Do some artists get worse, or am I an old reactionary?

[Dudley]

Man that is GOOD!  I may have to take back some (seemingly ill-judged) comments about McMahon, after all...

[Oddboy]

The diggers are good, granted - but the people just *irk* are wrong!

[The Enigmatic Dr X]

Nonsense. The man is clearly drawing with a ruler. Since when did people have such oddly proportioned bodies? Compare this to his Cursed Earth stuff to see how far the mighty has fallen.

[+rufus+]

Hardly Dr X, Mick's always done crazy anatomy! That's why other artists rate him so highly. I hope he does do Heavy Plant, if he finds the time.
Comics is all the poorer for his working in games.
I've got pages and pages of sketches by Mick, I'll start scanning them and work out how to stick em in the original art section. I'll also scan Muto Maniacs Originals, absolutely beautiful!
 Mick's handling of volume and proportion is unparalled. I know alot of people just see the surface 'cartoony' finish, ( his older style everyone now harks back to so fondly was derided as scrappy and rushed by fans then) but his use of space, character and volume really is mind boggling.
I'm a fan because he's an artist that makes you think and question how you perceive things.
Rufus

[Noisybast]

See, now that's McMahon actually putting some effort into his work. I like it. Contrast that with some of his latter-day Dredd stuff. Doesn't compare well, does it?

[+rufus+]

Errr...again, the last Dredd he did was really nice. I'll scan it.
R

[Leigh S]

"his use of space, character and volume really is mind boggling."

Can't improve on that really - McMahons work is totally "unnatural" looking, yet the most 'real' looking art you can get - those images, freaky as they are, look as if they could walk of the page!  Those images look a lot more solid and believable than even the best rendered Bolland piece, AND achieve a completely unreal look at the same time - Perfection

[-=>DEMONIZER<=-]

Yes Esquerra's new computerised-approach sticks out like a sore thumb.

He is also prone to the odd blunder, such as Dredd's non-existent arm in a recent story.

Still, a top Dredd artist for a while yet I think.

[petemaskreplica]

This is the introduction from the old "Judge Dredd 2" Titan reprint book that collected a load of McMahon's Dredds...

"Why does Mike McMahon give Judge Dredd such big feet?" It's a very familiar question. All over the country young people are wringing their hands and shaking their heads at the size of Mike's 'feet'. It was at a comic convention that I saw one soul grinding his teeth and showing all the signs of this particular anguish common in so many of his contemporaries; so I told him he ought to ask the man himself, which he did?

Mike McMahon came out of obscurity in early 1977 to start his professional career with the first ever public appearance of Judge Dredd. His drawing style, at first only partially formed, was an imitation of the artist who co-created Dredd, Carlos Sanchez Ezquerra. Carlos pulled out of the series early on, but here was a fresh new artist named McMahon who could do a reasonable Carlos impersonation. I wandered into the 2000 A.D. office soon afterwards and couldn't get anybody to talk to me, and the reason was that six pages of artwork had just arrived from Colney Heath. It was The Return of Rico story which appears in this book. A choice piece of Pat Mills' writing had inspired some very tasty Mike McMahon artwork and to this day a lump comes into the throat of those of us old enough to remember it.
Around this time a style emerged that, throughout his work on Dredd, and even now, is still developing and changing while remaining instantly recognisable. It's hard to explain what's so good about this work when I can see so clearly what the unconverted might find disagreeable. The lines appear to be slapdash; often the anatomy goes out the window; I personally often find the overall texture of the pages a bit uniform; and as for those feet? weeell!

Allow me to pull the veil from before your eyes. Mike sweats and slaves over his pencils, often spending over a day on one panel, occasionally throwing yesterday's work in the bin and starting again? and the result is exquisite, precise and delicate (yup, delicate ) pencilled pages, with lines so faint they never have to be erased after inking. Then, with everything worked out, ON GOES THE INK! Or if this is full-colour artwork, out comes the plastic raincoat and the bog-roll and ON GOES THE WATERCOLOUR! The latter processes taking hours rather than days. This is known in the Art trade as "Expressionism", and has the effect of making artwork look fresh, and alive, and un-stodgy? but it can also make it look deceptively simple.
There's some pretty weird draughtmanship in there too, but Mike has created his own personal vision and everything in it is correct according to its own rules, and in so doing he creates people, places and situations that are more recognisably real. People are never seen standing chest out, legs four feet apart. They stand as you or I would stand, weighed down by the world, fed-up. For all their weird clothing they are people less recognisable from comic books than from 70s and 80s London. Take a good look at Dredd. Some say he's a very straight-forward character, but with his face looking like a slab of raw meat, and those feet, he's a very complex and contradictory character. He's heroic and macho, he sneers and postures, but the joke is on him because he doesn't know that he looks ridiculous. In fact the joke is on some readers too, because they fail to see the fine balancing act between straight adventure and the comic satire that's always present in a Dredd story, and at its best under the team of Wagner and McMahon.

Mike won't approve of this blurb. He's a nononsense type, like the people who populate his pages. He disagrees with intellectualising about comics; in fact the word is that he secretly believes that if he spends his time analysing and discussing his work, or even using reference, it'll spoil the direct act of drawing comics and the simple pleasure of reading them. Well, I'll go along with that, but don't be fooled reader, for what you'll see in the following pages is a great deal of subtle wit and imagination.

Oh, and before I forget, the official word from McMahon himself is: "Dredd doesn't have big FEET... he has big BOOTS!"
Brian Bolland. London. December 1982.



'Nuff said. :)

[-=>DEMONIZER<=-]

Yet they are tight, so he must have big feet!

[petemaskreplica]

well, that was written before Dredd got tight boots. You'll notice McMahon draws him with smaller boots these days ;)

[Bolt-01]

Bart, that is very nice. a lovely homage to Ol' Red eyes.

Bolt-01

[Noisybast]

Maybe I've just missed the good stuff of late. I seem to recall a few Dredd's that looked like they were drawn in about five minutes with a set of chunky markers.

However, I'm more than willing to stand corrected, Rufus. :)

[steev.]

Yeah i thought his last dredd was fantastic,
I really like his recent work,
I'm just reading Tattered Banners,
he's one of those artists whose work is genuinely exciting.

steve.

[Noisybast]

OK - I've checked. I was referring specifically to "Future Crimes" in Prog 2000. Utter pants.

Granted, his work in "Doomsday" was better, but still not a patch on his early work (or on this new, non-2KAD stuff).