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!

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!

40k stuff

Kev at work offered to take some photos of my Warhammer 40k models which he saw me painting on my lunch break. Here's the results:

HOPE!

An image of The Mighty One that myself and Mike Molcher came up with the idea for one afternoon at work. It's based on this famous campaign poster for Barack Obama that loads of people have satirized already (You can check some of them out here, my personal favourite is the DOOM one) but it's a really cool bit of art itself.

This is Molcher holding up the enormous (and zarjaz) 4x6' banner we had made for the Bristol Comic Con - hopefully we'll get to do some more stuff with it as well...

*cough* t-shirts!

No Man's World: The Ironclad Prophecy

Finally sent this to press this afternoon, after starting the cover art for the Abaddon 2011 catalogue several months ago. Earlier this week I updated the landscape along the bottom based on a cool scene in the book suggested by Pat Kelleher. I also added some gassy nebula stuff up the one side, blood on the goggles and various other little bits and bobs.

I'm glad I finally got to the deadline on this - I'd have kept endlessly changing it otherwise!

Cover art without text is below, plus the design for the front and back cover of the book and some sketches I drew when designing the Stone Beetle and Jabberwock.

The back cover image is the spacey stuff from the cover, rearranged with all the other elements removed. The Jabberwork ended up being quite small on the cover, and I changed it's body shape anyway, but I still think this sketch of it's head is pretty cool.

Design Led Covers

Some more cover art I've been working on for Solaris, this time a bit more graphic than illustrative. The Regicide is the only one I actually did any real drawing for, but I mucked about with it in Photoshop so much you can hardly tell any more! This cover will probably get tweaked a bit before print as I had to do it quickly for a catalogue, and I'm hoping they'll shell out for a metallic spot colour on the text and maze but we'll see about that...

The other covers are for some books Solaris have the e-publishing rights for by James Lovegrove. They needed doing pretty quickly which is why we chose the style they're in, but its nice to do the whole lot at once and see them all tie together. The top 3 are mine and the bottom 2 where done by Luke the other Solaris designer. All 5 took us about an hour and a half but I think they've turned out well.

Recent Cover Work

I don't seem to have finished anything for ages, but last week the Solaris and Abaddon 2011 catalogue went to press which gave me the kick up the arse I needed to finish a load of covers I've had half finished weeks. Most of these still aren't done 100% finished but they're all getting there.

No Man's World: The Ironclad Prophecy

This is the second book in the No Man's World series by Pat Kelleher. I hadn't even started this til a few days ago so I had to steal a few bits old art to make it look complete. The red landscape at the bottom of the image is the same as book 1 which I'll have to update later but everything else is pretty much there. Despite the hastiness I'm really pleased with it at the moment!

Malory's Knights of Albion

These are covers for the first 2 books in the series. Like the Ironclad cover above I only had a day or two to put The Savage Knight together last week, and I'm very happy with it. This is the only cover here that's totally finished. Book 1, The Black Chalice was a bit more painful. It looks ok now, but I've been mucking around with it for weeks, and I think it's going to end up getting dropped and changed now anyway, mainly due to the strength of the book 2 art. This is fine by me as I spent so long shopping and changing the art I've no idea what to think of it anymore. Book 2 is miles better, so Book 1 needs to be just as good. I 've already started the replacement and its working much better already.

Solaris Rising

Last up is the cover for a new SF anthology from Solaris. Above is the rough mockup for the cover (I might change the text layout) and below that the whole image. I want to scene to wrap around the front onto the spine and back page in the end. This is another cover thats occasionally been a bit difficult. I've really enjoyed doing all the fancy glowing planets and space gas but what's held this cover up is a shuttle I wanted to the foreground. I must have designed and rejected 30 ships and still haven't done one I'm happy with. Now that the backgrounds pretty much done though I'm starting to think it might not even need it, or at least not as big as I first imagined.

The Infernal Game: Ghost Dance

This is the latest cover I've done for the Abaddon Books: Infernal Game series, and is the sequel to Cold Warriors. Not sure about the layout of the cover text yet, but I'm happy with the image. There's an unused alternative I was trying out below too - I wanted to make the 2 book covers match, and keep the main image inside the pentagram but I didn't think it worked very well. The 2 parts, are quite similar in shape and interfered with each other too much so I put the raven behind.