting topic. I think part of it is that enduring characters like Dredd that have settled in and ‘matured’ – who have become part of the pop-cultural landscape, as it were – start accreting different layers of meaning for different generations of readers. They resonate differently with each new era of readers – soak up the social climates of different decades – have different cultural anxieties and hopes projected on them by each new wave of readers. It means that the characters are able to perpetually renew and refresh themselves.

It helps in Dredd’s case that Wagner, Grant, Mills, etc brought social satire and absurdism to the table quite early on – (we were living in the Thatcher Era, after all!) – and subsequent generations of writers have continued to run with that and written Dredd stories that have reflected or satirised the concerns of the 90s, 00s, etc. So satire and humour were always very much part of Dredd’s DNA, along with horror and gritty action-adventure – traditions it had absorbed from 2000AD’s notorious comic-book predecessor, Action. Action was itself mimicking / borrowing from various contemporary social trends, 1970’s horror and neo-realist cinema, Jaws, etc, etc. Again, it was just reflecting the trends, fashions and social panics of its times.

That process is still going on today in both Dredd and 2000AD– which is what makes them both so vital, vibrant and endlessly (re-)inventive. Superficially, Dredd seems a one-dimensional character, but he’s not: he’s a reflection of the different chaotic times he’s published in. A Hall of Mirrors as much as a Hall of Justice. 

People say that Mega City One is the other character in Dredd tales, but I think It’s fun to invert that idea and consider Dredd as being sort of extension of Mega City One itself – a living corner-stone of the city, if you like – “Old Stony Face”: he’s part of the scenery, but one that also has a degree of agency – and this enables him to appear in and sustain a wide range of  tales that vary in style and tone – in the same way that any major metropolis has millions of human interest stories that range from the tragic to the hilarious.   

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Steven, as always, it’s fascinating to see how you approached this one – can you give us some kind of process run-down to the strip?

SA: Well, I generally read the script four or five times to get a real feel for the story, basically I read it until I’m seeing it play out like a movie in my head, the first read-through is always daunting as they are just words and nothing comes to mind, which always feels a bit scary, but then the second and third reading certain panels start having images come to me and then by the 4^th, 5^th or sometimes 6^th reading everything starts to run concurrently, as in a movie.

I don’t read the script that many times one after the other, I do it over a couple of days which allows it to drip away somewhere back in my subconscious and then revisit it.

SA: After this, I start thumbnailing to make sure what’s happening in my head works on paper and then once I’m happy that it does I’ll draw a pretty tight A5 page and then blow these up to A3 and lightbox from them in pencil prior to inking the piece.

Usually I use a brush pen to ink but for this, as it was a retro story ank Kek had referenced Brian Bolland and Brett Ewins in the script with relation to the feel of the artwork  I thought to myself, “I know, I’ll use my series 7 Windsor and Newton No2 brush  just like Brian used to (something I usually reserve for covers and commissions).

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SA: Of course, after the first page I started to regret my decision and it took me twice as long. I hadn’t taken into consideration how much harder it would be working so small with the bloody thing. Every time I dipped the brush I’d have to fiddle about getting ink off in order to keep my lines relatively tight and not splodgy. That said I ended up being the happiest I’ve been with a strip thus far.

Well, I reckon it’s well worth the extra blood, sweat, and tears to get the finished product!

Right, after Common Enemy, what have you both got coming out this year, both 2000 AD and elsewhere? And don’t worry, Tharg’s well into cocktail number three by now, something neon yellow with sparklers hanging out the top, plus he’s into the Betelgeusian thrash metal section of his playlist and is just rocking out (although it does sound like thrash metal is a more literal thing for Tharg – it has the unmistakable sounds of Droids being whipped into shape.)

SA: I’m currently working on another Dredd story entitled The Rematch written by Ken Niemand and then will be catching up on an ever growing commission list.

KEK-W: Recently finished writing a series of The Order and am about half-way through scripting a new series of Dark Judges: Fall of Deadworld. But I’m also writing something else for Tharg I can’t talk about right now. Ssssh! [See, when we reassure them that TMO won’t notice them blabbing secrets, the droids live in fear!]

I’ve also written a creator-owned thing called Edward Monarch Police Mysteries with artist Mauro Longhini which I’m hoping will be out later this year. I need to get back on The Screaming Hand! soon with Conor Boyle and finish writing part 7! At some point we’ll be putting out an entire first ‘season’ of that. Para-anatomical quantum-horror set in the late 70s – it’s bonkers!  

Again, massive thank yous to both Kek and Steven for jumping into the DJ booth with that one. Classic tune, great strip. And you can see Judge Death: Common Enemy in all its absurd glory in the 2000 AD Sci-Fi Special 2022 – it’s out on 13 July 2022 and available from wherever Thrill Power is sold, including the 2000 AD web shop. And you can listen to the whole Sci-Fi Special playlist here on Spotify.

And now the full glory of Steven Austin’s pencils and inks that he kindly sent along, together with the finished pages…

Now, before we leave you once more, the final couple of pages of the original Comics Rock, Terror Tube by Pat Mills and Kevin O’Neill…

Marking 2000 AD‘s 45th birthday, 2022’s summer special has a musical theme as the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic continues to celebrate 45 Revolutions Per Minute with Comic Rock!

He’s the Scots ex-Stront and he’s back in the freelance business and ready to rock – it’s Middenface McNulty in Opening Night at the Omegabowl, with David Baillie and VV Glass telling a tale suggested by Neil Young’s Rockin’ In The Free World.

Out right now, the 2000 AD Sci-Fi Special is a musical extravaganza with six tales suggested by six songs, all of it inspired by Pat Mills and Kevin O’Neill’s Comic Rock idea that first appeared in Prog 167’s Terror Tube. Inside the Sci-Fi Special, there’s a thrill-power overload with Judge Dredd, Sinister Dexter, Psi-Judge Anderson, Judge Death, Fiends of West Berlin, and Middenface McNulty.

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Now, to tell us all about just what the hell McNulty is doing in Milton Keynes, here’s David Baillie and VV Glass…

David, VV, hi there!  In this years’ Sci-Fi Special, you’re bringing back the finest Scots ex-Stront, Middenface McNulty, in a tale suggested by Neil Young’s Rockin’ In The Free World. First of all, can you tell us just a little of what to expect with Opening Night in the Omegabowl?

DAVID BAILLIE: The British government has built an enormous floating ‘supervenue’ over the site of what they’re now calling the ‘former mutant ghetto of Milton Keynes’. It’s a blatant attempt to distract public attention from a string of recent scandals – the biggest of which is the horrific mutant sterilisation programme they were running in secret (see The Life and Death of Johnny Alpha!) The opening concert at this new Omegabowl features an all-mutant line-up, which has caused outrage among outlawed anti-mutant groups. A potentially explosive situation that requires the best security money can buy – who will also accept the job: ex-Strontium Dogs. Enter Middenface McNulty.

It’s a far more comedic take on things than the rest of the Sci-Fi Special – is that one of those inevitable things when it involves Middenface?

DB: Although this was the only one I pitched to Tharg, I sketched out a few ideas for Middenface stories based on other rock songs. The story I had for Bullet with Butterfly Wings was full-on horror, which I thought might be a good subversion of that expectation of humour whenever Middenface shows up.

I also had stories for Heart Shaped Box, Black Hole Sun, Cannonball, Sabotage, Killing in the Name… You know – all the dad grunge classics!

Hey, nothing wrong with a bit of dad grunge!

DB: I love stories that mix humour and more serious moments, and when you have a character like Middenface, whose stories often appear at the more comedic end of the spectrum, it really opens up an opportunity for landing those big emotional beats.

I think this is chronologically the latest we’ve seen Middenface, it’s after he lost his arm in the Second Mutant Uprising, and I’m hoping that we get to see where his life goes, and have some really poignant storytelling moments.

Now, David, given it’s the writer’s choice of track, what is it about Neil Young’s classic that made you pick it to soundtrack and suggest this Middenface story?

DB: The first time I heard the song it absolutely blew me away. I was neck deep in my teenage grunge years when I saw Neil Young play it live with Pearl Jam on TV. It had a deceptively simple riff, great lyrical imagery and a bold political message. I immediately learned how to play it (it’s only three chords!) and bored everyone in my immediate vicinity with my attempts.

Tharg was typically stoney faced when I suggested that all the creators in the SF Special should record cover versions of their chosen songs for a free flexi-disc… Which I think is a real shame.

As I said I had a few options, but this song just instantly suggested the set-up for the story and gave me a great lyric to incorporate into an action beat near the end of the story. (Which VV absolutely knocked out of the park!)

VV GLASS: Who doesn’t like Neil Young! Canada’s premier rock artist (contested)? Creator of the soundtrack to the third-best Jim Jarmusch film? That said I did have to make a playlist that had the same level of energetic cynicism as Keep on Rockin instead of mainlining Young in the end, you can’t live on bread alone.

When it came to drawing the story, how did the song influence your art?

VV: It definitely informed the energy levels of the art, short wind-up and then 100% escalation straight through to the end.  Young’s very dark, understated lyrics combined with high-tempo music works great for a Middenface story, and the communication of defiantly anti-authoritarian, anti-conservative, sentiment makes a lot of sense of the strip in the context of the song as well. 

Visually, I ended up going for glam and shock rock, but I think the point of the song is still evoked even if everyone on the page looks more Alice Cooper and Till Lindemann than Crosby Stills and/or Nash.

And just for the record – which track would you have picked as a fave to illustrate?

VV: Black Me Out by Against Me? Pink Floyd’s In The Flesh? Barry McGuire’s Eve of Destruction? Don’t make me choose.

David, given that you’ve shared one late 80s classic, where else would you take us on a sonic adventure? 

DB: Now I’m going to sound like a real philistine – I only have a couple of Neil Young albums. I think my favourite is Harvest – it’s really great – and Rockin’ in the Free World isn’t even on it! The album of his Unplugged concert is also brilliant. I recorded it off the telly back in the day and watched it until the tape wore thin.

I’ve got to chip in here and say that I reckon the live album, Weld, from 1991 is a stunning introduction to Neil Young – well, it was to me at least!

DB: If you’re looking for other musical recommendations – I’m currently into a Baltimore hardcore band called End It, funk metal cover band Brass Against, jazz supergroup Dinosaur and I also frequently listen to the theme tunes of my favourite TV shows on repeat (Better Call Saul, Twin Peaks and Only Connect, since you ask.)

Oh lord, we’re back to the Victoria Coren-Mitchell thing again aren’t we? (See this interview with David for a little more on that – suffice it to say that, yet again, he’s failed to get VCM into a strip, probably something to do with the restraining order, eh David?)

• 

• 

Okay, swiftly moving on from that – VV, can you take us through some of your process and how you went about making these Middenface pages?

VV: First I looked up concert footage from the showier eras/areas of music so I could make the setting and characters as out-there as possible. I thought about putting an 18-inch Stonehenge somewhere on the stage but there just wasn’t room.

Once I had a load of references and some idea of how everything should look I started with roughs, concentrating on flow across the page, expression, and emphasis on ‘intense’ moments. Then a thumbnail colour rough to work out the look of the pages as individual objects, and to make sure the colours shifted properly from start to end – so in this strip the palette transitions from green to blue to red as things ramp up, for example. Then the standard process of pencils and inks, painting backgrounds straight over pencils, and painting colours for the figures under their lineart so they’re still readable. Finally I did a layer & setting colour pass so everything cohered visually.

Unusually I also got to design a new piece of kit, since McNulty has a spiffy new robot arm in this strip, so I did a few iterations of that beforehand until it felt right for the character to have. If anyone has to draw it in future I hope it isn’t too much of a ballache.

• 

• 

Now, to end with, let’s hear what sort of things you’ve got coming up in the future – both here at 2000 AD and elsewhere. And no need to worry about TMO by now, he’s well into yet another bizarre cocktail (black and bubbling this time) and has the headphones blasting out Jazz fusion where the percussion is screaming droids being bludgeoned in new and interesting ways.

DB: Oh – it sounds like Tharg and I have similar tastes in music!

I’ve just finished up a couple of TV projects that have soaked up a lot of my last year, and I’m looking forward to taking a break over the summer before launching into a few new comics projects. So far none of those are for the House of Tharg, but Green Bonce knows where I am if he needs me!

VV: I’m going to be working on something new(ish) with you lot at the end of the year. I can’t talk about it for obvious reasons, but it’s the exact intersection of the two things I like drawing and so I’m very excited for it to be winter if you can imagine that. In the meantime I’m working on the second volume of  Conor McCreery’s The Last Witch, which is an unpleasant fairytale for largely children, the intersection of the other two things I like drawing.

A massive thank you to both David and VV for taking the time to talk comics and music with us.

You can see their Middenface McNulty in the 2000 AD Sci-Fi Special 2022 – out right now and available from wherever Thrill Power is sold, including the 2000 AD web shop.

And you can listen to the whole Sci-Fi Special playlist here on Spotify.

Now, as promised, the full-sized versions of VV Glass’ Middenface process…

Now, the final part of our look back bonus at Pat Mills and Kevin O’Neill’s Comic Rock originals – the second and final part of Killer Watt from Prog 179…

Marking 2000 AD‘s 45th birthday, 2022’s summer special has a musical theme as the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic continues to celebrate 45 Revolutions Per Minute with Comic Rock!

Up next in the series of interviews about the Sci-FI Special, it’s Karl Stock and Warren Pleece with Fiends of West Berlin, where the vampire Constanta meets Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ From Her To Eternity.

Out this week this years’ 2000 AD Sci-Fi Special is rocking out to the tune of six tales inspired by six pieces of music. Inside you’ll find Judge Dredd, Sinister Dexter, Psi-Judge Anderson, Judge Death, and Middenface McNulty – it’s a Thrill-Power overload of comics with a soundtrack to kill for – especially if you’re the Vampire Constanta in Fiends of West Berlin.

Inspired by the original Comics Rock of 2000 AD Prog 167 where Pat Mills and Kevin O’Neill took The Jam’s Going Underground and twisted it into Terror Tube, the very first appearance of Nemesis the Warlock, the 2000 AD Sci-Fi Special is bringing back Comics Rock for the modern age!

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Time to turn the decks over to Karl Stock and Warren Pleece right now to tell you all about their strip in the Special, Fiends of the West Berlin, inspired by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ From Her To Eternity.

Karl, Warren, in the Sci-Fi Special, you’re bringing the Vampire Constanta back to the strange world of 80s Cold War Germany in the story Fiends of West Berlin.

It’s a story suggested by From Her To Eternity, the Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds song. Can you tell us a little of what we can expect from the latest Constanta and what was it particularly about the song that made you come up with this latest Fiends episode? 

KARL STOCK: It’s inspired specifically by the live version of From Her to Eternity in Wim Wenders’ film Wings of Desire, which is getting a reissue this summer I believe. I love Nick Cave, but I love that film too – saw someone refer to it on the socials recently as a “portrait of a city which doesn’t exist,” in other words Cold War-era Berlin.

And here’s the very track Karl’s talking about, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds performing From Her To Eternity from Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire…

KS: My script was written with the same aesthetic spirit of debauchery and authoritarianism living in close proximity soaked into the bones of it, I hope. The sense of old Weimar glamour gone rotten around the unhealed scar that was the Wall. The film is as much an influence as the song’s lyrics, there are hints and easter eggs concerning both in there if you’re looking.

Of course, Wings of Desire is about unseen angels moving among the people, and the sense there’s something pure and true which moves between humans, beyond the control of the petty politics of the time – that’s an easy flip to the demons of Fiends’ world, to create a far less pleasant mirror story.

A while ago I thought a Fiends of the Cold War strip with a period update would be a lot of fun to write, and of course now Ian Edginton is doing one, or thereabouts. [For more on that particular tale, Fiends of the Eastern Front: 1963, have a look at this interview with Ian Edginton].

This is a framing story to the original Fiends saga’s own framing story, and an excuse to scratch that particular storytelling itch.

Now Warren, seeing as it was Karl’s choice of music, was it a case of having the track on for hours to get a feel of what the writer wanted? Did the pacing and content affect the way you made the pages? And just for the record – which track would you have picked as a fave to illustrate?

WARREN PLEECE: Yes, this was great fun to draw; Fiends, Cold War 80s Berlin, Wings of Desire, Nick Cave, almost like I’d paid someone to come up with some choice nuggets just for me to draw (Thanks, Karl). Actually Karl had kindly included a YouTube link to the Bad Seeds scene in the film in his script, so I really did have everything on a plate. I’m not sure if the story’s pacing is a direct lift off the song, but it seems like a great track to merge with the Fiends mythology. I would’ve gone for The Birthday Party’s Release the Bats, of course!

Warren, when it came to illustrating this one, was it a case of reading through Karl’s story and then assaulting yourself with all manner of versions of Cave’s song?

WP: I knew the original well and probably the Peel session version. After that, it was probably on my internal ear worm loop for rest of the drawing process!

In many ways, it’s an unusual Fiends to draw, as it doesn’t feature the normal amounts of bloodshed we’re used to. Instead, it’s a quieter affair, of obsessional love and being in service to a monster. In this, I think it’s something that plays well to Warren’s natural abilities to give us brilliance and drama in everyday situations.

WP: Yes, definitely. I mean I can do the gratuitous gore if called upon, but really I’m just a kindly old storyteller for the kids of all ages.

KS: Warren’s done a great job of course, his character storytelling is always a treat. Most importantly, he really nailed the sense of place and time I was after, and the references to the film throughout.

Karl, Warren, are you both big fans of Nick Cave? What is it about him that lights a fire beneath you? (Personally, as much as I love his early stuff with the Bad Seeds, which I got into after hearing The Mercy Seat, it’s the later stuff that I’ve come to really adore – I don’t think he’s done a better album than Push The Sky Away.)

KS: Well, how long have you got? The Birthday Party were always a bit feral for me, although thinking about it I probably missed a trick, I should have written a Fiends story based on Release the Bats. Then again, Constanta as a ‘sex vampire’… maybe not.

Anyway, pretty much everything he’s done with the Bad Seeds has been excellent, although like a lot of people I know I only caught up with him in the 2000s. I knew him from Where the Wild Roses Grow with Kylie Minogue in ’95, of course, and had a vague appreciation of his work otherwise, but I went to see the Bad Seeds live in Glasgow around the time of… I don’t know, Abattoir Blues I think? And I was a convert from then.

Yeah, Push the Sky Away is a contender for the best thing he’s done, but Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen are almost unbearably emotional, given his personal circumstances, and one of the first gigs I saw after lockdown was Nick and Warren Ellis (not THAT Warren Ellis) doing their pandemic album Carnage, which made it doubly moving. If any readers want to start from scratch, I’d suggest the ’98 Best Of personally, then work forwards or backwards from there.

WP: Yes, I’d say I was, though from a respectable distance. I really liked the Birthday Party back in the day and a lot of the Bad Seeds stuff, though I probably had a problem keeping up with all their output, a bit like later Fall albums. Nick Cave’s more recent work is amazing, dark and intense, maybe not your usual jogging/ dinner party playlist favs, but then you haven’t been to mine for a dinner party.

KS: Of course, describing any song or artist as your favourite is a hostage to fortune, I probably have a couple of each every week. But this song was my favourite while this script was being written, hopefully it comes through.

Also, thinking about it, Higgs Boson Blues would be a good title for a Future Shock, right?

Yes, why hasn’t anyone done Higgs Boson Blues as a musical Future Shock? Karl, the stage is yours for that one now!

What can we expect from you coming out in the future? The Mighty One has now moved onto his second Betelgeusian cocktail, this time with the gizzards of some strange little thing as a garnish and has just described the latest tune he’s listening to as ‘if Dolly Parton and Joy Division made an opera’… so I reckon he’s in the right place to sneak out a tidbit of something special…

WP: Bits and potentially exciting bobs.

KS: Things with zombies. Including a version of what I believe is the most primed-for-a-reboot 2000AD series going.

Now there’s a tease to end with! Start guessing now! (And hope Tharg didn’t hear Karl, otherwise it’s down to the punishment rooms for 24 hours of Whigfield and Wenga Boys.)

A massive thank you for Karl and Warren for talking about both comics and tunes with us. Go get some Nick Cave for yourselves. Your ears will thank you later.

You can see Fiends of the Western Front, a perfect meditation of music and mood, by Karl Stock and Warren Pleece in the 2000 AD Sci-Fi Special 2022 – it’s out on 13 July 2022 and available from wherever Thrill Power is sold, including the 2000 AD web shop.

Warren was also kind enough to send along a magnificent look at his design process for the characters, plus his inked page one of the strip, which you can lovingly look at below…

Once more, before we leave you, a little more of that Pat Mills and Kevin O’Neill Terror Tube, the first bit of 2000 AD Comics Rock…

Marking 2000 AD‘s 45th birthday, 2022’s summer sci-fi special is out this week with a musical theme celebrating 45 Revolutions Per Minute with Comic Rock!

First on the set-list and beginning with a classic banger: Dan Abnett on his Sinister Dexter story Killer Serial, suggested by Happiness is a Warm Gun by The Beatles.

Out on 13 July, the 48-page special is all about the music, with six stories inspired by each writers’ favourite song – including Sinister Dexter, Judge Dredd, Psi-Judge Anderson, Judge Death, Fiends of the Eastern Front, and Middenface McNulty – six Ghafflebette thrills with a musical twist!

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The concept of the 2000 AD Sci-Fi Special as a musical extravaganza goes all the way back to the earliest days of Tharg’s assault on your senses, when Pat Mills and Kevin O’Neill introduced the notion of Comic Rock with Terror Tube in Prog 167, the very first instalment of Nemesis the Warlock, taking their inspiration from Going Underground by The Jam.

First up in a series of interviews for the Sci-Fi Special, we have Dan Abnett, one of Tharg’s finest and the writer of the Sinister Dexter story here, Killer Serial, art by Antonio Fuso, a tale inspired by The Beatles’ Happiness is a Warm Gun.  

Dan, hi there, in the Sci-Fi Special, you’re bringing back Downlode’s finest gun sharks from a time before they parted ways in Bulletopia to tell the story of Killer Serial.

First of all, can you tell us just a little of what to expect with Sinister Dexter: Killer Serial?

Dan Abnett: It’s a typical one-shot (no pun intended) Sinister Dexter story, a self-contained anecdote told over five pages. I always think of these as reminiscences of the sharking biz – the sort of thing Sinister and Dexter would recount over a drink. “You remember that time when…”

This one has a particularly creepy overtone – or undertone – and there’s a sense that neither Sinister nor Dexter really grasped the significance of the event.  

The track chosen by you infuses the whole story with its meaning. What was the reasoning for one of the stranger Beatles songs to act as your inspiration here?

DA: The Beatles “Happiness is a Warm Gun” is certainly one of their stranger songs, and the ‘warm gun’ is a particularly arresting and disturbing phrase.

The gun shark culture of Downlode in Sinister Dexter seems to have its own ‘mystic mythology’, laden with superstitions and an almost ritualistic attitude to murder and guns. Weapons are regularly fetishised as being more than just objects. So I wanted to push that idea with the sense the gun was both warm (recently fired) and warm (alive), and that in the messed-up logic of this world, guns really do kill people. What happens when a ‘cursed’ object that’s been empowered by that ritualistic culture encounters people who are also talismans of death, that murder has ‘charged up’ both people and their weapons as embodiments of death.

And just in case you’ve never heard the song…

DA: Oddly, years ago, on a visit to New York, I was shown the gun that had been used to murder John Lennon. This was during a tour of an NYPD evidence area. It was a surreal experience, and I didn’t even want to touch the gun. Even more oddly, I didn’t remember the incident until after I’d written the story and sent it in.  I don’t know how I feel about it now, but that mix of distress and fascination has clearly haunted me. This is meant to be an uncomfortable and nasty story, and it is.    

Yes, uncomfortable and nasty is exactly the vibe going on here.

It comes across as something not necessarily explicitly trying to make a point on the futility of gun culture (and by association, the desperate need for gun control) but I definitely got that sense of it as I read it. Was this something you were thinking of as you wrote it or merely a welcome accident?

DA: No, that was there from the start, but any conclusions are deliberately ambiguous. The moral compass of the series has always been wildly out of whack (again, no pun intended), as we are asked to sympathise with, root for, and even like two people who are – at the very least – sociopathic mass murderers.

This story certainly suggests that guns have a murderous hunger all of their own, which triggers (these puns are inadvertent, swear to god) people into violence, both enabling and persuading. But Sinister and Dexter are even more greatly possessed by that urge, to such an extent that they are almost immune to it, and can cancel it out.

So, on the one hand, I suppose the song inspired me to write a story about the allure and fascination of firearms, and pose the question ‘where does the power lie’? Is it the weapon or the person? On the other hand, that’s all a bit pretentious and wanky, so it’s also just a story about a cursed gun.  

Is it just this track in particular that you love or are you a huge Beatles fan as well? Or are you, as many are, a fan of a particular Beatles era?

DA: When Matt (Tharg) asked me to contribute a story, it was the song I immediately thought of. In fact, I think he may have even suggested it. I have immensely fond memories of the original Comic Rock story by Pat and Kev, so it was an honour to follow in those footsteps. Big difference, of course, is that Pat and Kev had a blank slate and could build a (brilliant and long-lasting) world on their song’s premise, where we’re all attempting to work a track thematically into pre-existing strips.

This track has such a Sinister Dexter vibe to it, I couldn’t think of anything else once it had popped into my mind. I am a Beatles fan, and a fan of all Beatles eras, though my fave would be Revolver (seriously, this is not intentional). But this track was the right one, no matter who had written and recorded it.  

One particular thing about Sinister Dexter I enjoy is seeing how your various artists coming to the strip have fitted in, something that’s meant we have several iconic SinDex artists at this point, all the way up to the great work Tazio Bettin is doing right now on Bulletopia.

DA: We certainly have. It’s a such a long-running and regularly appearing strip that, like Dredd, no one artist could do it all. Matt also often commissions stories at short notice to help with his schedule, and Sinister Dexter is often used as a ‘try out’ strip.

To me, the ‘default’ setting of the strip is short, self-contained one-off stories, so it lends itself to multiple artists. However, as right now, there are much longer stories arcs from time to time, and that’s often where an artist becomes an iconic SinDex artist, like Simon Davis on Gunshark Vacation and Murder 101, Andy Clarke (great to see him back on that recent “Austin Allegro” cover, by the way) on Shrink Rap and now Tazio on Bulletopia.

Tazio is doing an amazing job, and he and I work very happily together. I brought Tazio in – we’d worked togther for another publisher – and I’m delighted he’s found such an enthusiastic reception from the readers. He deserves it.   

Your artist for Killer Serial, Antonio Fuso, has only done the covers for the IDW SinDex reprints to date, but Killer Serial does show us he’d be a perfect fit for the strip in the future – what do you think of what he’s done with it?

DA: He’s done a fine job – there’s a moody, creepy vibe to what he’s done that suits the story perfectly. 

Going away from Killer Serial, we’re currently on the penultimate story in the Bulletopia saga in the Prog, Malice In Plunderland. We’ve got Dexter out on his own (well, with Carrie, Billie et al) and a resurrected Sinister in the thrall of the Downlode AI. What’s the plan for more from the boys? Will we be seeing them reunite at some point… and will it be good or bad for them both if/when they do?

DA: Bulletopia ends soon (as you say, one more story after Malice in Plunderland), at which point we have big plans for the next big era. There will be reunions of all sorts… and few of them will be pleasant.

With a strip as long-running as SinDex, no matter how solid the default setting is (i.e. the short, one-off stories), I think you need to keep it fresh by re-inventing it on a regular basis, and shake things up – at least temporarily. I’ve done that before with ‘eras’ like Downlode Tales and Malone. There’s always a way to re-set again.

What we have coming is a major re-invention which will be the biggest departure from the ‘norm’ so far, with a very different tone… yet will also capture the original spirit of the series in a distilled form. It’s an exciting prospect. 

It’s also one of the longest running strips in 2000 AD and, since starting in 1995, has shown no signs of slowing down at all. What is it about SinDex that really makes you want to return to it over and over again?

DA: It’s the puns. No, I don’t know, really. Like everything I write (for 2000 AD and elsewhere) I’ll stop doing something when I run out of ideas. With SinDex, that’s just never happened (“Oh yes it has!” chorus a section of the readership). The strips inevitably had high points and low points over the years, and I’ve ‘rested’ it from time to time. But the potential of the milieu keeps drawing me back, and the characters have become very solid and real to me. I hope, to the readers too.

Bulletopia’s been great fun – it’s ostensibly the 25th anniversary story, and it draws on loads of old continuity. When I started writing it I seriously thought it might be the last story, a last hurrah, featuring some of their greatest hits (I can’t help myself) by revisiting old continuity. But as I started to do that, I discovered – or re-discovered – so much potential. So rather than being a grand finale, it allowed me to work out what I could do to invent a brand new era. We’ll see how that goes down.    

That’s the problem with planning an ending, something else always crops up! But of course, all things must end – so do you still have that final SinDex storyline in your head or has it all changed now?

DA: I thought I had, but darn it…

Given that you’ve shown us your favourite Beatles song, what else would you suggest? Where would you point someone (and I’m sure there’s some out there somewhere) who hasn’t really got into them before?

DA: I could be really clever-clever about it and cite all sorts of obscure songs, but this is the Beatles we’re talking about. If you’ve seriously never got into them, go buy a greatest hits or the collection of their number one’s. If that doesn’t get you, nothing will. (Hint – it will). 

Now, to finish, feel free to go large in telling us what you’ve both got coming up, and I know Tharg will let you both talk about stuff outside 2000 AD (he’s had his late night Betelgeusian cocktail full of unspeakable things and has the headphones on right now listening to some very interesting stuff that’s somewhere between Miles Davis and droids being electrocuted in weird time signatures)

DA: I’m a busy as ever. In 2000 AD we have more Feral and Foe on the horizon, more of The Out, a new series of Brink, and Lawless continues in the Megazine.  These are all strips I love working on, and artists (Rich Elson, Mark Harrison, INJ Culbard and Phil Winslade) that it’s a massive privilege to work with. Plus, SinDex of course, and the stuff Tazio and I are planning for it.

Outside of 2K, I’m doing some work for DC, and some game work (particularly the forthcoming Warhammer 40K game Darktide), not to mention my ‘other hat’ as a novelist. Oh, go on, I’ll mention it, then. I’m just delivering the biggest (both in word-count and in terms of lore) Warhammer novel I’ve ever written (and, boy, I’ve written a few), so that’s keeping me at my desk in a creative trance (fugue?).  It’s called The End and the Death, and it’s the final book of the Horus Heresy series (after 15 plus bestselling years). Horus finally faces the Emperor, and there are tears before bedtime. I’ve been working on it for eighteen months, and it’s a beast.  So there’s that.

Plus, some other things I’m not at liberty to mention yet. But that’s quite enough to be getting on with, right? “I’m writing the end of the Horus Heresy” … that’s ending with a bang (funt, I did it again).    

And huge thanks to Dan here for turning this around at lightning speed – he’s a gentleman and a star (and those puns just creep into things to do with Sinister Dexter even when he’s not trying)!

You can see Killer Serial, a great Sinister Dexter story by Dan and Antonio Fuso in the 2000 AD Sci-Fi Special 2022 – it’s out on 13 July 2022 and available from wherever Thrill Power is sold, including the 2000 AD web shop. And the penultimate Sinister Dexter: Bulletopia series, Malice in Plunderland, is running right now in the Prog!

And you can (and should) listen to the whole Sci-Fi Special playlist here on Spotify.

But before we leave you… that original Comic Rock cover by Pat Mills and Kevin O’Neill, Terror Tube…

Vengence Be Thy Name, the stunning collection of the adventures of the warrior woman with a name born of the black rage that filled her heart, Black Beth, came out on 8 June – here we talk to Alec Worley, the man pretty much responsible for bringing her back for a new generation.

It’s a collection that really does span the generations, beginning with the original 23-page story of Black Beth, with art from Spanish artist Blas Gallego, first developed in the early 1970s and eventually published in the Scream! Holiday Special 1988, a comic bought by a young Alec Worley at the time. And, although his copy has long since been lost, his love for Black Beth continued over the years until he had his own chance to bring the character back with artist DaNi.

In Black Beth: Vengence Be Thy Name, we get absolutely everything published of Black Beth, the original 23-pager by Gallego and all of the Worley/DaNi material published in the last few years – a spectacular sword & sorcery saga completed for the first time right here.

Buy now:

PAPERBACK >>

EXCLUSIVE HARDCOVER >>

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So, Alec, the first thing to ask I suppose is what does it mean to you to have the complete Black Beth out, including that gorgeous Blas Gallego original story?

ALEC WORLEY: It’ll be the first time the original has seen print in 33 years, which is quite something! (Beth saw a reprint a year after her debut, in Quality’s Slaine the King #21-22 in 1989.) For me, it’s especially nice as I loved the character so much as a kid, and if I hadn’t bugged Keith [Richardson] to let me revive her, she may well have remained languishing in obscurity.

It does mean that you no longer have to mourn the loss of that Scream! Holiday Special! you once owned and loved for the original Black Beth.

AW: Absolutely! Still super-annoyed at having lost that. But this being such a beautiful quality reprint more than makes up for it.

Alec, you’ve talked about first discovering Gallego’s Black Beth on some dreary summer holiday, only adding to your love of Scream! But what was it about the Black Beth strip that really stood out to you?

AW: It stood out for reasons that are just so ridiculously idiosyncratic on my part. At the time I was hooked on Hawk the Slayer and the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks and was just getting into Warhammer and Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion books. I would devour any fantasy I could get my hands on.

But I think it was all the unanswered questions surrounding Black Beth that really made her stick for me. Like, what was a sword opera strip like this doing in a horror comic like Scream!? What else was going on in Beth’s world? And most importantly, what happened next…?

Thankfully… now we know what happened next, all thanks to you and DaNi!

One thing that does remain a mystery is the identity of the writer of that one and only Black Beth, something that no-one involved with the collection has been able to get to the bottom of, although there is that possibility that it was Gallego himself who wrote and drew it.

AW: Yeah, I did a lot of detective work on this and reached out to a bunch of great people, including Dez Skinn and Barrie Tomlinson. I found a really cool little clue in the fanzine ArkenSword, in which Ian Gibson mentioned in an interview that he’d worked on a female-led sword and sorcery strip in the ‘70s with Blas Gallego. So I reached out to him and he confirmed that he had only worked on the pencils. It was more likely that Blas himself had been the writer! But again, I reached out to Blas and he told me it definitely wasn’t him. It seems that Beth’s original co-creator was most likely some overworked freelancer on the IPC books.

It’s funny how you perceive these things as a kid, isn’t it? When you discover these characters for the first time, they seem land in front of you like gifts from Olympus! You’re so swept away by the romance of it that you have no idea of the grubby reality of all the sweat and graft and deadlines and invoices that actually went into making them.

So, fast forward 30 years and young Alec Worley is now somewhat older Alec Worley, comics writer, and there’s suddenly the opportunity to push for the return of Black Beth.

Was it something that you’d always hankered after doing or was it the Treasury of British Comics beginning to publish new Scream! Specials that set you about pitching?

AW: I love sword and sorcery adventures full stop, so would have jumped at the chance to do anything in that vein. But Beth has a really special place in my heart, so I got Keith in a headlock as soon as I heard she might be up for grabs.

But at the same time, I didn’t want this to just be a self-indulgent nostalgia-fest. Weirdly enough, Garth Ennis (an idol of mine, just a brilliant, brilliant writer) seems to have found his own retro sword-and-sorcery passion project with the Hawk the Slayer series he did with Henry Flint. Now THAT comic is another great example of how not to get caught in the nostalgia-trap and play what you love as the straight adventure story it’s supposed to be.

As for the pitch itself, aside from the headlock, was it something that took a lot of pleading/begging/bribery (after all, Black Beth isn’t standard horror stuff that we’d expect from Scream!) or was Keith convinced by you pretty easily?

AW: I’m eternally grateful to Keith and the powers that be at Rebellion for giving me the green light on this, as they really didn’t seem to take much convincing.

And of course, that pitch included you asking if you could work with DaNi, as you’d already worked together on Fate of the Fairy Hunter in a previous Misty Special.

AW: Yes! We’d worked together before and Dani was part of my pitch from the beginning. She’s just perfect for it in terms of bringing that woozy, exotic feel I was after. Plus, her storytelling is always just so spot-on!

One thing that’s very noticeable from the collection is just how together the whole thing seems, with the transition between the ages practically seamless – even though there’s 30+ years difference.

AW: Well, we did make a few changes and that began with the readership. The readership of Black Beth in 1988 is very different to where we are now. I didn’t want to aim it exclusively at the same kids who were now in their forties, but rather recapture that original energy by aiming it at young adults, the kind of readers who enjoyed books like Six of Crows and Children of Blood and Bone. So I did my homework (lots of homework), made Beth younger and Quido hotter, thought through their relationship, their values and so on, and off we went.

You and DaNi have taken things in a somewhat magical direction, as Gallego’s original was grounded in vengeance, a very human tale. You and DaNi have taken her tale into sword AND sorcery – although of course, it all keeps to the idea of fighting evil in all its forms.

AW: Yeah, the original is really more like a historical drama than a spell-slinging fantasy, though it’s got that witchy folkloric feel, which I wanted to crank up in our short The Witch Tree. And when the chance came to broaden the scope even more with Devils of Al-Kadesh, I really wanted to take it into the realms of a Harryhausen-type Saturday matinee swashbuckler.

Obviously, artistically, things are different but the tone of the art is sympathetic – was there a conscious decision on your part here to make those first B&W stories flow artistically with what had come before?

AW: Definitely! In opening up Beth’s world, I modelled it somewhat on Moorish Spain. Not only as a tip of the hat to Blas’s country of origin, but because Almeria in south-east Spain was where they filmed the Spaghetti Westerns and the original Conan movie. It’s got all those scorched rocky landscapes you see in the original strip. But again, I wanted to keep the sense of witchcraft and mystery. For me, creating a sense of wonder in fantasy is about keeping things hidden and letting the reader’s imagination come out to play. It’s a two-way thing, not just about you explaining how the world works.

Now that you’ve had the opportunity, I’d imagine, to see the final collection with your work sitting so comfortably next to Gallego’s, what’s your final take on the project that you’ve taken on, bringing an artist and his character back in print, expanding on what was a simple character, and bringing her back for a modern audience?

AW: I’m feel really privileged to have been allowed to do everything we’ve done so far. The reviews have been great and the collection has been in the top ten of an Amazon Best Seller’s Rank for the last couple of months (‘Fairy Tales, Folklore, Legends & Mythology Comics & Graphic Novels for Young Adults’). It even hit number one last time I looked.

Also seeing other artists join in and bring their own vibe to the table, like the brilliant Andrea Bulgarelli who drew the back-up strip Fairy Tales. (Fun fact: Since Andrea doesn’t speak a great deal of English, I had to write the script in Italian!)

I couldn’t be happier, really.

And now that everything Black Beth is all collected together, do you both have plans to continue the saga at all?

I would drop anything to keep writing Beth and vanish off into her world for a bit. Reading comics like Jason Aaron’s Conan and Garth Ennis’s Hawk the Slayer makes me realise just how much I adore this genre!

Thanks to Alec for chatting to us – you can see his Black Beth collaborations with DaNi, together with the original Blas Gallego story, in Black Beth: Vengence Be Thy Name, out now from all good comic shops and the 2000 AD web shop.