Comic Relief...

The brilliant comic artist Chris Weston has just put a post about little old me on his blog (Hello if you have travelled to me from there). I feel truly humbled by his kind words! If you haven't come from there, you need to check out his stuff. He's recently completed a very nice Judge Death Pin-up and that together with his posting about me has a nice kind of synergy to it as I have been thinking about trying to get some comics work.

I used to be an avid fan of 2000ad and Judge Dredd. I collected it almost religiously from prog 425 and even bought vast numbers of back issues.

I kind of lost track around 2001 but I've seen some amazing work being produced for it currently. So much so that I'm inspired to try to get involved. In order to get some work doing comics, I first need to show that I can do sequential art, I was looking for a script to simply draw up, but couldn't find anything on the web. I have finally surrendered to the inevitable and started to write a script of my own...



... but in the meantime, I've been sketching old Judge Joe Dredd. I haven't drawn the jaw in such a long time and I wasn't sure how I wanted my interpretation of Mega-City One's top lawman to look. Do I want a more cartoony Mike McMahon look? I know I couldn't do a Brian Bolland and I'm not as out-there as Simon Bisley. Glenn Fabry, Steve Dillon and Ian Gibson were all heros of mine also... but in the end I think I need to go my own way, taking all the things I like (and think I'm capable of) into account!

The sketch above took about 45mins and then about another 10 or 15 for the typography (all digital). Yes clearly it's a pastiche of the much imitated Lord Kitchener poster and probably needs quite a lot of work to make it work as a stand alone image.