DEATH PLANET! plus: Avert Disaster Today!

DEATH PLANET! This is a cover I finished today for the graphic novel that gets bagged with the Megazine each month. Next issue it's reprinting DEATH PLANET (it needs to be written in caps) by Alan Hebden and Lopez, and as it never had a cover when originally printed Tharg asked asked me to draw one. His brief was something like 'a planet dripping blood' but I went to town and made it look like an old video nasty instead. I have to admit it doesn't have much to do with the strip itself, but it's a pretty cool image. I came up with the crappy tagline myself, so this will almost certainly get ditched on the print job. Below are a couple of rough I did beforehand.

Ages ago Robo-k33f and I came up up with a fun idea for a subscriptions advert in 2000 AD that would read more like a propaganda poster than a sales pitch, involving whole planets getting leveled and blown up for daring to cancel their weekly Prog.
I think Tharg kind of liked the idea, so I came up with something a bit more concrete one afternoon, complete with ridiculous small-print and condescending tone. Unfortunately actually doing the art and getting it finished proved a little harder to fit in, but after a few months of putting it off it was printed in the Prog 2012 Christmas special. It'll also get tweaked a little bit to run in the special Free Comic Book Day 2000 AD issue in the US.
Below is the art without stuff on, and below that my pencils.

Frogmen vs. Dogmen! This is something I've wanted to draw for ages, for no reason other than it would be violent, and cool. It's a titanic struggle of the ages that my dog seems intent on continuing in my back garden. It's time frogs got their own back.

Although this goes unmentioned in the advert, the purple blob in the background is called 'Thangar Void-Eater' and is named after a weird bloke we saw wandering round a convention one year. At the time we were bored out of our minds, suffering badly from stuck-behind-a table-madness and were passing the time by making up fantasy back-stories for the strange people that were walking around. It's probably worth saying he looked nothing like this in reality.

Pretty much the perfect way I'd like to read 2000 AD each week: in a tatty old armchair with tea and biscuits. And gin. The dog is based on Baz, my insane Paterdale Terrier. Also, I don't know if anyone will notice this but Tharg is peering over the fence in the background. I thought about having him stood behind the Squaxx with his hand on his shoulder in a paternal way, but I thought instead I'd make him leer like a sex-pest from behind a hedge.

Various stages of the SalesBot character. I came up with a great pun for his name, and was gonna write it on his head, but I can't for the life of me remember it, so he stays nameless. For now let's call this pink cretin Molch-R.

In the spirit of the advert: Click here to subscribe to 2000 AD - your species depends on you!

Pax Omega (again, sorry)

We sent Al Ewing's Pax Omega off to press this morning. Here is the final cover design and a few spreads from the interior pages, which I spent a bit longer on than I would do normally. On the cover, as well as adding in all the correct copy, I redesigned the spine, and made a ton of small adjustments to the art at the last minute (I couldn't help myself) that I doubt anyone but me will notice...

Time's Arrow: Black Swan. Work-in-progress!

This is an ebook cover I've been working on for Abaddon, the cover for the second volume of Jon Green's Times Arrow. Above is the work-in-progress colouring, which at the moment is just the pencil drawing multiplied over a layer of colour. I'll have to go back and finish this at a later date, but I want the colours to be similar in tone to that of volume one. Below is the thumbnail I drew before starting, and the teaser design I did a while ago for the back of volume one, which owes more to the design of Pax Omega than the usual Pax Britannia style.

This whole project is pretty cool, and a bit of an experiment. Time's Arrow is getting published in three volumes as ebooks, and between the release of each one the readers will be able to vote for what happens in the next installment!
The first part, Times Arrow: Red Handed, is available now, and Black Swan will be on sale in a month or so. 

Find out more here!

CaB

Last year Luke and I worked on several (quite varied) projects for Cab Studios. Below is a selection of some of images I produced for them.

THINK

DO

TEAMSPORT KARTING T-SHIRT CONCEPTS

XMAS CARDS

Judge Dredd vs Zombies!

The Law comes to the iPad and iPhone in the Lawman of the Future's first ever iOS game: Judge Dredd vs. Zombies! 


Even though the 2000 AD Nerve Centre shares an office with the computer games side of Rebellion, I had no real knowledge (other than sneakily glancing at programmers screens whilst wandering around) of the the newly released Judge Dredd vs Zombies, up until about 3 weeks ago - and now I don't seem to have done much else!

I was approached at first to come up with an alternative icon for use on the App Store, as the version the games dudes had been using during production didn't really tell you much about the game. I think it was just a Judge's badge on a blue background or something. They wanted something very simple and very graphic that would suggest both the Dredd and zombie elements, and still be recognizable when reduced in size. The picture below is the first thing I came up with, based on the mask graphic that we use on the Judge Dredd Case Files books.

Image-wise I still think this is kinda cool, but I do agree with the feedback we received from Fuse Powered (who Rebellion were creating the game with) that it doesn't really give the impression of there being a hero in the game, or a versus element. To people not familiar with Dredd it could just be a zombie in an american football helmet or something.

It was suggested instead I do some kind of fight scene with Dredd fighting a horde of the undead. I wasn't so sure about this really - for a start Dredd facing off a horde of zombies is exactly what we were trying to avoid with the first graphic, it's not a graphic anymore its an illustration, plus the minimum size the icon would be displayed at is something like 50x50px, so it would run the risk of being completely unintelligible.

Anyway below are 3 rough pictures I did for this. The top one I spent more time over (too much really, I put loads of pointless detail into the zombie faces), before deciding that it really, really needed to be simplified. I scrapped it and quickly knocked out the other 2 pictures. I did all of these in Adobe Illustrator so it was pretty easy to rearrange the bits.

After seeing these everyone decided that although they kind of liked them as images in their own right, they were far too busy and wouldn't be very clear when reduced in size on the App Store... 

At this point I did what I should have done in the first place and did a very quick page of sketches, then got everyone involved to choose a favourite. Number 5 is the one we went with. Here's the final icon:

Next up is the advert I put together with some help from PR-bot Molch-R for the game that'll be in next weeks 2000 AD (Prog 1763). As I'd kind of set a style for the game at this point I ended up doing all the web banners and itunes store graphics too at the last minute! There was about 35 of them and it was right up to the wire. The game went live today I think, and I only finished them yesterday afternoon!

The only thing left for me now is to play the bloody game! It looks great, but I think I've played it for the grand total of about 15 seconds! If you want to have a go too, here's the link, It's only 69p too.
Would seem tight of me to ask for a complimentary copy?

Double Dead Advertising

Press and web adverts for Double Dead, for 2000 AD and the Abaddon website respectively.

2000 AD/Rebellion Design Stuff

I don't ever really bother putting anything on here about the design work I do at Rebellion, so here's a few of the more interesting things I've done recently. Most of my time day-to-day is taken up with the design and production of 2000 AD, the Megazine, Graphic Novels and the Solaris and Abaddon books, but I always enjoy working on stuff that's a bit different.

First off is the 'manga-sized' Dredd graphic novels we're putting out. 'Manga-sized' actually means 'B' format, which is a pretty standard UK novel size (128x198mm). We did quite a few tests at different sizes to make sure that the speech bubbles where still readable and that the art looks as good as ever, and the B size seems just about right. Personally I would have prefered something slightly squarer so the art fitted larger on the page, but a custom page size would have cost much more to print and defeat the point of the smaller sized books (and would probably have only added 10mm on to the width of the art anyway) so it's a small quibble.
There's quite a few in the pipeline, but I can only show a couple of the covers at the moment. Really excited about them though. Like with the Case Files series it was good to present some classic stories in a new way. We wanted these to looks a bit more book-y than our usual GNs, so as not to immediately alienate people who wouldn't usually want to read a comic on the train or whatever. Hopefully we've done that.
The artwork on both of these editions is by Mick McMahon, definitely one of my favourite Dredd artists. It wasn't a conscious decision to use him on both covers, but his art just fit the space left by the design. I'm hoping to get a decent selection of the other Dredd artists on some of the later volumes.

This is a bit random: A recruitment campaign for Rebellion that's going in Develop Magazine and on their website. Usually jobs like this get banged out in 5 minutes flat as various deadlines are always looming, so it was nice to take a bit more time on one. Considering how much great concept/3D art we have floating round the office it's surprizingly hard to find pictures to use for this kind of thing, as very often any game in production is still top-secret, or licensed from a big company who'd take weeks to approve any artwork - hence these being entirely type-based.

Here are a couple of Judge Dredd 'in-world' logos I did a while ago that haven't been used for anything yet (although watch this space). Tons of stuff I do like this doesn't ever get to see the light of day, so here they are:

Below is a selection of some of the (many) character/story logos I've designed over the years for 2000 AD. The Zombo one is a personal favourite, but I'm happy with the Numbercruncher logo too.

Zombo created by Al Ewing & Henry Flint

Ichabod Azrael created by Rob Williams & Dom Reardon

Numbercruncher created (and owned) by Si Spurrer & PJ Holden

Indigo Prime created by John Smith & Chris Weston

(although this logo gets used on artwork by Edmund Bagwell)

Cursed Earth Koburn created by Gordon Rennie & Carlos Ezquerra

Samizdat Squad created by Arthur Wyatt & Paul Marshall

Lastly are some graphic novel cover designs. The Harlem Heroes book is based on the Team's kit from the story, and the ball and logo are lifted off the interior art. I've no idea who made the original Logo but I think it's great!

The Ichabod Azrael ones are concepts for a US edition to be released in 2012, but it's not yet confirmed and these may not get used. I quite like the block of text though. I did this in the same week as the Rebellion advert above. Can you tell?

I should probably point out that all this stuff is © 2011 Rebellion A/S, apart from Numbercruncher which is © 2011 Simon Spurrier & PJ Holden. It's also aces!