Wraparound cover for 2000AD Prog 1811 - I had a real blast doing this
Lowlife Saudade copyright Rebellion Developments Ltd/2000AD.
Lowlife created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint 

I've been getting a lot of positive feedback about the big wraparound cover for this week's Prog (1811). If you'd like to know a bit more, Pete Wells has kindly hosted a full step-by-step demo showing how the cover was done on his excellent 2000AD Covers Uncovered blog.

Lowlife Aliens Quiz Answers

The host of Aliens from the last episode of Lowlife: Saudade
All characters copyright Rebellion Developments Ltd/2000AD.
Lowlife created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint 
Judge Dredd created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra
Creators of individual characters listed below

Answers to last week’s quiz: I’ve included Prog numbers for each characters first appearance, plus the “JDCF” number tells you which volume of The Complete Judge Dredd Case Files that story is reprinted in.

To the best of my knowledge, all these characters first appeared in stories written by John Wagner; artists are credited below.

1) Already introduced in the story and this blog, but I’ll not leave them out; the Kleggs, Alien mercinaries intoroduced by Judge Cal to keep the poplulation of Mega-City One in line during the Day the Law Died saga, (first appearance Prog 94, JDCF 2), first drawn by Brian Bolland (in an episode inked by Gary Leach.) 

2) Just some guys, y’know?

3) (From the race of) Trapper Hag, an alien bounty hunter who caused all sorts of trouble for Dredd back in Prog 305 (JDCF 6). Armed with a hi-tech force field, formidable physical strength and some nasty alien hounds, Hag killed a number of judges in the pursuit of his human prey. Despite his name, there's no indication as to whether Hag contains less caffeine that other comparable trappers. Artist: Steve Dillon.

4) (From the race of) the necromancer Murd the Oppressor, the vile sorceress from the Judge Child Saga parts 15 &16 (Progs 170/171, JDCF 4) Native to the planet Necros, she was the guardian of the giant toad Sagbelly, the only source of the drug Oracle Spice, which Dredd needed to find the Judge Child Owen Krysler. Murd pops up again in flashback as the mentor of the necromancer Sabbat in the Judgement Day saga. Artist: Mick McMahon.

5) A Guardian, servant of Murd the Oppressor, from the same story (Progs 170/171, JDCF 4). Artist: Mick McMahon.

6) This one’s a real pig - he appears in only one panel during part 17 of the Judge Child Saga (Prog 172, JDCF 4). He’s playing a board game with Prosser, The Jigsaw Man, just before we get the big reveal and see what Jigsaw Disease is. Artist: Brian Bolland. 

Lowlife: Saudade Part Three: Sharkitecture, or Slaughter Your Darlings

Luna-2 from Lowlife: Saudade part three. The most complex drawing I've done since the end of Leviathan (2003).
Lowlife Saudade copyright Rebellion Developments Ltd/2000AD.
Lowlife created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint.

I'm very lucky working with Rob Williams, as he's always on time with script. Over the years, I've often been kept waiting (the clock ticking away but my deadlines not shifting…) or received script in dribs and drabs as the writer's working on it (which can be a minefield for continuity). But Rob? Always prompt. While I was working on Lowlife: Saudade part three, he even got me the script for part four in advance, which is very unusual. I hardly ever get to see what will happen next when I'm working on an episode.
What's even more unusual is, this was the only time in my career when getting a script in advance caused me a whole load of extra work… but without it, the double page spread of Luna-2 (above) would have looked very different…

(Before I start this story, I want to say this isn't intended in any way as a criticism of Rob Williams, who really saved my butt by turning out scripts for me at very short notice after I'd had scheduling problems with another project.)

There's no such thing as foolproof. However carefully you specify something, there'll always be someone who can get the wrong end of the stick. And, dear reader, that someone is usually me. Take a look at the description of the double-page spread shown above from Rob's script:

Pages 3 and 4 (Two panels)
Panel One
Double Page Splash, effectively (panel two’s a small indent bottom right). Now we see what’s being built at the bottom of this HUGE moon crater. And it’s LUNA-2. It’s a brand, shiny new GOD CITY. Unsullied by industry or people living in it. If Mega City One and Luna-1 look old and lived in, this looks not yet out of the box. And it looks better and more modern and more hi-tech than any Dreddworld city we’ve ever seen. It looks like an idealised representation of a future city. And the Overdrive Inc logo is very overtly on lots of the city blocks etc. Its scale if simply enormous. Workers are working on it, as you’d imagine. That’s who the people were coming in on the transport we saw last episode. The city’s not quite finished yet. There’s small transports carrying workers whizzing around. In the far left foreground of this shot we can see the viewing window with Frank and Overdrive in it, staring out at this simply extraordinary sight.

Now, that certainly conforms to the image you see above, a big wide shot of the city. Frank, after all, is in a spaceport, which you'd assume would be at the edge of the city. So now take a look at these two panel descriptions from page 6 to see where I went wrong:

Panel One
We’re on the ground of LUNA-2 here looking up at its spires high overhead and, in the sky above, high above the crater, in the distance, we can see the EARTH.

Panel Two
Frank now, in a viewing area, alone, it looks out over LUNA-2 and has a glass ceiling to allow him to look up at the sky. 

What's actually intended here is that we have one shot inside the city and then another one outside; but reading "looking up at its spires" and "look up at the sky," I added two and two, made five, and placed Frank's observation dome inside the city. I then set about designing the sequence accordingly.

Designs for Luna-2 architecture. To make the city look a bit different, I hit on the idea of using shark forms; tails, fins, snouts with open jaws (I like to think of this as "sharkitecture.") On the left are layouts for the first version of the double page spread, with the observation bubble set inside the city.

The first, incomplete version of the double page spread, set inside the bounds of Luna-2. Halfway through work on this I received the script for part 4, which indicates that Frank's location is in fact some distance outside the city with a view of the whole thing.

Bum.

Now, I could have gone back to Rob and asked for a rewrite, but this business was really my fault… and then, looking at the action from the following episode, and seeing the possibilities of a big wide shot of the city… it would be a real pain in the arse to re-do the spread, but there was just time, and it could be really brilliant…

Sometimes it's just worth making the effort. Back to the drawing board.

In my 3D program, I made up a simple model with the plan view of Luna-2 inside its concealing crater. Following the "sharkitecture" theme, I made the city plan a sort of fat shark shape. I used 3D because we were going to see the city at a low angle and the perspective of the complex curved shape was the key to showing the scale of the thing. It's easy enough to draw something so the reader knows it must be big, but I wanted them to feel how big it was. I wanted this to be a real "money shot."

I generated this view in 3D, using a wide-angle virtual camera to create strong perspective effects - this is the key to the sense of scale. I've only made a flat outline as it's easier for me to draw in the rest of the city than try to model it - this view is just a guide.

The 3D rendering pasted into the double page spread in Manga Studio EX 4. I've used the Perspective Ruler tools to add a perspective grid over the top of the image, though it's hard to see at this scale.

Rough "pencils" over the top of the 3D rendering. I've "rescued" the foreground bubble containing Frank and Overdrive from the previous version.

"Pencilling" added in bright colours over the rendering and rough pencils. Though I often use colour coding to indicate different parts of the drawing, in this case the bright colours are just to help the drawing show up against the brightly-coloured rendering.

 Because I'd already spent time on the abortive first version, I was running a bit late, so I pencilled everything very loosely with the idea of doing most of the drawing at the "inking" stage. With fantasy architecture, I'm pretty confident at just doodling in buildings, especially at such a small scale. Note that I add a bit more detail to key landmarks - the tower at the top of the hill, for example.

The "inks" over the pencils and rendering. This was a couple of days' work on its own. With this sort of repetitive detail work, patience and stamina are much more important than drawing skill. I find the best way to do it is listening to something absorbing on the radio - a good drama, say, that occupies the attention - and then it's almost like doodling. I also broke the fine detail work into chunks and interspersed it with work on other pages to give myself a bit of variety.

The spread with greys added, ready to be exported from Manga Studio. The striking false colours indicate areas where I'll drop in subtle gradations in Photoshop, which handles grads much better than Manga Studio. The blue on Frank's face is a mask where I'll drop in a "grot" texture.

The finished piece, with grads added in Photoshop. I'm pretty happy with this, but there's a reason I only do one of these big spreads every decade :-)

Luckily, there weren't that many other changes needed; I had to tweak the views out through the bubble on page 5, but that wasn't much work. The biggest change was re-drawing the background to page 6 panel 2, taking Frank's observation bubble from the centre of the city to the crater wall. All of this was made easy not only because I work digitally, but because I have the habit of drawing foregrounds and backgrounds on different layers - I could erase the cityscape in one go without touching the bubble itself.

Lowlife: Saudade Cover at 2000AD Covers Uncovered

Cover for 2000AD Prog 1805
Lowlife Saudade copyright Rebellion Developments Ltd/2000AD.
Lowlife created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint.

If you're into process-y, step-by-step demo-y goodness, there's more to be had at 2000AD Covers Uncovered, who have kindly agreed to host a detailed demo of the process behind the cover to last week's Prog - go get it!

And a big "get well soon" to Pete Wells at 2000AD Covers Uncovered, who's been suffering from the 'flu all this week.

Lowlife: Saudade Part One

Cover for 2000AD Prog 180. Click to embiggen.
A full step-by-step breakdown of the making of this cover is available on 2000AD Covers Uncovered
Lowlife copyright Rebellion Developments Ltd/2000AD.
Lowlife created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint.

So, back in the saddle for another Lowlife!

(If anyone’s wondering what happened to the new Stickleback series I tweeted about a couple of weeks ago, have no fear, I’m working on it now; 2000AD often commissions material months in advance, so Lowlife:Saudade represents work I did between February and June this year).

One of the delights of working for a comic you read yourself as a child is that sometimes you get to draw stuff you remember fondly; thus I was happy to find myself working on a story set in the Dredd universe’s moon colony, Luna-1. Although I wasn’t a regular Squaxx until Prog 86 (when Starlord merged with 2000AD), I picked up the odd issue here and there (often on day trips) and there seems to have been a little cluster during Dredd’s tour of duty as Marshall of Luna-1 - the Face-Change Gang, the Lunar Olympics and The Oxygen Board, all stories drawn by Brian Bolland. (Quick digression - the first Judge Dredd story I ever drew, Master Moves, revisited several of the themes of the Lunar Olympics.)

One thing I wanted to do was really establish the cityscape of Lunar-1; previous renditions of the city tended to show the domes from the outside, but avoid any sense of enclosure once you were inside - not that I'm being sniffy about the efforts on my predecessors; the geometry of the inside of a dome is horribly tricky to plot by hand, and the only way I did it was by modelling the domes in a 3D program. Not only was that technology unavailable to Messrs. Bolland, McMahon and Gibson back in the 1970’s, but they only had about half as long as I do to draw a single episode. Nevertheless, there was a gap in the visual landscape of the Dredd universe that I felt could be usefully filled.

I built the domes in Carrara 3D* using transparent spheres embedded into squat, wide cylinders on an infinite plain; I added various small blocks around the edges of the cylinders to simulate smaller support structures. The shape was loosely inspired by the design on the moonbase in 2001: A Space Odyssey. I’d made the domes themselves transparent by adding a glass shader to them, but I needed a bit of structure as well, to help me add details like support struts (I generally build as little as possible in 3D, preferring to add a checkerboard pattern to objects which allows me to accurately place hand-drawn details such as windows, struts and panels on the surfaces of complex objects.) To get transparent domes with a checkerboard pattern on them, I copied the domes, pasted the copies back in exactly the same positions (in 3D modelling, two objects can exist in the same space), replaced the glass shader on the copies with checkerboard, then reduced the opacity of the checked domes down to about 10% - giving the effect of a checked frosting on the “glass” dome (there’s probably a more sophisticated way of doing this by editing the shader directly, but I was in a hurry and this worked).

*I don’t especially recommend Carrara, it just happens to be the descendant of a 3D program I was given back in the late 90’s, and I’ve stuck with it out of familiarity and the fact that upgrades are cheap. If you’re starting from scratch, Google Sketchup is probably a better bet; the basic version is free, it’s easy to learn and ideal for the sort of simple modelling needed by comic artists.

Four stages of work on page three (click on image to embiggen)
Top left: imported 3D render. Top Right: perspective grids and rough pencils
Bottom Left: finished pencils. Bottom Right: inks over pencils and 3D render.

Once the models were built it was just a question of placing a camera inside one of the domes to give the effect of looking down from a tall building near the crown of the dome. I’d already drawn a rough of the page to help me work out what angle and field of view I wanted. Once I’d got the view right in Carrara I did a screen grab and imported it into Manga Studio; there I could use the 3-Point Perspective Ruler to build a perspective grid that mapped onto the perspective of the scene. With the grid in place, I could sketch in the bubbly organic Dredd-world towers by eye. Obligingly, the checker pattern I’d applied to the 3D shapes mapped onto the circular cross-section of the base cylinders as a sort of dart-board target pattern, so I had the rings of concentric roads inside the domes ready laid-out for me!

Brian Bolland's splash for Judge Dredd: The Oxygen Board, 2000AD Prog 57.
Judge Dredd copyright Rebellion Developments Ltd/2000AD.
Judge Dredd created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra.

One last detail I made sure to add was the oxygen tankers docking with the crown of the domes - this comes from the Dredd story The Oxygen Board way back in Prog 57. I love finding these little connections back to the past history of the Dredd universe.

Lowlife: Saudade part one page three, with its eleven panel layout.
This is still only the same amount of work as six panels with two figures in each.
Lowlife Saudade copyright Rebellion Developments Ltd/2000AD. 
Lowlife created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint. 

I’ve been a little surprised at how much attention page 2’s received due to its 11-panel layout. I guess I’m bucking the trend these days but I absolutely LOVE this dense style of storytelling - on the rare occasions I’ve written for myself, I tend to do very high panel counts, going up to 20 panels a page in the A4 pages of Timulo (Deadline magazine, 1989-90) and averaging 12-16 panels in the US-comic-sized Consequences (Autocratik Press, 1999, both stories now available in the collection Timularo from Lulu.com). It’s ironic, but dense pages always feel spacious to me, from the storytelling perspective; you can show the minutiae of action and reaction, take a character through a thought process; explore the environment that surrounds him. A lot of artists shy away from high panel counts because it looks like lots of work, but generally, because you can’t show as much per panel, you don’t end up doing that much extra drawing. Well, I don’t anyway.

 It’s a pity we don’t get to do more of this in 2000AD - unfortunately it’s a more contemplative style that’s probably at odds with 2000AD’s status as an adventure comic. I don’t know if it’s still the case, but a few years ago there was a 2000AD style guide that suggested no more than seven panels to the page maximum in order to keep the stories moving. But then again, Si Spurrier and I got away with a four-tier, eight-panel grid on The Vort.