The Vort Part 2: Naughty Bits

Menaced by the Frogs... cover to 2000AD Prog 1590
The Vort © Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Created by G. Powell & Me.

The Vort part 2 is upon us, with my 5th cover for 2000AD (shown above, in all its unlettered glory). This episode also contains two further minor landmarks for me. Though they're "blink-and-you'll-miss-them" small, those pages contain my first drawings of bare breasts and someone weeing in a mainstream comic (see below). If my mentioning this seems a bit like a vicar's giggly virginal middle-aged daughter congratulating herself on daringly using the word "bum," well… I suppose you're right.

Naughty bits: top: page one, panel one, bottom: page three, panel four
The Vort © Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Created by G. Powell & Me.

Of course, I drew naked folks and all sorts of nastiness in Lazarus Churchyard, waaayy back in 1991, but a) Warren made me do it and b) doing this stuff in 2000AD feels like a bigger deal, because I can't help but think of it as the comic I read as a child. In fact, I've always referred to the IPC/Fleetway/Egmont/Rebellion (pick an era) hands-off editing style as "scanning for tits and willies" (since you'd often get no feedback at all unless there was something objectionable to be changed). It usually was "tits and willies" too, since while 2000AD has pushed the boundaries in a number of ways over the years, like all mainstream British comics it tends to be happier dealing with violence than sex. Before the introduction of female judges in the early 80's, even significant female characters were next to unknown in British action (aka "Boy's") comics; Professor Jocelyn Peabody from Dan Dare is the only one I can think of. Alan Moore really broke through with The Ballad of Halo Jones in 1986 (especially book 3, a war story with a predominantly female cast that even fits in an elliptical reference to menstruation). John Smith, too, has to be credited with introducing sexually liberated female characters (Tyranny Rex and Pussyfoot Five) along with allusions to all kinds of sexual themes.
And most recently, of course, we've had Simon B Davis's "big purple willy" episode of Stone Island. Got to admit, that was a line I didn't expect to see crossed. Mind you, neither did Ian Edginton, who hadn't put it in the script (when he saw it, he rang me in a state of shock, wailing "there's a big purple willy right in the middle of my strip!" in a quavering voice. And him a married man, too.)

So, rather naïvely, I was slightly surprised to see such open references to Bless sleeping with Veldt in the scripts for The Vort. I mean, given the age of the average Earthlet these days, it's only right for us to admit that men and women engage in - let's not mince words here - horizontal interpersonal man-woman wibbly-wobbliness. For myself, I'm torn between sticking with visual solutions that allude to naughtiness without showing it (just because it's a fun game), and going full ahead to see if I can be the first artist to cross that final barrier and slip a spurting stiffie into 2000AD (pardon my French, vicar).
(After all, we're well behind Johnny Foreigner on this one; Jean "Mœbius" Giraud managed that trick back in 1977 in the Blade Runner-inspiring detective story The Long Tomorrow, which somehow even made it into Epic Comics' US editions without being censored).

It does make you wonder a little as to why images of willies have been so thoroughly banned for so long; after all, half of us come with them built in and the other half are probably going to find out what they look like sooner or later. Willies aren't especially pretty, but it's not as if the world will come to an end if we see the odd picture of one now and again, surely.

Except... since that last episode of Stone Island, the world economy has gone into a spin, there have been catastrophic natural disasters in Burma and China, food and petrol prices have soared, and violent youth crime has gone spiralling out of control. Coincidence? All I can say is, if, in ten years from now, you find yourself living in a landscape of shattered rubble and burnt-out cars, wearing a mohican and Mad Max-style bondage gear, and dividing your time between bizarre gladiatorial games and roasting dead dogs on a spit, you'll know who to blame, wont you?

The Vort Part 1: Back to the Future

Jeep-Beastie from page one of The Vort
The Vort © 2008 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Created by G. Powell & Me.

2000AD Prog 1589 is out and with it episode 1 of The Vort. This series has an unusually short lead time; I'm still working on the last 2 parts. I usually dread having anything come out while I'm working on it, for if the job doesn't come out as intended, it becomes very hard to stay motivated. Luckily, episode one has printed exactly as I envisaged. I was more nervous about this episode than most of my recent colour stuff, because I was trying some new techniques, and there's always the possibility that can turn round and bite you.

Left: When I started colouring, I found painting onto white paper slow and unsatisfactory (The Third World War, Crisis, Fleetway Editions 1988) Right: You can see here that I'm painting onto a red ground, adding highlights, shading and the odd additional colour as I go. This is quicker and gives a more unified colour scheme (Lazarus Churchyard, Blast, 1991)
The Third World War © 1988 Rebellion Developments (?). Created by Pat Mills & Carlos Ezquerra.
Lazarus Churchyard © 2008 Warren Ellis & Me.

Well, I say "new" - in fact, I'm recapturing a way of working I first devised for painted artwork back in the late 80's. On my first colour job, I'd found that my colouring was very slow and inconsistent; I was working by adding colours to white paper and the simple business of deciding what colour to pick for each object in each panel was taking me ages. I decided to try and work out a system to let me produce colour in a consistent way at a faster pace.
I found I worked best if, instead of trying to put colour onto white paper, I covered the whole page with a glaze of mid-tone colour, then used paint and crayon to pull out highlights, and added transparent glazes for shading. The combination of underlying colour and shadow colour helped pull all the colours in an image together with very little effort.
At first I painted over my inks, obscuring them a little and giving the whole thing a more painterly look. Later I took to painting over the pencils and inking onto the paint; this isn't as difficult as it sounds, but it limits your options for making mistakes in the inking! With some variation, this was the method I used for Lazarus Churchyard and Kingdom Of The Wicked, and that method of thinking about colour has served me ever since.

Top: In this panel from Scarlet Traces (2000), I still working mostly with flat colour and simple gradients - a technique left over from the time before I had a graphics tablet. Bottom: By the time I started Scarlet Traces: The Great Game (2005), I was able to think about a more painterly approach - but the technique was slow.
Scarlet Traces © 2008 Ian Edginton & Me

When I first switched to computer colouring, I didn't have the technique to recreate what I'd been doing with paint; later on, as I got more sophisticated (and got a copy of Corel Painter), I was able to do more painterly stuff (see the first 10 pages of Scarlet Traces: The Great Game) but the trouble is, I'm not a natural painter, and I become hesitant when I have to paint rather than just colour in. If that seems a bit obscure, the difference is, with colouring the black of the drawing takes care of the dark areas; with painting, you add the dark tones in colour and I find that really difficult for some reason. Short version: every time I try and paint, I'm damn slow.

When I came to do The Vort, I was trying to think of a new approach. I didn't just want to repeat what I'd been doing with Scarlet Traces, proud as I am of it, but I needed some way of working quickly enough to meet my deadlines. The answer struck me when I picked up a copy of Ralph Steadman's book I Leonardo; here was a guy producing elaborate colour work which is strongly rooted in drawing as much as painting. The controlled chaos of Steadman's work reminded me of something I'd idly noticed when finishing the drawing stage of my comics in Illustrator.

Click on image to see larger version.
1) Roughs drawn in Adobe Illustrator. 2) "Pencilling" added to refine important details. 3) "Inks". 4) "Inks" are imported into Photoshop; rough layer is converted to transparent colour and flat colour is put under the drawing. 5) Basic flat colouring added 6) Highlights and shadows added to finish.
The Vort © 2008 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Created by G. Powell & Me.

When I draw on computer, I go through about four stages from blank "canvas" to finished drawing; there are 2 stages of roughs, a "pencils" stage and "inks." Each stage is drawn in a darker grey and a finer line than the one before; the first roughs are a very light grey, the "inks," of course, black. Before I export the inks to Photoshop, I make a copy of the file and delete all the unwanted layers. Sometimes, before I do this, I switch on all the layers, and you get a sort of dark halo around the inks where all the previous stages are visible. Sometimes too, you get "ghosts," where I've included stuff in the roughs that have been changed at a later stage in the drawing. I realised that if I exported the rough layers and made them transparent, they could add just the slight organic, chaotic edge I was looking for, without any additional effort.

Better still, it gives the work more of a "painted" look, but it's all done by drawing.

Click on image to see larger version
Page three test version (left) and re-coloured version (right).
The Vort © 2008 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Created by G. Powell & Me.

My first try was page 3 (the scene with Bless and Veldt in the audience at the speech-giving). For various reasons, this page took me ages, but by the time I'd got it finished, I'd made my mistakes and knew where I was going. In fact, the thing that really persuaded me the technique was good was when I realized I needed to change to colour scheme on the whole page, and managed to re-colour it in half an hour flat!