Wednesday 23 December 2009

Twelve Progs of Christmas!

Merry Christmas everyone! To celebrate the festive season, let's look at some of the Christmas covers Tharg's droids have given us over the years. This post is kicked off in fine style with the wonderful cover of the current Megazine (292) by the legendary John Higgins. The printed version of this cover suffers from having the Megazine logo obscuring most of the clock tower which is a big feature of the story within so I'm happy to be able to show you the 'clean' version.

Okay, below we have two covers by the wonderful Carlos Ezquerra. A fine double page cover for prog 192 featuring a wealth of 2000AD characters and the cover of Prog 297 depicting the classic Dredd tale 'Night of the Rad Beast.'

Classic artist Eric Bradbury provides us with the cover of 348 showing Tharg and his droids sticking it to the Dictators of Zrag once again!
Next, one of my (many) all time favourite covers, Prog 658 by Richy Pickle (or Richard Dolan to give him his proper title.) This is followed by Prog 763 which followed two years later...

Next we have two festive offerings from superdroid Colin MacNeil. The first one (Prog 815) is a particular favourite for mine and I've recently acquired the original artwork for it, so I'm a very happy blogger! The second one is for Prog 710 and features a host of much loved characters including Chopper, a character who Colin (almost) killed off in Song of the Surfer.

Next we have a cutie for Prog 920 from Jason Brashill (who now works for Valve Software company and was part of the design team for the mind-bending Portal game) and the cover of 1023 by Paul Johnson, featuring the Men in Black (Boo! Hiss!) from Vector 13. The less said about them the better I think...

Onto the Megazine now and I'll start with this camply festive offering from covers legend Cliff Robinson. I love this man, sorry droid's, work so much I'm actually putting off writing a blog entry about him as I fear I won't do him justice!
And another beauty from uber artist, Greg Staples (or 'Joe Dredd', as he'll be known in the forthcoming Judge Minty fan film) who's work formed the subject of the previous blog entry.
Finally, as a special Christmas treat, here is a Kev O'Neill cover for Speakeasy Magazine featuring Santa and Mashial Law - cool!
So, a Merry Christmas to all readers of the blog and a HUGE thank you to everyone who's contributed over the year, added comments, sent nice emails and the wonderful staff and artists of 2000AD who have been so kind and generous with their time and talent!

NEXT WEEK - Cover of the Year 2009 as voted for by the members of the 2000AD Messageboard. Go here to vote!

Sunday 20 December 2009

Prog 2010 - Your Move Earthlets!

Here's Greg Staples' cover for this years' fantastic end of year spectacular, Prog 2010! Easily one of my favourite 2000AD artists, Greg's style is another we've been lucky enough to watch develop in his years working for 2000AD. The cover above, which was Greg's idea by the way, was not Greg's first end of year spectacular as he was also responsible for this portrait of Tharg for the cover of Prog 2003.
Speaking of portraits, here are a couple of beauties he did of Dredd for progs 1273 and 1600, stunning! Here are the gorgeous covers of 1446 and 1305 too. A droid at the top of his game I think!

Next are the inks for the Strontium Dog cover of prog 1305 and the amazing painted cover of prog 1446...
Moving on, here are a couple of images featuring Dredd's undead nemesis Judge Death. The first is the cover of Megazine 209 and below that is Gregs beautiful promo image for the Dredd vs. Death game - one of my favourite Dredd images ever...


Finally we have a couple of posters. The first is available as a giveaway in this month's Judge Dredd magazine (on sale now earthlets!) and the second is the cover of the first 2000AD poster prog - enjoy!


Greg's site is at http://www.gregstaples.co.uk/ Take a look!

Wednesday 9 December 2009

Neil Roberts - Sinister Dexter!

Thanks to friend of the blog Neil "Skinny Elbows" Roberts who has done my work for me this week!

He's posted the sketches, refs and finished artwork for his fantastic Sinister Dexter cover of Prog 1665 on his excellent blog. However, I couldn't resist posting the sketches and hilarious reference photos, you have to admire the fella for really living his work!

Please visit his blog here for the official version of how the cover was done. There's masses of other breathtaking artwork on there too!