Lowlife: Creation Part Five: All The Joy I See Through These Architect's Eyes

The parting of the waters from Lowlife: Creation Part 5
I was quite pleased with this until I started researching this post :-)
Lowlife © 2009 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Lowlife created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint

Working on Lowlife, with its Mega-City One setting freed from the presence of Judge Dredd, I found myself thinking about the city and its place in the Dredd/2000AD franchise. And it occurred to me that, really, the city is the actual star of Judge Dredd. I mean, Dredd himself is a man of limited attributes and predictable reactions. His value is giving us a fixed point, a window through which to explore the endless fountain of new phenomena that is the Mega-City. It's the Mega-City that powers Judge Dredd, and Judge Dredd that has powered 2000AD for the last 30 years. It's no coincidence that 2000AD's spin-off is called The Megazine.

And it begins with Carlos Sanchez Ezquerra.

in 1977, Ezquerra is brought in by commissioning editor Pat Mills and writer John Wagner to produce concept art and a pilot episode for a future cop story for the planned new comic 2000AD. Called Judge Dredd, the concept was essentially Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry set in 1990's New York. Ezquerra drew a far more futuristic setting for the pilot strip, Mills decided to go with it, and Mega-City One was born.*
*The Judge Dredd Story, The Judge Dredd Annual 1981, page 10, and David Bishop, Thrill Power Overload: Thirty Years of 2000AD, page 22.

Now at this point, I want to make sure that I'm clear about what I'm claiming. I'm not simply saying "Carlos Ezquerra invented Mega-City One." Judge Dredd and his world are the work of many hands, and even at the early planning stages many different people made important contributions. Mills recognized the potential in Carlos' drawings and carried the concepts forward. Doug Church introduced the notion of a vast "Mega-City" to Pat Mills after reading about the idea in Life magazine.*
*Thrill Power Overload: Thirty Years of 2000AD, page 23.

Mega-City One as we know it was developed by a number of writers and artists. Pat Mills helped to define Mega-City history and wider geography in The Cursed Earth, and John Wagner (often in collaboration with Alan Grant) shaped the city and introduced most of its key features and landmarks in a series of stories from about prog 110 onwards. In particular, they shifted the city from a 1950's-model where citizens lived a life of leisure served by robots, to a mass-unemployment scenario that parodied Thatcher's Britain of the early 1980's.
Nevertheless, Carlos Ezquerra planted the seed from which all of this grew.

Ironically, Ezquerra left the strip over the decision to give newcomer Mike McMahon the first published episode. I'd like to look at the artists who helped to define the look of the city during the years he was away; his return to Dredd with The Apocalypse War in Prog 245 is a useful stopping point.

I'm not going to try and talk about all the artists who drew Dredd in this period, just the ones who made contributions to the design of the Mega-City. This leads to some interesting omissions; for example, Brian Bolland, who is one of the all-time great Dredd artists, won't be discussed here as his talents lay in the direction of figure drawing and character expression rather than city design and world building.

Carlos Ezquerra

Carlos Ezquerra's seminal Mega-City pin-up from Prog 3
Judge Dredd © 2009 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Judge Dredd created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra

The co-creator of Judge Dredd (with writer John Wagner), Ezquerra came to 2000AD from sister publication Battle, where he'd been drawing WWII strips such as Major Easy. His dynamic drawing style, with its gritty rendering, along with his organic-looking "bubbly" future architecture, suggests a certain influence from French comics maestro Jean "Moebius" Giraud, and though I can't say for certain, it is fair to say that his work has a great deal in common with other Moebius-influenced European artists including Enki Bilal, Philipe Caza and Juan Giminez. Ezquerra was certainly the first to bring particular style to British comics.
It's hard these days to realize the impact that Ezquerra's designs had at the time. Though his Judge Dredd pilot strip was never published, the last page (a full-page view across the city) was used as a back-cover of Prog 3. I remember seeing this aged about eleven and it absolutely blew my mind. The sense of scale, the strangeness of the designs, the feeling of the future as a gritty, exotic place formed by unguessable processes, all of this generated an excitement I've rarely felt from comics or any other medium. Along with Italian Massimo Bellardinelli, Ezquerra dragged 2000AD away from the comfortable visual tropes of the 1950's and, importantly, gave it a signature visual style that distinguished it from the blocky, industrial designs of the recently-released Star Wars. That one page set a visual and imaginative standard for later creators to aspire to; ironically, as a leftover page from a rejected strip, it may be the most important piece of work Ezquerra ever did, and in its influence it may make him one of the most important artists in British comics in the last 30 years.


Mick (formerly Mike) McMahon

Left: a slightly primitive Ezquerra-style Hall of Justice from an early McMahon Dredd.
Right: a more developed "McMahon organic" style from The Day The Law Died.
Judge Dredd © 2009 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Judge Dredd created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra

Possibly the pre-eminent Judge Dredd artist, McMahon came up with the "big chin, big boots" look that defines the character to this day. He also had an aptitude for drawing the Mega-City environment, so his Dredd strips were notable for their inventive, richly detailed urban scenes and cityscapes. Of all the artists working on Dredd during its early years, McMahon is the one most responsible for carrying forward the distinctive environmental design ethic initiated by Carlos Ezquerra, and his city design - particularly his pepper-pot-shaped City Blocks - has become the "standard model" for later Dredd artists.

Classic late McMahon "pepperpot" cityblocks from The Judge Dredd Annual 1982.
Judge Dredd © 2009 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Judge Dredd created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra

McMahon's drawing style changed radically from year to year, so there are technically several versions of "his" Mega-city one. But I think it is possible, broadly, to talk about McMahon's Mega-City as follows: his earliest strips were strongly influenced by Carlos Ezquerra, and while McMahon's own drawing style begins asserting itself from Prog 12 (his first contribution to the Robot War storyline), his Mega-City architecture retains a certain amount of the Ezquerra "organic" look up to his final contributions to The Day The Law Died (Judge Cal).

Mid-Period McMahon from Judge Dredd Year 3
Judge Dredd © 2009 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Judge Dredd created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra

After that story, possibly as a result of a stint alternating with Kevin O'Neill on Ro-Busters, McMahon's Mega-City tends slowly to become more rectilinear, as does his art style. In his last episodes of Dredd* (the first two episodes of Block Mania), even McMahon's signature curvaceous "pepper-pot" City Blocks give a sense of being bolted together out of metal or concrete plates in a recognizable fashion - the earlier Ezquerra-style architecture just seems to have somehow grown out of the ground.
It's worth repeating that in terms of his influence on Dredd, McMahon is second only to Carlos Ezquerra. He rebuilt the character and his world so thoroughly that both his contemporaries and the generations of artists subsequent have followed his lead - even Carlos Ezquerra changed the way he drew Dredd when he returned to the character. As his entry in Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files states: "...his importance to the comic (2000AD) cannot be overstated."
For further examples of McMahon's world-building (including better examples of his more rectilinear design), check out his work on Ro-Busters and The A.B.C. Warriors.

*When I say "last episodes", I mean that McMahon's tenure as a regular Dredd artist ceased after Block Mania. He has drawn a few episodes since, but a combination of dramatic changes to his art style and his apparent lack of interest in the character mean that these later episodes have been much less popular with the 2000AD readership. However, his long-term influence on the development of both Dredd and the Mega-City cannot be overestimated.

Ian Gibson

An amazingly detailed Gibson cityscape from The Robot Wars.
Judge Dredd © 2009 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Judge Dredd created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra

Now remembered mostly as artist on Robo-Hunter and 2000AD all-time high-point The Ballad Of Halo Jones, Ian Gibson was one of the most prolific of the early Dredd artists - he provided nearly half of all the Judge Dredd episodes between Progs 14 and 55 (20 out of 41 episodes*). Gibson's city design is distinctive and difficult to describe - his work has none of the Ezquerra "organic" look, but instead uses complex angles, multiple levels and a proliferation of detail to create rich and exciting future environments. His clean, elegant drawing is balanced by a lively, "bouncy" inking style that lends life to even inanimate objects (making him a perfect choice to draw robotic characters in Judge Dredd and later Robo-Hunter).
Gibson's work was a perfect compliment to McMahon's and from Prog 22 they alternated on Dredd, confirming the strip as the most visually exciting in 2000AD and setting a standard for the other strips to follow. This was the point where Dredd's popularity began to take off, so I think it's fair to say that Gibson was instrumental in helping establish Dredd as the stand-out strip in 2000AD.
If you want to see the very best of Ian Gibson's world-building though, I thoroughly recommend the first series of Robo-Hunter, where he really lets rip on the robot world of Verdus.
Ian Gibson continues to contribute occasional Dredd episodes to this day, making him the second longest-serving artist on the strip, after Carlos Ezquerra.

*total count and Prog numbers obtained by counting episodes in Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files volume one. I'm prepared to stand corrected.



Ron Smith

Ron Smith's beautifully-rendered frontispiece to the Judge Dredd Annual 1981, with typical "tower block" style cityblocks.
Judge Dredd © 2009 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Judge Dredd created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra

An interesting one, this; Ron Smith is a veteran comic artist whose career goes back to the 1940's, and his city design is typical of the whole "future as the present with fins tacked on" approach that normally feels so dull and unimaginative in the Judge Dredd universe. Working against the revisionist vision of Future technology supplied by Ezquerra and McMahon, Smith's Mega-City is filled with Cityblocks that are 1970's skyscrapers on steroids; his citizens wear 20th Century suits with kneepads strapped on over the top; his cars are like 1950's automobiles with extra wheels (or none at all). Where the other Dredd artists show us an exotic future filled with strange sights, Smith's future parodies the world we know.
What makes it all work is the sheer exuberance with which Smith approaches his subject matter; where fellow comics veterans John Cooper and Barry Mitchell are obviously a bit out of their depth in the complex environment of The Big Meg, Smith dives in with gusto, piling on the detail to an extraordinary degree. That's why he's included here; although he's not really part of the new 2000AD future vision, he's created his own "evolutionary branch" of Mega-City design that's well worth a look.
Smith's drawing style is lively and energetic, and the streets of his Mega-City one seethe with activity in the way a big city should. His technological designs are a little old-fashioned looking, favouring 1950's-style details such as chrome headlights, metallic trims and fins, but are nevertheless imaginative, beautifully crafted and lovingly rendered. He's also a bit of a magpie; everything from Chris Foss concept designs to American supehero costumes are borrowed to add to the mix. Yet despite the complexity of his drawings, the storytelling is always clear. It's an astonishing technical feat.
What makes this all the more amazing is that Smith was also one of the most prolific Judge Dredd artists ever; for example, between his first appearance in 2000AD in Prog 104 and the start of The Apocalypse War (Prog 245) he drew just over half of all Dredd episodes (72 out of 140*). He also drew the Judge Dredd newspaper strip in The Daily Star. The sheer volume of his work means that he contributed many key episodes to Dredd's history (Cityblock 1-3, The Day The Law Died, The Judge Child, The Blood Of Satanus, Otto Sump and Chopper (Unamerican Graffiti) spring to mind).
Unfortunately, because of his rather retro approach, Smith has left little in the way of a lasting legacy in the world of Dredd, beyond individual characters (Otto Sump probably being the most frequently referenced). His work was shamefully under-represented in the old Titan Books Dredd reprints, though the new Complete Judge Dredd Case Files from Rebellion are finally making his work accessible to a new generation of readers.
*calculated by counting episodes listed in Smith's Wikipedia entry, 2nd April 2009.

Colin Wilson

Clean lines and European style: Colin Wilson's Judge Dredd
Judge Dredd © 2009 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Judge Dredd created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra

Though he worked on a relatively small number of Judge Dredd episodes in the period in question, Colin Wilson made a big impression. Also a devotee of French comics master Jean "Moebius" Giraud, Wilson took inspiration from the precise brushwork of Giraud's Blueberry western series.

A dab hand at the old perspective, our Colin.
Judge Dredd © 2009 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Judge Dredd created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra

His technological styling is post-Star Wars, possibly borrowing to some extent from Jodorowsky and Moebius' Incal Saga). The result was a striking and believable Mega-City, drawn in a precise, clean style that nevertheless implied plenty of grit and grime.

Wilson balances clean linework with a dramatic use of silhouettes
Judge Dredd © 2009 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Judge Dredd created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra

It's also well worth checking out Wilson's Rogue Trooper strips from the same period - in terms of envrionment design, these are, I think, stronger than the Dredds. Wilson went on to work in the French market, including working on several Young Blueberry Westerns, before returning to 2000AD with Rain Dogs and more Dredd in the late 1990's. There was a compendium of these later stories issued along with The Megazine a couple of months ago.

Steve Dillon

Dillon's double page spread of Orlok the assassin spreading Block Mania remains one of my favourite ever Dredd spreads.
Judge Dredd © 2009 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Judge Dredd created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra

Now better known for his work with Garth Ennis on Preacher, Steve Dillon came to Dredd following runs on SF strips such as Absolom Daak: Dalek Killer for Dr. Who Weekly and Laser Eraser and Pressbutton for Warrior magazine. A superb natural draughtsman who can turn his hand to just about anything, Dillon was careful to include definitive Mega-City details in his strips, such as Ezquerra's looped overhead roadways and McMahon's late-period "pepperpot" Cityblocks. His own future design shows a gritty post-Star Wars influence, and is convincingly realised. Dillon is important because his approach - of taking the wilder flights of Mega-City architecture and toning them down to fit a more conventional style of design while maintaining an integrated futuristic feel - has become one of the more popular approaches over the last twenty years or so, followed by artists as diverse as Colin McNeill and Paul Marshall.

Full Circle

Following Carlos Ezquerra's tour-de-force return to Judge Dredd with the twenty-five part Apocalypse War epic, the wheel had come full circle regarding Mega-City design. Writers John Wagner and Alan Grant had established the city as the urban Hell we know and love today, and a range of artistic models for Mega-City One had been tried. In short, all the big stuff had been invented, and for subsequent artists it was not so much a case of starting from scratch as picking an existing approach to work from.

Many artists have worked on Judge Dredd since, far too many for me to even do highlights, but the current generation of practitioners contain what, in my opinion, are two of the most exciting "city builders" of the last 20 years:
(Note: when I relate these guys to Ezquerra or McMahon, I'm identifying them with a style of design, not saying that they're copying that particular artist. As an example, I'd describe my own work as "post-Ezquerra" in this context)

Henry Flint

A typically magnificent cityscape from Henry Flint.
Judge Dredd © 2009 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Judge Dredd created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra

Following in the grand tradition of Mike McMahon, Flint's future design also shows a certain hyper-detailed Kev O'Neill influence, tempered by a sensibility all his own. His renderings of cityscapes and urban spaces are superb, with dramatic compositions and a terrific understanding of perspective and lighting. One of the few 2000AD artists whose work recreates the thrills of my childhood progs. His terrific Mega-City is to be found in Judge Dredd and early episodes of Lowlife, though for his greatest world-building efforts, try Shakara!

Dave Taylor

Who's the daddy? Spreads like this are the reason I rate Dave Taylor as the best current Mega-City artist.
Judge Dredd © 2009 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Judge Dredd created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra

Dave Taylor's Mega-City is another country; they do things differently there. He's taken the post-Ezquerra "bubbly" look and pushed it to its logical conclusion, then added a dash of William Gibson super-technology and some magic all his own. Delineated in clear line and lovely subtle European-style colouring, Taylor's Mega-City is an organic-looking techno-purgatory with streets full of bizarre citizens and weird phenomena, mapped out in bold compositions and cinematic lighting. His is the first version of the Mega-City to give me that same thrill of strangeness that I got from the original Ezquerra Dredd back in the 1970's.

The swine can even make back alleys look interesting.
Judge Dredd © 2009 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Judge Dredd created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra

You won't be surprised to hear that Dave's my current favourite designer of the Mega-City; every time I see his stuff I'm torn between outright admiration and utter jealousy that I can't come up with anything that cool.

(And with that, I'm stopping. This article isn't so much finished as abandoned; it was way more work than I expected, and despite omitting so much, it's eating into my working time and I've got to let sanity prevail. All I can say is, if there's an artist I've missed who you feel deserves recognition here, please leave a tribute to them in the comments.)

Lowlife: Creation Part Four: This Week I Ar Bin Mostly Drawin'… Frogs

Frog sketches for Lowlife: Creation part four
Frogs © 2009 The Process Of Evolution

As part of my ongoing attempt to perk my drawing up a bit, I decided to make some effort to suss out frog anatomy, since I was going to be drawing thousands of the buggers:

From page one of Lowlife: Creation part four. I nearly went mad.
Lowlife and associated characters © 2009 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Lowlife created by Rob Williams & Henry Flint

It was an attempt to break myself of a bad habit; when deadlines are tight I tend to both fudge stuff I don't really know about and design stuff on the page rather than thinking ahead. It's not so much the drawing as the advanced planning and thinking that suffers. It's a pity, because a little advance planning can make a big difference to the quality of the finished product.

That said, I completely winged it drawing the whale:

Page three of Lowlife: Creation part four.
Lowlife and associated characters © 2009 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Lowlife created by Rob Williams & Henry Flint

Lowlife: Creation Part Three: So Was That It?

Page one of Lowlife: Creation part three.
Lowlife and associated characters © 2009 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Lowlife created by Rob Williams & Henry Flint

Lowlife: Creation Part Three has been out for a week now, but this post has been held up by my scurrying to finish the final episode (part eight). It's part of the experience of being a comic creator that you find your involvement with a project ends well ahead of publication; comic projects often take months, sometimes years to complete, and if you add delays caused by publishers going under, that can stretch to decades.

Left: publication of the colour version of Kingdom Of The Wicked was held up for 13 years.

My record to date is for the graphic novel Kingdom of the Wicked, which I drew for Tundra UK between 1992-3, but which didn't see print in colour until Dark Horse put out the current edition in 2004. I think I finally sat down and read the thing through for the first time in 2007.

On that scale of things, working for 2000AD counts almost as simultaneous publication. It takes me about two weeks to draw each 5-page episode of a 2000AD story, and the comic has to go to print about four weeks ahead of the publication date. Thus the deadline for the first episode of a series will be scheduled months ahead of time, but the last episode is usually completed while the series is already in print. This can have drawbacks; if for some reason you're not happy with the way the work looks in print, it can be a powerful blow to motivation at a time when you're normally struggling against fatigue to beat that final deadline. Don't forget, even for the experienced artist, comics are a trial of stamina; I've spoken to a number of fellow artists about this over the years, and the consensus is that every project starts in a blaze of enthusiasm, and ends in a grim determination to Bloody Get It Done.

Another facet of this business that I'm still getting used to is the discrepancy between the amount of time it takes me to draw a strip and the amount of time it takes to read it. The average black & white page will be the product of two eight-hour working days, but on a first reading you're likely to zip through it in a few seconds. Even if I plant loads of background detail to draw you back, the time spent re-reading a page probably won't ever amount to more than a few minutes.

Left: a page of my pencils from Mister X, 1990. Pity my poor inker, Ken Holewczynski.

That, I think, was what struck me most forcibly when I first saw my own comics in print; my first regular job, Mister X, came in twenty-two page episodes that took me 2-3 weeks to pencil; light on dialogue, even I could zip through a whole issue in a couple of minutes. The feeling of "was that it?" was almost palpable, though not off-putting; I draw comics mostly because I enjoy the comic artist lifestyle. Having the published work has always been a bonus, not an end in itself.

These days I rarely read my own work in any depth; usually, when I get the printed object, I'll quickly check through for mistakes and printing errors, then set it aside. That's not to say that I'm not happy with or proud of what I’ve done - but for me, it's more important to focus on the next thing rather than what came before.

Twenty years on, I'm still having fun doing the thing I love, for which I'm deeply grateful. Hope you're enjoying the ride as much as I am - even if your ride's a bit shorter :-)

See you in the funny pages.

Lowlife: Creation Part Two: Old Dogs, New Tricks

Page three of Lowlife: Creation part two.
Lowlife and associated characters © 2009 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Lowlife created by Rob Williams & Henry Flint

The fundamental part of being a commercial artist is earning enough to cover the mortgage each month, but mere survival doth not an interesting career make. So each time I start a new project, I look for some part of my work that needs change or improvement. What could I do better? What can I try next? Some projects answer that for themselves. Adapting my computer-based art techniques to black & white comics (Leviathan), making talking dinosaurs emote (XTNCT) and building a skanky Victorian London out of found textures (Stickleback: Mother London) each filled up weeks of work with new and entertaining challenges.

With Lowlife: Creation, I knew I wasn't going to be doing anything technically radical (I wanted a bit of grimy texture in with the line drawing, but the technical challenges of that sorted themselves out in a couple of pages), so I was free to pick an area for development.

Something that's bothered me about my own work for some time has been my figure drawing. I always feel it's too stiff and clumsy; somehow I can never get the characters to "act" convincingly in quite the way I'd like to. I've been thinking on the problem for a while, but the solution came from an unexpected quarter.

Half as a joke, my belovèd, the bibliophilic Dr. F, bought me a copy of How To Draw Comics The Marvel Way.

First published in 1978, How To Draw Comics... is one of those books I've been half-meaning to buy since I first became seriously interested in drawing comics. It's based on a course on drawing comics put together by John Buscema in 1975; Stan Lee later wrote up Buscema's notes in his own inimitable style. The florid tone of the text is probably what put me off buying the thing for thirty years, but once you push past that, it's a goldmine of information on everything from basic drawing and page planning, right through to inking techniques.

Left: How To Draw Comics The Marvel Way by Stan Lee & John Buscema.

The section on figure construction was exactly what I'd been looking for.

Above left: my old "skeleton" for constructing figures. Note the one-piece torso.
Above centre: John Buscema's figure construction "skeleton" sub-divides the torso into "rib-cage," "spine" and "pelvis."
Above right: This gives more points of reference for constructing figures in active poses.

In that chapter, Buscema shows how to build up a figure from a stick-figure "skeleton." All this was familiar enough to me in principle, but it turned out that Buscema's "skeleton" was just a bit more sophisticated than the one I'd been using in my own drawings. My "skeleton" used one section for the whole torso; his included a rough "ribcage" and "pelvis" connected by a "spine." This makes it much easier to draw the torso twisting or bending.

The first three panels of page four with the figures laid in using Buscema "skeletons." It was a lot easier to capture Aimee's casual slouch and Frank's hunch using this system.

Rough pencils stage: the figure drawing is a little more expressive than my usual, I think. It was certainly easy to do. I just wish I'd stuck with the folded arms on Aimee in the first panel.

Pencils stage: Even at this relatively late stage I sometimes faff with the drawing - in this case I thought it better to have Aimee hide her feelings by turning her head away from Frank in panel three. Pre-planned doesn't mean inflexible.

As a result of using this new system, figure drawing's become much easier, and I think the results are a bit better too. I'll never be Neal Adams, but I do have a clear idea of how to make my figure drawing still more expressive and convincing in future. A bit of me wishes I had picked up a copy of How To Draw Comics... when I was eleven; the wiser part of me remembers you couldn't tell my eleven-year-old self anything :-)

I'm also going to have a look at my composition in the next job, although I always find those diagrams where they overlay drawings with geometrical shapes a bit hard to believe in. Still, per ardua ad astra and all that.

How To Draw Comics The Marvel Way is available from most comic shops, or dirt cheap from amazon.co.uk right now. Many libraries also stock a copy.

Lowlife: Creation Part One: Borrowed Plumage

Cover to 2000AD Prog by me.
Dirty Frank © 2009 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Dirty Frank created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint,
this version of the character based on designs by Simon Coleby.

The new 2000AD is out, featuring the first episode of Lowlife: Creation, by Rob Williams and myself, plus a cover by me (slightly to my surprise, as the "milky beard" thing happens in a later episode of the story). Much to my relief and delight, both cover and interior have printed exactly as I envisaged (note that "relief" comes before "delight" there; with two weeks' hard slog ahead of me to finish the last episode of Lowlife: Creation, finding that I'd messed up the repro on the seven previous episodes would have been a serious blow to morale).

I've talked before about how working in comics sometimes gives you a chance to play with favourite concepts and/or characters (or reasonable facsimiles thereof). Being an art droid for 2000AD means I'm sometimes let loose upon the stuff of my childhood dreams; Judge Dredd is the only character I've worked on that I also read regularly as a child.

Old Stoney Face can be a bit of a challenge, though; he's one of the few flagship licensed characters where you're positively encluraged to come up with your own version. Finding my feet with him has taken a while (and, ironically, since I felt I got a handle on the character, I've been so busy doing other stuff that I've only managed one Dredd story, and he wasn't in that one overmuch.) To date, I think that I've done better with Mega-City One than Dredd himself.

Pencils for Page 5 of Part 1 of Lowlife:Creation,
showing how my version of Dirty Frank is closely based on Simon Coleby's.
Lowlife © 2009 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Lowlife created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint.

Lowlife has been a treat in that regard; I get to play around with the city without having to grapple with Dredd (and all issues of interpretation aside, not having to draw all those bloody eagles is nice;-). There's the question of Dirty Frank of course; in some ways he's a more complex character to interpret (he has more than one facial expression for a start), but after some playing around I decided to stick pretty closely to Simon Coleby's version. There were two good reasons for this; first, Simon's really made the character his own, and I wanted the readership to be drawn straight into Lowlife: Creation without spending the first couple of episodes adjusting to a new version of the character. Second, all my attempts to change the look of Frank ended up looking like degenerate versions of Ian Culbard.

Whenever I draw Mega-City One, thoughts of Carlos Ezquerra are never far behind. Carlos is of course the founding father of Mega-City One (more on this in a later post), and he was an major early influence on me. When I was eleven or so, I wanted to be Carlos Ezquerra in the way that other boys wanted to be rock stars or football players. Although I learned to counterfeit his rounded, organic style of design, it's so distinctive that I never felt able to pastiche it in my own projects, but working on Mega-City stories gives me the perfect excuse the borrow the Ezquerra "plumage" - so my Mega-City One always follows that tradition of bubbly shapes and gritty surfaces.

Carlos Ezquerra's classic stripey H-Wagons from mega-epic The Apocalypse War.
Judge Dredd © 2009 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Judge Dredd created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra.

This time ~~I went one step further: inspired by Dave Taylor's recycling of the good old-fashioned stripey Ezquerra H-Wagons from The Apocalypse War for his Judge Anderson story Big Robots (Judge Dredd Megazine #257-261, 2007) I decided I'd also use them in the flashback sequence in the first episode of Lowlife: Creation.

My 3D model of the classic Carlos Ezquerra H-Wagon, made in Carrara 3D 6.
I faffed away ages building the rear booster, but in the final strip you don't even see the ship from behind.

Being me, I couldn't resist seeing if I could make a 3D model of the thing, even though it only appears in one panel. I was quite pleased with the result - by sheer fluke I got the little upward tilt of the nose section right on the first try; I'm sure I couldn't have done it deliberately. I've added a few tweaks to my version (external cannons, another eagle on the nose, and extra pods on the "wings"), but it's fundamentally Carlos' design.

The rendering of the 3D model (top) versus the finished art (bottom)

Since I needed reference for the H-Wagon, I ended up re-reading The Apocalypse War. It's a remarkable achievement - in 1982, after an absence of five years, Carlos Ezquerra returned to the character he'd created by drawing 25 episodes straight in real time (ie one per week; these days we art droids get at least a fortnight per episode). There's the odd dodgy bit here and there of course, but 25 episodes straight - I mean, I once drew four episodes of Dredd on fortnightly deadlines and I nearly died of it.

A flashback scene by Carlos Ezquerra from The Apocalypse War.
Judge Dredd © 2009 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Judge Dredd created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra.

Anyway, re-reading The Apocalypse War, I was reminded of a neat technique Carlos used for flashback sequences. Where other artists tended to muck with panel borders to show flashbacks, Carlos "faded down" flashback panels by replacing black areas with chunks of mid-grey hatching. A useful effect, thunk I, and one well worth nicking for my own flashback sequence.

Left: the "blacks" are defined in mid grey.
Middle: less than a dozen strokes of my "Carlos hatching brush" generates all this hatching (the red outlines show the area that needs to be covered).
Right: the "blacks" are used to mask out the hatching.

I built an Illustrator brush that produces a cluster of short "Carlos hatching" lines, so I could lay down dense hatching really quickly. I then masked out these blocks of hatching to give hard-edged areas of shading, similar to the effect seen in The Apocalypse War. Since my flashback sequence takes place in a blizzard, I lined the shading up with the direction of the wind and blown snow to add dynamism. A modified version of the hatching brush let me quickly add myriad flecks of blown snow to the backgrounds.

The funny thing is, I've joked for years about drawing a strip that was just one man in a blizzard - as a relaxing antidote to all that detailed architectural stuff I usually do - but when I finally got the chance, I spent so long making 3D models and custom brushes that in the end the pages were no quicker or easier than usual.

Still, the getting there was fun.

Sunken Treasure

Wil Wheaton's Sunken Treasure, cover by me.

If you've not already heard about this on Twitter, blog-meister Wil Wheaton has a new collection out. Sunken Treasure is available via Lulu.com, 90 pages of loveliness with cover by me. Check it out.

Better Late Than Never!

What's this all about? Check out Huzzah! to find out.
Characters created by Dave Taylor, Ian Culbard, Rob Davis and Sketchybeast

I've finally pulled my finger out and managed a contribution to Huzzah!, the successor to Who Killed Round Robin. This new game is really firing on all cylinders, with amazing contributions from old hands and newcomers alike. Bookmark it now, or be the laughing stock of all your friends!

Be Sure Your Sins Will Find You Out

Some of my rather weak colouring from Pussyfoot Five.
Pussyfoot Five © 2009 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Pussyfoot Five created by John Smith, Steve Yeowell and Nigel Raynor

One of the drawbacks of being a commercial artist is that your mistakes are as public as your triumphs. I found myself reflecting on this fact when I saw that this month's Megazine is accompanied by a reprint volume of Pussyfoot Five.

Written by John Smith and drawn by Nigel Raynor, Pussyfoot Five was conceived as a spin-off from urbane vampire series Devlin Waugh; it contains John Smith's trademark mix of sex, religion and weird alien biology.

It's also the series where my career as a 2000AD colourist jumped the shark.

It was in January 2000, and I'd been working as a full-time colourist for 2000AD for just over a year. I was hanging on by my fingernails, using a patchy self-taught set of Photoshop skills and a rickety old Power Computing Macintosh clone (anyone remember those?) which creaked like a ship in a high wind whenever I used more than three layers to colour a page. Despite that, I was doing very well commercially; editor David Bishop fed me all the work I could handle, to the point where quite a few progs were coloured half-and half by me and Chris Blythe. I'd lucked into the job by getting a computer at exactly the time 2000AD were switching to computer colouring; back in 1998 there weren't many colourists in the UK with the combination of skills and equipment, so I was in.

From Judge Dredd: Return of the Assassin, drawn by Cam Kennedy.
Judge Dredd © 2009 Rebellion Developments/2000AD

Judge Dredd created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra

The problem with colouring other people's work, is that I find it pretty strenuous. It’s a very different proposition from colouring my own stuff, where I have a picture of the colouring in mind from the beginning. With other people's work, there's always the slight feeling of scribbling all over someone else's drawing; half the time you have no contact with the artist, and even on the occasions when you can get in touch and get some sort of direction from them, there's still a sense of treading on eggshells about the whole process.
On top of that, getting to grips with the new technology on tight deadlines had meant a nightmarishly steep learning curve in the first few months. There's a huge difference between being able to do something, and being able to do it reliably, to order. Working out the simplest, most efficient ways of working takes a lot of trial and error. I mean, for the first six months, I didn't even have a graphics tablet! Madness!

From Devlin Waugh: Chasing Herod, drawn by Steve Yeowell.
Devlin Waugh © 2009 Rebellion Developments/2000AD

Devlin Waugh created by John Smith and Sean Phillips

By early 1999, I was pretty much on top of the basic technique, but another complication arose; I entered into a long-distance relationship. Those of you who've tried it will know it's taxing enough in itself, but the nature of the job made life much harder.
As a colourist, you're pretty much at the end of the working chain, so you're making up for any delays caused by the writer or artist. This makes planning time off a nightmare. In the old days, I used to take work with me (I once coloured the cover for a Titan Books Batman collection on my Gran's dining-room table), but now I was tied to the computer and therefore home, as laptops were way beyond my price range at this point. Luckily, after a difficult first few months, I was put onto the epic 25-part Devlin Waugh: Chasing Herod. Artist Steve Yeowell had been working on the project for several months before I came on board, so I was presented with a stack of artwork and a schedule for delivery. By pushing my working schedule, I could get a couple of episodes ahead, enough to make the occasional week off to go and visit my belovèd! Bliss!

Hand on heart, I think I can say I didn't cut corners on that project, but I was content to rest on my laurels and just make sure the work was in on time. I stopped growing, stopped looking for new ways to do things - and the came Pussyfoot Five.

It was natural enough to give me Pussyfoot Five, as I'd been the colourist of Devlin Waugh, but this new strip was a very different proposition. Devlin Waugh artist Steve Yeowell has a classic, balanced style that looks great in black & white but is lovely and "open" for colour; his use of line weight and spot blacks mean the drawings are very clear; you can more or less put flat colour underneath them and they'll look grand.
Nigel Raynor's work on Pussyfoot Five was complex and all drawn in a uniform line. It required careful colouring to pull the characters out from the backgrounds and the lend them weight and solidity. I suspect Chris Blythe, with his background in painting, could have done an excellent job of this (his colouring on series 2 is immeasurably superior to mine); I was suddenly finding that the flat colours and soft gradients which worked under the likes of Cam Kennedy and Charlie Adlard weren't going to cut the mustard here.

I re-coloured this panel twice and it's still a pretty terrible job
Pussyfoot Five © 2009 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Pussyfoot Five created by John Smith, Steve Yeowell and Nigel Raynor

On top of that, I'd misunderstood the whole tone of the series; faced with the title "Pussyfoot Five" and the ironic tone of John Smith's dialogue, I'd delivered a colouring job inspired by Austin Powers, only to discover editor David Bishop had been thinking The Matrix. I substantially re-worked the episode (the only time I've ever had to go back and re-colour), but there wasn't time to start again from scratch, which is what the job really needed. I lost heart: the resulting effort still looks to me like something from a child's colouring book, and it was a relief when it was over.

From Judge Dredd: Rest Stop, drawn by Chris Weston.
Judge Dredd © 2009 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Judge Dredd created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra

And that was the beginning of the end for me as a colourist at 2000AD. I hung on for a few months, turning in a couple of things I'm still quite happy with (The Judge Dredd story Rest Stop with Chris Weston and A future shock called Crash Crack with Siku), but the writing was on the wall. When Andy Diggle took over as editor of 2000AD, he took me to one side and told me I'd no longer be getting colouring work from the comic.

Of course, the fact that he asked me to write and draw three Future Shocks for him considerbaly softened the pill.

By the end of that year I was a published writer and artist in 2000AD, an ambition I'd held since I was eleven. I'd completed new material for a reprint volume of Lazarus Churchyard with Warren Ellis, and I was just starting on an exciting new web comic thing called... Scarlet Traces.

And looking back now, it's all down to that pivotal moment on Pussyfoot Five. You see, I'm not really an adventurous type; I tend to burrow down and seek security rather than get out there and make things happen. So, if I'd done a great job on Pussyfoot Five, and 2000AD had kept offering me colouring, would I have had the nerve to chuck it over to go and do Scarlet Traces for an unknown (and, as it turned out, short-lived) web company?

Probably not.

In some parallel universe, there's a me sitting here today, photoshopping muzzle flashes onto yet another episode of Sinister Dexter and looking at Steve Pugh's latest work on Stickleback with bitter envy in his heart. And there's the lesson; in the end, the price you pay for actually getting out there and doing stuff is the odd Pussyfoot Five, rattling skeleton-like in the closet.

Bit tough on Nigel Raynor, though.

Patrick McGoohan & Tony Hart, RIP

Left: Patrick McGoohan, died this week aged 80

Right: Tony Hart, died this week aged 83

This week sees the sad loss of two notable contributors to popular culture.

Patrick McGoohan was a highly respected stage actor, but is now best remembered for his landmark television series The Prisoner (1967). McGoohan starred in, produced (and even wrote several episodes of) this surreal and enigmatic series, in which an un-named secret agent ("Number 6", played by McGoohan) is kidnapped and held in a hidden town ("the village") by unknown forces who could equally be his enemies or his own side. A parable on individuality versus state power, The Prisoner has provoked much argument and many different theories as to its meaning, but what strikes me is its relationship to McGoohan's own career.

What tends to be forgotten now is what a huge star McGoohan was by the mid-1960's; he had been approached to play both James Bond and The Saint, and the second and third series of Danger Man were so successful that he became the highest-paid actor in the UK. What's impressive is that McGoohan seems to have had very little regard for his own success; all indications are that he found little to challenge him in the action-hero roles he was offered, so that he walked away from Danger Man during the filming of the fourth series. He then negotiated with Lew Grade of ITC to produce a series of his own, and The Prisoner was the result.

Probably the best title sequence in the world: The Prisoner (music by Ron Grainer)

The Prisoner in many ways mirrors McGoohan's own situation at the time; Number 6 is a valuable agent who resigns but must then resist attempts to coerce him back into a role that he no longer wishes to fill. Making such a wilfully strange series looks to me like a way of kissing off the industry that had typecast him in simplistic action-hero roles, but which had paid him enough to leave him free to walk away. Certainly, at the time, The Prisoner was not the huge success that Danger Man had been, and McGoohan's involvement with television was much more limited thereafter. But it was also an extraordinary work in its own right, and one which grew to be a long-term cult success. Certainly it has lasted in a way that Danger Man and its ilk have not.

Ironically, McGoohan was left in the position of swapping one form of typecasting for another, as The Prisoner ended up overshadowing all his subsequent work. But if one is to be remembered, there are worse things to be remembered for.

Tony Hart is someone I remember from my earliest days, first as artist-in-residence on the innovative children's programme for the deaf Vision On, then later his own series Take Hart and Hart Beat. With his shock of white hair and affable manner, he was a perfect children's TV presenter; his demostrations of small-scale art-projects were clear and unhurried, and usually included straightforward but non-obvious tips which would improve the end result for viewers attempting the exercise at home. Each episode, Hart would also produce and extremely large-scale picture, painted on the studio floor or assembled from objects in outdoor locations, and viewable only from above. A third classic element to a Tony Hart show was The Gallery, a showcase of drawings sent in by viewers. This formula has become the template for later shows such as the BBC's SMart and ITV's Art Attack.

Hart's shows also contained a fair amount of animation; The Mad Professor (a silent movie-style segment created by stop-motion animating a live actor) and The Workman (who dug up a new, strange object every week) migrated with him from Vision On to Take Hart, and were soon joined by Morph (left), a stop-motion animated plasticine character produced by a fledgeling Aardman Animations (now better know for Creature Comforts and Wallace and Gromit).

As a designer, Hart was responsible for Vision On "grasshopper" logo and the original design of the Blue Peter ship.

For those of you who fancy a quick nostalge, here's Left Bank II, the vibrophone piece that accompanied the Gallery in Vision On, and became the theme tune for the early series of Take Hart.

Who Killed Round Robin?

My last contribution to online comics game Who Killed Round Robin?
(The Hierophant Of Zoktar created by Ian Culbard.)

Thanks largely to the efforts of Craig Conlan, Dave Taylor, Colin Fawcett and particularly Ian Culbard (for helping keep us all on track continuity-wise at the end) the online comics game Who Killed Round Robin thundered to a successful conclusion 0n December 31st 2008.

It's hellishly difficult to keep these things on track (most of these games peter out in a morass of competing contradictory storylines), so getting this one to a conclusion is an achievement in itself. Read in an Airtight Garage frame of mind, it could even be said to make sense; but it's worth a look mostly for the host of fun moments along the way.

I managed only a measly eight contributions to WKRR, but I'm hoping to do better with HUZZAH! , the new game that started on 1st January this year.