Everyone at Rebellion is deeply saddened to learn of the death of artist John M. Burns.
Well known amongst 2000 AD fans for his extensive work on stories including Judge Dredd, The Order, and Nikolai Dante, Burns’ career extended across six decades, inspiring entire generations of artistic talent to pick up a pencil and brush. The majority of his work in comics was fully-painted – and even through to his most recent artwork for the Prog, all his pages were delivered directly from his home in Cornwell to the 2000 AD office in poster tubes, rather than sent via PDF. His work had a wonderfully tangible quality as a result, his incredibly detailed paints leaving the office marvelling over every single panel he created.
Born in Essex in 1938, Burns started his comic career in his early twenties, working as an apprentice for titles including School Friend and Junior Express. It was in 1958 that his first major comics work was published, in Champion The Wonder Horse Annual. Through the 1960s he became more and more prolific, working as artist on a variety of comics and magazines including Eagle, Wham!, Diana and more, drawing stories for characters like Dan Dare and Kelpie the Boy Wizard. In addition, he worked tirelessly through the years on newspaper strips including The Seekers, Danielle, George & Lynne, Jane – and Modesty Blaise, one of his most high-profile roles to date.
As he entered the 1970s he was hugely in-demand, as new technology meant that comics and magazines like TV Action, Countdown and Look-In could finally print his painted work in full-colour as intended. He inspired generations of children with comic adaptations of familiar franchises including Doctor Who, Mission Impossible, Buck Rogers, Magnum P.I. and so many more.
For an artist of Burns’ distinct pedigree, there was no doubt that 2000 AD would eventually come calling, and he debuted in the Prog with a Judge Dredd strip written by Garth Ennis called “Garbage Disposal”. Although he might not have been the artist people would predict would be a strong fit for Dredd, Burns immediately proved his adaptability, creating a vision of Mega-City One which felt all his own, and introduced a welcome noir sensibility to Judge Dredd’s world.
It was with his other work for 2000 AD that he arguably truly cemented his status as an industry legend, however. Well remembered for his contributions to comics like Vector 13, Witchworld and Durham Red, Burns was co-creator of the paranoid conspiracy thriller series Black Light with Dan Abnett and Steve White. For many readers, though, his name is most well-remembered for one series in particular: Nikolai Dante.
Created by Robbie Morrison and Simon Fraser in the 90s, Nikolai Dante quickly became a firm fan-favourite in 2000 AD, telling the story of a swashbuckling hero who wanted nothing more than to romp around a futuristic Russia and cause chaos in his wake. The demand for new stories with the character meant that Fraser needed other artists to fill-in from time to time, and Burns was one of the artists chosen for the assignment. His style was completely at home with the romantic nature of Dante as a character, and he returned to the character repeatedly across the course of the series: when Nikolai Dante started to turn towards darker storylines, Burns was more than ready to create exceptional and shocking battle sequences, depicting the full horrors of the war which engulfed Nikolai’s world for years and years.
When Nikolai Dante finally came to a decisive end, Burns would team up again with Morrison for The Bendatti Vendetta, a 1970s-inspired action thriller which brought cool style to a story of gangster revenge. By now Burns was a superstar in comics; a name who could bring people to 2000 AD simply by being attached to a story. Readers flocked to see what he’s get up to next, from the Yazuka-inspired Angel Zero with Kek-W to his most recent classic series The Order. Always unpredictable, this long-running historical epic lasted for seven stories, with Burns offering a masterclass in storytelling with each and every page he painted. By the time his run on The Order concluded, Burns was in his eighties, with six decades of work behind him, and still leading the way as an artist.
His legacy is obvious: his artwork inspired countless artists across multiple decades, and his final work – Nightmare New York, with frequent collaborator Kek-W – will be published later this year in 2000 AD.
Our most heartfelt condolences go out to all of John’s family and friends.
Everyone at Rebellion is deeply saddened to hear of the death of artist Ian Gibson.
A renowned writer and artist, with a career spanning half a century, he was responsible for the art on some of 2000 AD’s most distinctive and iconic stories, including ‘The Ballad of Halo Jones’ with Alan Moore and ‘Robo-Hunter’ with John Wagner and Alan Grant.
Whether under his pen-names – Emberton and Q. Twerk – or his own, Gibson’s art is immediately recognisable: as at ease in portraying dynamic action as it is chronicling character, as comfortable with goofball comedy as with moving pathos. His endlessly inventive imagination could craft whole worlds that seemed lived-in and real yet fantastical and wondrous – from the mean streets of Mega-City One and the robot world of Verdus to the planets on Halo Jones’ galaxy-spanning journey.
Born in 1946, Ian’s first work was on fanzines but by 1973 his art was appearing in Pocket Chiller Library, the Bionic Woman Annual, and in House of Hammer titles. After his ‘skinny’ girls were rejected by editors on IPC’s range of girls’ comics, he worked with renowned Spanish artist Blas Gallego, who lived in London at the time, with Gallego inking over Gibson’s pencils. It was his work on ‘Death Wish’ in 1975 for Valiant that marked the beginning of a decades-long collaboration with writer and editor John Wagner.
After 2000 AD launched in 1977, Gibson contributed a string of work drawing the futuristic lawman, including episodes for the first Judge Dredd epic, ’Robot Wars’. It was his portrayal of robots inspiring Wagner to come up with a new series that would suit his talents – ‘Robo-Hunter’.
When the long-running series about a weary, wise-cracking bounty hunter called Sam Slade tracking down errant robots began, its first episode was by Spanish artist José Ferrer – but Gibson soon stamped his authority on the character, catapulting him into the pantheon of 2000 AD greats.
‘Verdus’, which saw Sam and spaceship pilot Kidd (who had been reverse-aged into a foul-mouthed baby) attempt to escape a planet populated entirely by robots, is one of the most inventive stories 2000 AD has ever published. Gibson brought an anarchic and constantly surprising approach to storytelling on the series, as brilliant at handling the high-stakes action sequences as he was at injecting humour, bringing charm to the laconic lead character and introducing a host of memorable supporting characters who caused chaos and kept readers riveted to each new story.
In 1981, Gibson worked with rising star Alan Moore on the Tharg’s Future Shock story ‘Grawks Bearing Gifts’ and the pair would reunite a few years later for one of the landmark stories in 2000 AD history: ‘The Ballad of Halo Jones’.
A powerfully feminist and forward-thinking serial about a young woman desperate to escape the claustrophobic and dangerous life on a floating housing estate, Gibson and Moore worked together closely to construct a futuristic and yet relatable world. As Halo left Earth and faced betrayal, danger, and heartbreak, Gibson’s skill only grew in portraying her evolution from a wide-eyed innocent to a scarred but mature woman. His clear passion was the vital ingredient for the success of both the character and her story, told by the duo across three books. Halo Jones is rightly considered to be a classic story in comics history: one which continues to influence and inspire new creators to this day.
With his 2000 AD catalogue including runs with stories including ‘Ace Trucking Co’, ‘Anderson: Psi Division’ and many more, in the late 1980s Gibson moved across to work in America, with a storied career working on comics including Mister Miracle, Star Wars, the major DC comics event storyline ‘Millennium’, and ‘Meta 4’ for First Comics. In the 1990s, he designed pre-production visuals and characters for the pioneering CGI-animated TV series, ReBoot, as well as creating ‘The Chronicles of Genghis Grimtoad’.
Ian’s most recent 2000 AD work saw him return to both Judge Dredd and one of the franchises he’d made famous, ‘Robo-Hunter’, teaming up with Alan Grant for a series based around the adventures of Sam Slade’s daughter, Samantha. In recent years, he celebrated the publication of his long-gestating Lifeboat story, as well as connecting with fans on social media.
Throughout, Gibson never lost his ability to make the fantastical into something which felt relatable, exciting and real; his gift for humour marks him as one of 2000 AD’s most expressive and human artists, who left an indelible mark on comics history.
His passing represents another profound loss from the golden generation of artists and writers who established 2000 AD as an artistic and cultural powerhouse, his work enthralling and thrilling generations of children.
Our most heartfelt condolences go out to all of Ian’s family and friends.
Everyone at 2000 AD is devastated to learn of the death of artist Kevin O’Neill.
Words like ‘unique’ and ‘genius’ are not uncommon in the pantheon of 2000 AD creators, but no-one deserves them more than O’Neill, whose innovative, iconoclastic, idiosyncratic, inventive, visionary, and provocative work still has the ability to shock and dazzle, even decades after its first publication.
The co-creator of Ro-Busters, A.B.C. Warriors, Nemesis the Warlock, Metalzoic and Marshal Law with Pat Mills, and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with Alan Moore, O’Neill was one of the most important and unique artists British comics ever produced. From the towering, Gothic bacchanals of Nemesis to the anarchic, razor-sharp and emotionally-brutal work on League, O’Neill’s art was the scourge of conservative editors and was blacklisted by the Comics Code Authority in the US for being ‘objectionable’. There are so few artists – even at 2000 AD – that have been so uncompromising in their style, a style so visceral, so extreme, so individual. And, even now, you simply still cannot mistake O’Neill’s work for anyone else’s.
Born in 1953 on a working-class council estate in the south London suburb of Eltham to an English father and an Irish mother, O’Neill was an avid reader of British stalwarts The Beano and TheDandy before being introduced by a school friend to MAD magazine, whose panels crammed with anarchic, satirical humour, sight gags and comedic grotesques would be a profound influence on his work.
Forced to give up the offer of places at art schools in London after his father retired early, O’Neill became an office boy at IPC under the wing of art editor Janet Shepheard, who would go on to design the iconic original logo for Judge Dredd. ’I handed out soap and towels to the editor once a week, spent time leafing through old volumes of comics, and gradually doing minor art and lettering corrections and pasting up reprints of Billy Bunter strips,’ he told George Khoury in True Brit. ‘Jan was a good, if strict, teacher. She also told me while looking through my samples that it would be ten years before I was good enough to work as a professional artist – and she was right!’
After a few years freelance, O’Neill returned to IPC and eventually becoming assistant art editor on 2000 AD, the new science-fiction comic being developed by Pat Mills. Alongside Shepheard and designer Doug Church, O’Neill helped define the early look of this new title, his sharp, febrile lines, postmodern design sensibility, and mischievous sense of humour giving it a fresh, spiky and iconoclastic edge that spoke to the moment amid the simultaneous rise of punk and its DIY fanzine scene.
Most importantly, frustrated that creators were not receiving the attention they deserved, O’Neill was instrumental in 2000 AD adopting credit boxes that, for the first time, named the creative teams on each individual strip, including letterers. Virtually unheard of in the close-knit world of British comics, where publishers always feared writers and artists being poached by the competition, O’Neill convinced the censorious senior editor Bob Bartholomew that the boxes were merely experimental. They have remained ever since.
As well as designing Judge Dredd’s obsequious robo-servant Walter the Wobot, O’Neill designed the principal characters in Ro-Busters, a strip about a robot rescue squad – ‘an inhuman International Rescue’ – that Pat Mills wrote for Starlord, including characters such as Ro-Jaws, Hammerstein and Mek-Quake, who went on to be a part of the popular A.B.C. Warriors strip after Starlord merged with 2000 AD.
His other artwork for 2000 AD included parodies, such as the anarchic and scatalogical take on Godzilla – Bonjo from Beyond the Stars – and Flash Gordon parody Dash Decent. Shok!, a one-shot sci-fi horror story co-written by editor Steve MacManus, was later copied wholesale by the makers of the film Hardware, with the producers eventually agreeing to credit and pay the creators.
But it was after leaving IPC – following an argument over the violence in Harlem Heroes sequel, ‘Inferno’ – and becoming a full-time artist that O’Neill’s distinctive talent truly came into its own.
Nemesis the Warlock was a magic-wielding, cloven-hoofed alien freedom fighter who battled the xenophobic, fascist interplanetary empire of the bigoted human leader Torquemada, whose mission is to purge the galaxy of ‘deviant’ alien races. With its blend of brutal satire and anti-establishment anger, Nemesis quickly became one of the most popular recurring characters in 2000 AD. Mills and O’Neill’s Catholic upbringings produced a strip seething with iconoclastic fury.
Under O’Neill’s pen, Earth was transformed into ‘Termight’, a hellish dystopian hollowed-out planet of gravity-defying tubular highways and stalactite housing blocks like something from a medieval nightmare, but splattered with off-the-wall humour and details more befitting a Heath Robinson drawing; Nemesis and Torquemada duelled amidst Gothic towers, along penis-shaped bridges (later amended ever-so-slightly to evade editorial censorship), across time and space, and eventually to the end of the world.
O’Neill was eventually forced to leave the series due to financial pressures but returned to draw the final ever episode of Nemesis in Prog 2000.
He also worked on disturbing Judge Dredd stories such as ‘The Law According to Dredd’ and ‘Varks’, before co-creating Metalzoic with Mills. Published as a colour DC graphic novel in 1986 and later serialised in black and white in 2000 AD Progs 483-492, this highly-acclaimed series pitted robot apes against robot mammoths on a future Earth, with just two human characters, and produced the memorable cover to Prog 485 with the insane Armageddon announcing ‘I operated on my own BRAIN!’.
Part of the charm of his work were the in-jokes and self-deprecating humour he peppered throughout his pages, inspired by the work of his favourite Mad magazine cartoonists. Often behind on deadlines and struggling financially, he portrayed himself in Nemesis as a hunched over monk, chained to his desk as he is chastened by the spirit of Torquemada: ‘You’re taking too long on the illuminated borders, Brother Kevin! Your bestiary must be finished this century!’
When DC Comics began scouting for British artists in early 1984, O’Neill was amongst those who became known as ‘The British Invasion’ but the twelve-page tale in 1986’s Tales of the Green Lantern Corps Annual, resulted in self-appointed US comic moralists of The Comic Code Authority condemning his style wholesale as ‘objectionable’. It was later printed in an annual, minus the authority’s mark, but despite a moral victory of sorts, O’Neill’s work never fitted into the mainstream of American comics, though he worked on Lobo, Bizarro, Death Race 2020 and the mischievous entity known as Batmite with Alan Grant.
However, his wider reputation is founded on two strips that both suited and encouraged his iconoclastic style.
Pat Mills’ searing satire on superheroes, Marshal Law, followed an ultra-violent government-sanctioned superhero killer. First published by Epic Comics in 1987, the character briefly shifted to Toxic!, a creator-owned title launched in 1991, before moving to Dark Horse Comics. This heady mix of extreme graphic violence, sex and brutality, and a deep vein of dark humour, is still intoxicating and represents the anarchist wing of the British deconstruction of superheroes of the 1980s and ‘90s.
It was The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, written by Alan Moore, that sealed O’Neill’s fame and legacy. Set in 1898 in an England where the great characters of Victorian adventure fiction actually exist, League became enormously popular (despite the poor and badly-received Hollywood adaptation) in no small part to O’Neill’s art. Having drawn the cover to Moore’s first foray into music, a single released by the ‘Sinister Ducks’, O’Neill had contributed covers to the Titan collections of his 2000 AD ‘Future Shocks’, but with League their strengths reinforced each other in a sprawling, hyper-detailed and at times enigmatic collision of words, art, and design. ‘Partly because of Kevin’s art, we can span comedy, horror and pathos in a couple of pages,’ Moore said in The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore. ‘Often in one page, sometimes in one panel. The emotional range that Kevin’s artwork lends to the story is fantastic. It’s one of the main assets of League.’
Following the conclusion of the series, O’Neill enjoyed a return to 2000 AD of sorts earlier this year when he and Garth Ennis revived the infamous ‘Kids Rule OK’ strip from Action, 2000 AD’s controversial predecessor, for the Battle Action special and his final work, the return of ‘Bonjo From Beyond The Stars’, will be published in 2000 AD at Christmas.
Kind and incredibly generous with his time, O’Neill possessed a warmth that belied the ferocious anger and gleeful violence of his work, with him wielding his pen like a scalpel and creating art that possesses a profound beauty made up of harsh, sharp edges.
‘I suppose I have a kind of parallel life,’ he said on the Barbelith website. ‘I don’t have any suburban friends at all. I’m great friends with a band called Rockbitch and I have a lot of occult friends and friends who work in the sex industry. I suppose my benign smiling face might just conceal an appalling secret life!’
His art challenged and changed, provoked and delighted, he was the anarchic, gleeful humour of British comics twisted and twisted to breaking point, rendered in a style that was grotesque and beautiful at the same time. ‘I’d hate to see all comic art streamlined into one awful branded style,’ he once said. ‘What a nightmare vision, the world having one big harmless dream.’
His death is a monumental loss for comics. Truly unique, truly a genius, O’Neill made art like no-one else could or will; we were richer for having known him, and poorer for having lost him.
Our very deepest condolences go out to his family, his friends, his colleagues, and all those who have been in some way touched by the magic of Kevin O’Neill.
The bestiary is finally finished. Rest well, Brother Kevin.
Everyone at 2000 AD and Rebellion is devastated to hear of the passing of Alan Grant.
Grant was one of his generation’s finest writers, combining a sharp eye for dialogue and political satire with a deep empathy that made his characters seem incredibly human and rounded. Through his work he had a profound and enduring influence on 2000 AD and on the comics industry.
Born in Bristol in 1949, he grew up in Scotland where he was frequently beaten by his teachers for being naturally left-handed and regularly expelled, the injustice of his treatment giving him a powerful distaste for authority which saturated his writing. However, this was leavened by a mischievous and wicked sense of humour that was at times scatalogical and at others soulful.
After working briefly in a bank, Alan answered a newspaper advertisement for ‘trainee journalists’ and, at the age of 18, joined DC Thomson, the Dundee-based publisher and home to the Beano, where he met John Wagner and Pat Mills. Assigned a horoscope column for the Dundee Daily Courier, he and fellow sub-editors John Hodgman and John Wagner would compete to see who could write the most ridiculous predictions. ‘It got worse and worse,’ Grant told the Judge Dredd Megazine in 2008. ‘”Sagittarius, the stars are against you today — it might be safer to stay inside. Do not be surprised if a close family member suffers an accident!”’
Alan pictured by Kev Hopgood in the Judge Dredd Annual 1991 and at the Moniaive comics festival he ran with his wife Sue
He moved to London in 1970 to work for publisher IPC as a writer and sub-editor on romance magazines, but after being invited to write a strip for the short-lived Starlord, editor Kelvin Gosnell offered him an editorial position on 2000 AD.
In addition to editing scripts, Grant soon realised that 2000 AD had an urgent need to find and nurture new writing talent and he is credited as finding a script from unknown writer Alan Moore in the unsolicited submissions pile, which was the beginning of a career that would come to profoundly change comics. ‘I got a brilliant letter back from Alan Grant,’ Moore recalled, ‘he went out of his way to encourage people who he thought had talent.’
Dissatisfied with IPC, Alan quit in the summer of 1980 and his robotic alter ego, AALN-1, was written out of the stories of alien editor Tharg the Mighty with a heroic death in the two-part story ‘The Great Human Rip-Off’ in 2000 AD Progs 176-177.
The cover to 2000 AD Prog 177, portraying Alan as droid AALN-1 around the time he moved from sub-editor to full-time freelance writer. Art by Carlos Ezquerra.
However, he found himself unemployed when a job editing puzzle magazines fell through. John Wagner – who lived with Alan in London and was suffering from ill health – asked him if he could help with his growing workload.
Under the pseudonym T.B. Grover, the pair became a powerhouse. Beginning mid-way through ‘The Judge Child’ saga, their partnership redefined Judge Dredd, their black humour and wild imaginations forging what many consider to be the strip’s first great ‘golden age’. It was on the floor of Alan’s grand home in the Essex countryside that he and John Wagner, surrounded by newspapers, would sit and turn the day’s news into inspiration for quotidian tales of mass unemployment, violent fashions, and hubristic criminals, interspersed with towering epics such as ‘The Apocalypse War’ and ‘City of the Damned’.
Soon writing under the own names, on mutant bounty hunter series Strontium Dog they explored the nature of both prejudice and loyalty, while they let their madcap humour shine through on sci-fi private detective caper Robo-Hunter and space trucking comedy series Ace Trucking Co..
Ace Trucking Co. (1981), art by Massimo Belardinelli
Yet even in the silliest of scripts there was always a sharply political edge to Alan’s writing. Drawing on disdain for the populist authoritarianism of Margaret Thatcher, stories such as ‘John Cassavetes is Dead’ and ‘A Letter from a Democrat’ mocked and criticised the country’s right-ward turn. However, Alan was no dogmatic ideologue. He was inspired by both left-wing anarchism and Eastern philosophy (including the work of a Tibetan lama who turned out to be a plumber from Devon) and remained a fierce and strongly independent thinker.
‘As someone who was thrown out of the Young Conservatives for being too Labour-minded and was thrown out of the Socialist Party for being too Conservative minded, basically what both parties were saying was that I was just too argumentative for either of them,’ he said in 2021.
Judge Anderson from Helios (1989, art by David Roach) and Shamballa (1990, art by Arthur Ranson)
From the mid-1980s, Alan wrote the solo adventures of the irreverent psychic Judge Cassandra Anderson, including a string of stories in the 1990s in which she went on a voyage of self-discovery.
It was the Judge Dredd mega-epic Oz, when they disagreed over whether Dredd should kill teen sky-surfer Chopper, that signalled the end of the writing partnership. Splitting their strips between them, Wagner kept Judge Dredd and Grant Strontium Dog and Judge Anderson. Unhappy and dissatisfied with IPC’s policies over royalties and character ownership, Alan wrote ‘The Final Solution’, killing off Strontium Dog lead character Johnny Alpha to put him out of the reach of other writers, a decision he said he later regretted and which co-creator Carlos Ezquerra refused to draw.
Although they no longer worked together regularly, Alan and John did collaborate on particular projects, such as the Batman/Judge Dredd crossover Judgement on Gotham, The Last American for Marvel’s Epic imprint, the twelve-issue Outcasts for DC Comics, and their creator-owned series The Bogie Man.
The Last American (1990) art by Mick McMahon
Alan began an acclaimed run on DC Comics’ Detective Comics and Batman – at first with Wagner and then solo – and worked with artist Norm Breyfogle for a decade, where his Anarky character carried something of Chopper’s independent spirit. He also helped popularise DC’s anarchic brute Lobo, initially with artist Simon Bisley.
He continued to work for 2000 AD throughout the 1990s, mainly on Anderson, Psi Division, where his partnership with artist Arthur Ranson produced incredibly beautiful stories such as Shamballa and Satan, and the three-volume series Mazeworld, inspired by three months he spent in prison for possession of LSD in 1969.
Although ill for some time, Alan continued to write. His last work for 2000 AD was a Judge Anderson story in 2018 and a war story in the Battle Special in 2020.
Alan’s story for the Battle Special in 2020, art by Davide Fabbri and Domenico Neziti
For several years, Alan and his wife Sue organised a much-loved comics festival in their village of Moniaive in Dumfriesshire, as part of a community re-invention as a ‘Festival Village’ tourist destination after foot-and-mouth disease devastated the area in 2001.
For the generations who grew up reading Alan’s work for 2000 AD, who were touched by the pathos and compassion of his characters, who felt the joy of their victories and the sting of their deaths, Alan’s passing is a painful gut punch.
His impact on comics and standing in the industry simply cannot be understated. But he was more than just a giant in his field – he was a fascinating man whose sharp wit and boundless warmth touched all those who met him. One cannot separate 2000 AD from Alan Grant, his humour, humanity, and intelligence made it what it is, and his talent was integral to its success.
We are forever poorer without him.
Our deepest condolences go out to his family and his friends.
Everyone at 2000 AD is deeply saddened to announce the passing of artist Garry Leach at the age of 67.
Garry, who began his career in the pages of 2000 AD, was born in 1954 and attended Central St Martin’s College.
A modest and unassuming talent, by the time of his first work for 2000 AD – inking Trevor Goring’s work on the Dan Dare story ‘The Doomsday Machine’ in 1978 – his confident brushwork was already unmissable and although appearances were sporadic – whether on high-tech superspy series M.A.C.H.1 or on one-episode Future Shocks, including working with future collaborator Alan Moore – his self-assured style brought a solidity to its pages.
He worked on Judge Dredd stories such as ‘The Day the Law Died’ and ‘Night of the Bloodbeast’ in 1979, ‘Attack of the 50 ft. Woman’ in 1986, and ‘The Comeback’ and ‘Ten Years On’ 1987, the latter of which saw Whitey, the murderous gang leader from Dredd’s first published story, return to try and get revenge on the lawman.
The same year he collaborated on the 1987 Dredd mega-epic ‘Oz’ with Will Simpson and Dave Elliott, as well as producing covers for Titan Publishing’s collections of Judge Anderson stories, a series of seminal Dark Judges pin-ups for 2000 AD, and the illustrations for the ‘You are Sláine: Tomb of Terror’ solo role-playing game that ran in 2000 AD in early 1986.
His most prominent work for 2000 AD came on Gerry Finley-Day’s space war series The V.C.s – on which he followed Mick McMahon, and then alternated with Cam Kennedy – a series about the ‘Vacuum Cleaners’, a hard-bitten crew of a space patrol ship battling the alien menace of The Geeks.
With a slick and confident inking style reminiscent of both Dave Gibbons and Brian Bolland, Garry’s work was immediately recognisable alongside the rougher, more febrile art of McMahon and Kennedy.
While there was an intensity to his action sequences and stunning imagination in his designs, he also brought wonderful touches of whimsey – whether it was the harlequin-turned-hippie computer ‘Brother’ in The V.C.s, the nose-sucking plants of ‘Future Shocks: Bloomin’ Cold’, or Dredd’s striped socks in ‘Ten Years On’.
His greatest and most famous work was co-creating the new Marvelman with Alan Moore in 1981. A revival of the unauthorised and believed-abandoned British version of Captain Marvel from the 1950s, this series for Dez Skinn’s Warrior anthology was a stunning deconstruction of the superhero genre that presaged Moore’s better-known work on Watchmen.
Garry’s sharp-lined realism brought a languid, sinewy quality to Marvelman that befitted Moore’s intense psychological script. When Alan Davis took over as artist on the series, Garry inked his first few stories to allow him to settle into the strip and it was his style that remained the archetype for the rest of strip, even as it continued with Mark Buckingham.
It was with Moore than Garry created Warpsmith for Warrior, which eventually became a supporting character in Marvelman, and headed up A1, the anthology title Garry launched in 1988 as part of Atomeka Press with Dave Elliott.
After a spell working in advertising, Garry returned to comics in the late 1990s as John McCrea’s inker on Hitman, and worked for other DC Comics titles such as Legion of Superheroes, Monarchy and Global Frequency. He also inked fellow 2000 AD artist Chris Weston on J. Michael Straczynski’s The Twelve for Marvel Comics and returned to 2000 AD in 2004 to produce covers for the Judge Dredd Megazine.
Although he never had his own signature series in our pages, Garry was one of the artists who helped define 2000 AD’s first golden age. His imagination and talent leapt from every page and brought a confident dynamism to series such as The V.C.s and Judge Dredd.
His generosity in complementing, supporting and mentoring other artists cannot be ignored and the comics industry owes him a deep debt for both his work and his friendship, and he will be sorely missed.
Garry passed away unexpectedly on 26 March and our deepest condolences go out to his family and his friends.
Everyone at 2000 AD is very saddened to learn of the passing of artist Ian Kennedy.
It is no hyperbole to describe Kennedy as a legend of British comics. With a career spanning more than seven decades, his meticulously detailed but dynamic work graced dozens of titles, from Hotspur to Bunty, from Commando to 2000 AD.
Born in Dundee in 1932, Kennedy was too young for service during World War Two but the planes flying overhead sparked a lifelong obsession with aircraft. After leaving school, he began work as a trainee illustrator in the Art Department of comic and magazine publisher DC Thomson & Co, where his first job was inking the black boxes of the crossword in the Sunday Post.
He switched to more lucrative freelancing in 1954, picking up jobs with Amalgamated Press — later IPC — through an agent, but continuing to work for DC Thomson. He worked on a dizzying number of titles, including Hotspur, Adventure, Rover, Bunty, Judy, Wizard, Thriller Picture Library, and Air Ace.
As tastes changed, so did the audience for his work. His style adapted perfectly to the new generation of science-fiction comics like 2000 AD, for which he worked on strips such as ‘Invasion’, ‘Judge Dredd’ and ‘M.A.C.H.1’, as well as on ‘Ro-Busters’ for stablemate Star Lord. One of his most famous covers featured the perfect intersection of the different parts of his career – Messerschmitt 109s from World War Two transported to the skies over Judge Dredd’s Mega-City One, with one pilot screaming “Himmel! This isn’t Stalingrad!”.
His richly coloured art, with his particular skill for sleek, dynamic and functional machines and spacecraft, was perfect for the relaunch of ‘Dan Dare’ in Eagle in the 1980s as well as Blake’s 7, M.A.S.K., the short-lived IPC title Wildcat.
But it was World War Two and his childhood love of aircraft that dominated his career, he produced more than 1,600 covers for DC Thomson’s classic war comic, Commando, as well as covers for Warlord, Victor, War Picture Library, Battle, Red Dagger and more.
In the age before credit boxes, many artists of Kennedy’s generation laboured in obscurity, unaware of the impact their work had on so many young minds. Fortunately, this was not the case for Kennedy, the internet and convention appearances allowing him to meet his fans and come to understand just how popular his art was and remains.
His humility and easy, unassuming, friendly manner endeared him to all who met him. Even though he had semi-retired, he continued working – producing covers for comics and graphic novels that betrayed no lessening of his talent.
We have lost another titan of British comics, it is no exaggeration to call Ian Kennedy irreplaceable.
Everyone at 2000 AD and Rebellion sends his family their deepest condolences.
Ian’s cover for 2000 AD Prog 446 (1985)Art from Ro-Busters: Midpoint (Starlord, 1798)Art from Ro-Busters: Farnborough Droid Show (Starlord, 1978)Art from Wildcat (1988) Cover for 2000 AD Prog 1961 (2015)
2000 AD is greatly saddened to hear that writer Si Spencer has passed away suddenly.
Si has worked for the Judge Dredd Megazine for many years, creating such memorable series as ‘Harke & Burr’ and ‘The Creep’, as well as ‘The Returners’, the supernatural series with artist Nicolo Assirelli currently running in the Megazine.
Originally from Sheffield, Si was inspired to write by his secondary school English teacher, Viv Nicholls, and eventually discovered 2000 AD. ‘After starting with the standard British funnies – Monster Fun, Whizzer and Chips, Cor and so on,’ he told the 2000AD.com blog in 2018, ‘and the old black and white Marvel reprints in Fantastic and Terrific. I gave up on comics in my teens and only came back to them in my twenties, when Tharg got me back into comics around 1979/80. I loved the Britishness, the total punk anarchy, the uniqueness of the art styles, the dynamism, the radical approach to old ideas. Just beautifully British.’
Introduced by a housemate to titles such as Warrior and Chester Brown’s Yummy Fur, Red Dwarf Smegazine artist Adrian Dungworth encouraged him to write comics and the pair launched their own self-published anthology title, called Sideshow, that featured their work alongside both new and established artists.
After starting on Fleetway’s mature title Crisis, editor Peter Hogan signed him up for the short-lived comic Revolver where two long series, ‘Stickleback’ and ‘YoYo were intended to run. Unfortunately, the magazine folded before they saw print.
He took over as editor for a year of Steve Dillon and Brett Ewins’ comics and music magazine Deadline from 1991, before handing over to Frank Wynne.
His debut for the Judge Dredd Megazine came in 1993 with the gothic ‘Harke & Burr’, painted by Dean Ormston. Based on a mutual love of old Universal movie monsters, Spencer described the strip – nominally set in The Cursed Earth of Judge Dredd’s world – as ‘a cross between Flog It and Dickinson’s Real Deal but set in Hell. With hot chicks and guns. And zombie capybaras.’
He wrote a ‘Judge Death’ strip for the 1991 Judge Dredd Mega-Special and ‘Mytek the Mighty’ for the 2000 AD Action Special, before co-creating ‘The Creep’ – another series about a malevolent supernatural mass murderer set in Dredd’s world, with eerie art by the late Kevin Cullen – reportedly a favourite of screenwriter and producer Russell T Davies. He also earned an unofficial writing credit for the final episode of Dredd-world space series ‘The Corps’ for 2000 AD, when series writer Garth Ennis lost interest in his own story.
Si did not join the new wave of British writers who crossed over to American comics in the mid-‘90s. Instead, after winning a ‘New Voices’ competition with his play ‘Tracey and Lewis’, he began an extensive career in television, beginning at the BBC as script editor on cop show City Central and, as a scriptwriter, working on Grange Hill, EastEnders and The Bill.
Years later he met Anglophile Vertigo editor Shelly Bond, who was a huge fan of EastEnders. Out of the blue she called him to offer the chance to work on Neil Gaiman’s The Books of Magic.
‘[The opportunity to work with Gaiman] is not the kind of offer you turn down,’ he told the Megazine. ‘Neil was looking to update [boy wizard] Tim Hunter from the The Books of Magic and see where his childhood adventures might have taken him as a young man. He wanted to see a big epic story about a war between worlds based on spurious belief systems. I wanted to write something big and angry about the situation in Iraq and the war there. I can’t think why those two ideas meshed!’
It began a long association with Vertigo and his series for the imprint include The Vinyl Underground with Simon Gane; Hellblazer: City of Demons with Sean Murphy; the award-winning Bodies with Meghan Hetrick, Dean Ormston, Tula Lotay and Phil Winslade; and Slash and Burn with Ande Parks, and Max Dunbar. In September 2015, SelfMadeHero published his graphic novel Klaxon, drawn by DIX.
In 2017, he returned to the Megazine with ‘HAVN’, with artists Jake Lynch and Henry Flint. The new series explored a so-called “perfect society” in Scandinavia in the world of Judge Dredd. This was followed by ‘The Returners’ in 2018, in which four different people in the South American city of Ciudad Barranquilla – academic Barrancourt, ex-Judge Mineiro, gangbanger Correira, and transgender street-walker Chavez – all awake from near-death experiences and discover that they can deal with the supernatural.
‘Part of the joy [of writing comics] is, of course, the natural urge to create and solve puzzles,’ he told the Megazine, ‘but in a broader sense writing fiction is playing God. Whether it’s something fairly low-level like The Sims or playing with dolls or toy soldiers as a kid or whether you’re looking at the deeper creative process of fiction, it’s clear that humans like to stamp their authority on things. We like to create worlds where things behave exactly as we tell them to, to impose order in a world of random processes and, best of all, create a world where that order is your order. Writers are just frustrated fascists, I guess; although that’s not strictly true because for me and I think most writers, the real joy is when the characters you’ve created start imposing their own wills and identities on proceedings and take the story off in new directions.
‘For readers, I think it’s the opposite impulse that people enjoy. They like to solve puzzles. In the broader scheme of things, though, the universe is still random processes and the more civilised and organised we become, the more that random element is taken from us. Our lives become repetitive and predictable and a writer or artist defies that by offering us surprise and intrigue.
‘A good artist uses that magic trick of surprise and intrigue for a purpose, to say something true and original about real life. Escapism is nice, but for me the best art informs who we are as people or illuminates what’s going on in our lives. It rationalises or explains things and [therefore] offers hope or insight.’
Strident, creative and incredibly intelligent but always friendly, funny and welcoming, Si will be sorely missed by everyone who knew him, his inventive writing was filled with great characters, abstract ideas, enthralling phantasmagoria, and – above all else – a great sense of humour.
‘As a twenty-year-old in the early nineties, I read and enjoyed Si’s stories in the Megazine, like ‘The Creep’ and ‘Harke & Burr’ – they added a sprinkle of the weird and uncanny to the mix,’ said 2000 AD and Judge Dredd Megazine editor Matt Smith. ‘When he got in touch in 2016 looking to pitch for the Meg again, I thought it would be a great opportunity to have one of the Meg’s writers from its formative days bringing again his unique sense of the strange and esoteric, which he did with the dark, unsettling ‘HAVN’ and ‘The Returners’ – completely unlike anything else in the anthology. He was a very talented writer with a rich imagination and sardonic sense of humour, and will be much missed.’
Everyone at 2000 AD sends their most heartfelt condolences to Si’s family and friends.
We are deeply saddened to hear of the death of Ellie deVille, who passed away from cancer on Christmas Eve 2019 at the age of 72
One of 2000 AD‘s most prolific and longest-serving letterers, Ellie stood alongside Tom Frame, Annie Parkhouse, and Steve Potter, as one of the comic’s great letterers. Her death, coming so soon after her diagnosis, has been a huge blow for all those who knew and worked with her. Always the professional, Ellie was working on 2000 AD strips until just weeks before her passing.
Originally training as a teacher, Ellie (known as Ellie de Ville in 2000 AD‘s pages) began working for 2000 AD in 1992 on Tharg’s Future Shocks before working on numerous series such as The Ten-Seconders, Absalom, The Alienist, Ampney Crucis Investigates, Judge Anderson, Aquila, Asylum, Atavar, Bec & Kawl, Savage, Brass Sun, Caballistics, Inc., Cradlegrave, Defoe, the Judge Dredd/Batman crossover, Flesh, Rogue Trooper, Grey Area, Button Man, Jaegir, Kingdom, The Red Seas, Sinister Dexter, Sláine, Strontium Dog, Terror Tales, Past Imperfects, Tales of Telguuth, Tharg’s 3rillers, Time Twisters, The VCs, and many others.
Along with Elitta Fell and Tom Frame, Ellie was also one of the letterers on Fleetway’s Sonic the Comic, and she worked on many other titles such as Aliens, Batman, Flex Mentallo, The Invisibles, Lucifer, Conan, Star Wars, and Tank Girl.
The art of lettering is so easily overlooked when talking about comic book storytelling, but without clear, well-considered letters a book can easily become unreadable. Consistent, quick, professional, with a style that was instantly recognisable and entirely her own, Ellie’s talent was to make reading 2000 AD and so many other comics a joy.
Editor of 2000 AD Matt Smith, who worked with Ellie for two decades, said: “I had the privilege of working with Ellie for the last 20 years, and she was an absolute treasure – fast, reliable and professional. Back in 2001, she lived in the same part of Willesden that I did and in a deadline emergency I sometimes used to meet her at the tube station to pass her the files on a zip disk, like some surreptitious Thrill-power exchange. I’ll miss her enormously.”
Former 2000 AD designer Steve Cook, paid tribute to his friend: “‘Always look on the bright side of life’ and a rainbow emoji was what Ellie signed off with in the last email she sent to me from her hospice bed, and that sums her up perfectly. Ellie was one of those people who always had a positive and happy demeanour, and she was always there with an earnest ear for her friends, of which she had many. She was also incredibly talented and professionally reliable, and definitely the unsung heroine of the British (and occasionally American) comics business. When we were really up against it with deadlines at 2000 AD, she always delivered bang on time and saved our skins.
“Socially, Ellie made her home an open house to her
friends, and she was always eager to spend the night dancing to uplifting
music. One of my particularly fond memories was arriving at her house on a
Saturday evening for a party and seeing lots of silhouettes of people dancing
away inside, but absolutely no sound. It was only upon entering that I could
see that they were all wearing headphones so as not to annoy the neighbours.
Yes, Ellie predicted the Silent Disco!
“Ellie de Ville was incredibly special, and she’s
already sorely missed.”
The condolences of everyone at 2000 AD and Rebellion go out to Ellie’s family and friends.
Donations in memory of Ellie may be sent either to the Marie
Curie Hospice, Cardiff and the Vale, Bridgeman Road, Penarth CF64 3YR or donate
at www.mariecurie.org.uk/donate
Everyone at Rebellion is shocked and saddened to hear of the sudden death of artist Nigel Dobbyn at the age of 56.
Based in the north east of England, Dobbyn’s first works for 2000 AD were a trio of Future Shocks in 1988. These were followed by his debut on new space medical series, Medivac 318, written by Hilary Robinson and based on her previous writing.
The series, which followed an ambulance crew working in the midst of an interplanetary war, showcased Dobbyn’s unmistakeable style, his strong storytelling and clear lines giving all of his work a solidity and openness that was often at odds with the prevailing fashions in comic art at the time.
His colour work was bold and striking but also grounded and earthy – his work on future eco-cop series Trash (Progs 760 to 770), written by Paul Kupperberg, contrasted the greys of urban decay with lush greens and bright flower colours. He also had a skill for action and his work on Red Razors with Mark Millar and Garth Ennis’ Strontium Dogs stories featuring Johnny Alpha and Wulf Sternhammer’s furry sidekick Gronk, as well as Peter Hogan’s spell on the strip, demonstrated his ability to draw convincing, involved and energetic action scenes. He recently returned to 2000 AD for a series of single Ace Trucking Co. stories.
His style was just as easily adaptable to comics aimed at children and young peple and, thanks to his connections with former 2000 AD editor Richard Burton and writer Nigel Kitching, in the 1990s Dobbyn began work on Sonic the Comic, based on the massively popular Sonic the Hedgehog video game character, and later became a permanent feature of the line-up alongside artists such as Richard Elson. He worked on Dark Horse’s Digimon, Classical Comics’ Shakespeare adaptations, and Panini’s Spiderman and Friends. He also wrote and drew Billy the Cat for The Beano and produced the art for a graphic novel adaptation of Nightrise by Anthony Horowitz.
He recently worked on a series of three HP Lovecraft-inspired books for Arcturus Publications, Goblin Princess for Redan’s Sparkle World magazine, and Norse myth-based strip 28AR for new comic strip anthology Brawler. He wrote and drew the Saxon Princess comic strip on display at Kirkleatham Museum in Redcar and was working on a strip for digital anthology Aces Weekly.
Matt Smith, editor of 2000 AD, said: “Everyone here at 2000 AD was shocked and saddened to hear of Nigel’s death, and our deep condolences got out to his family. He was fantastically adept artist, equally capable of conveying the deep-space drama of Medivac 318 as he was the manic energy of the Strontium Dogs Gronk stories. A regular contributor to the Prog during the 1990s, his clear storytelling, strong lines and bold colours made him an instantly recognisable presence. Although he’d dropped out of the comic in the noughties, he came back recently to draw some Ace Trucking one-offs, and he did a beautiful job on the characters, instilling the pages with the humour and action he did so well.”
The deepest sympathies and condolences of everyone at 2000 AD and Rebellion go out to Nigel’s family and friends.
2000 AD is greatly saddened to confirm that artist Ron Smith has passed away.
A Spitfire pilot during World War Two, Ron began his career in animation before moving into comics for Amalgamated Press, then DC Thomson, before moving to 2000 AD and Judge Dredd.
During 2000 AD’s 1980s heyday, he was one of the five iconic Dredd artists alongside Carlos Ezquerra, Mick McMahon, Brian Bolland, and Steve Dillon, and many of the strip’s most unforgettable moments– from The Judge Child Quest to UnAmerican Graffiti, from The Hotdog Run to The Day the Law Died – have the name and style of Ron Smith stamped all over them.
The most prolific Dredd artist in the character’s history, from 1981 Ron also drew the daily strip for the Daily Star newspaper – one of the longest running in British newspaper history – which showcased his talents perfectly as he compressed entire epics down into a handful of panels.
His style deftly mixed action, humour, and pathos. Thanks in part to his seemingly incongruous ‘punk’ eye for design, Smith was the bizarre, warped imagination that took the biting satire of John Wagner and Alan Grant’s scripts and turned the city into a character of its own. He, arguably more than anyone else, defined the citizens of Mega-City One with characters such as Chopper, Otto Sump, Dave the Orangutan mayor, Pug Ugly And The Bugglys, The Stupid Gun, Citizen Snork, the Blobs, and so many more. And above it all stood his vision of Dredd – lithe, athletic, stoic, but with a knack for the darkly comic.
Even at a furious rate of work, the quality of his art rarely – if ever – dipped. Close up, his lines are clean and precise, panels perfectly balanced and yet losing none of their energy, their remarkable movement or scale.
2000 AD has lost another of its most treasured artists, a man whose unique work entertained millions over the course of five decades and who is sorely missed.
Matt Smith, 2000 AD’s current editor, said: ‘Ron was one of the artistic stalwarts of 2000 AD during the 1980s, and his Judge Dredd strips in particular were instrumental in making the Galaxy’s Greatest the cult, counter-cultural game-changer that redefined British comics. Like Carlos Ezquerra, his style was uniquely his own – you never mistook a Ron Smith strip – and he filled his panels with comical grotesques, his Mega-City One full of living, breathing loons. Capable of amazingly detailed work – check out his episodes of ‘Block Mania’, where he dealt with thousands of rioting citizens – and professional to a fault, it’s no wonder he was one of Tharg’s regular go-to Dredd guys. A 2000 AD legend, he will be greatly missed by fans and fellow creators alike.’
Born in 1924 in Bournemouth, Ron was forbidden from going to art college as a young man and followed his father into engineering but his studies were interrupted by the outbreak of World War Two. Enlisting as a pilot with the Empire Flying Training Programme, by 1945 he was a Spitfire pilot, seeing action in Europe as part of the Army Co-operation Air Squadron. Demobbed in 1947, he got work at J Arthur Rank’s Gaumont British Animation Studio, working at Moor Hall in Berkshire on animated shorts in the Disney style, such as Animaland and Musical Paintbox. When Gaumont’s owners, the Rank Corporation, went bust in 1949, Smith headed for London and, even before finding lodgings, went to the offices of publishing behemoth Amalgamated Press, where he got his first comics work on Sun and Knockout before moving on to Western comics, such as Comet.
Head-hunted in 1952 by AP’s main rival, DC Thomson, Ron moved with his wife to a company house just outside the firm’s headquarters in Dundee, Scotland. He then spent 21 years drawing everything from historical epics and cracking yarns in Adventure, Hotspur and Topper, to romance and slice-of-life tories for Bunty and Judy. In 1976, he created King Cobra, DC Thomson’s first superhero in the American style, which was a massive hit with readers, showing off Ron’s inventiveness and knack for action.
Moving back to Surrey, he became a fully-fledged freelancer and it was during this time that he further developed the lightning-fast working techniques that allowed him to churn out illustration after book cover after comic strip. He told the Judge Dredd Megazine about his famous technique in 2009: ‘People talk about this alarm clock – that is actually very real. The only thing that an artist can control is his hourly rate; you’ve got a fixed page, so right from the start they said to me a page of cartoons is ten pound and I had worked out that to survive in London I needed two pounds an hour, so you just divide one into the other and so you’ve got to do a page in five hours. So you set the clock, and you may not finish it but you start to get into this rhythm.
‘It used to be three pages, not six, and when I finished I was up to twenty pounds an hour – two hundred pounds a page, ten hours. But still with the alarm clock. This kept me going and meant that the bank always saw a similar amount coming in at the end of each month, because it was very hard to get banks to do things for you when you’re a freelance artist.
‘When it went ping I would literally put that page down and start on the next one. And then I would go back and sit up late at night, which is outside of my hours, and finish it off. But this got me into this way of working that meant that I could live this little middle-class life with four daughters, put them through school and on to university. Having the agent do all the leg work also meant I was sitting at home earning more of his twenty per cent – better to get him to do the leg work.’
As well as providing painted album covers for Def Leppard and Sigue Sigue Sputnik, Ron also worked Marvel UK on the TV tie-in series such as Transformers, Zoids and Mask, before moving off Dredd and onto Chronos Carnival, the early ’90s re-imagining of Rogue Trooper, Mean Team, and Harlem Heroes.
Married twice, Ron had four daughters. After retiring due to problems with his eyesight, Ron suffered from Parkinson’s and moved into a care home in Leatherhead, where he passed away in the early hours of the morning on 10th January 2019.
Everyone at 2000 AD sends his family their deepest condolences.
‘We all follow the Yellow Brick Road,’ Ron told the Megazine in 2009, ‘we’re all off to see the wizard and you should just stay on course, even if people say it’s a bloody stupid thing to do – if you’re genetically programmed, bloody go for it. It’s all part of that road… and this has been a part of mine. Yet there but for the grace of God go I.’
