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Thrillpower Overload: the missing chapters

Started by Frank, 21 November, 2016, 01:55:35 PM

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Frank

Quote from: I, Cosh on 04 March, 2017, 07:23:42 AM
Quote from: Steve Green on 26 February, 2017, 07:08:45 PM
The talk of Black Ops has reminded me - Si Spurrier's Domino(?) character is still floating around isn't she? I wonder if they ever thought about using her in Trifecta?

She was mentioned as the source of the Intel in the last Rob Williams story.


All hail The Cosh:




Get Sin (2001), by Williams, Hairsine & Kitson



Frank


I draw tiny diagrams, chopping the page up in different ways. You subdivide it into panels then draw stick figures in each one to represent the characters and where the action's going to be. I try to draw a page every 2 days, so a 5 page 2000ad episode takes 2 weeks.

The name came from mucking around with my friend, John, in History class. I don't know why we found the name D'Israeli so funny, but we did, and for some reason it stuck. John grew up to be a bank manager and I just never grew up at all.











Cheers to JOE SOAP for the link.



Frank


From the Telegraph Sunday Magazine, 1983. Thanks to Supersurfer for the scans:








Frank





1159 featured variant covers. According to Barney: "Not enough (Homeworld) CD-ROMs were produced, so an alternative edition featuring a Mazeworld cover by Arthur Ranson but without the free gift was also printed"

Thanks to Mark Everton.



Frank


Old interview with Jim Murray, containing some interesting background to Die Laughing and Holocaust 12. Try reading it in Nigel Tufnel's voice ...


QuoteBy Benjamin Dickson

When did you first get into Judge Dredd?

I first saw Dredd ages and ages ago, at school I think, but I never really got into them until Judgement on Gotham came out. I thought "Wow, this is what you can do with comics these days!" And then I saw Slaine and stuff, and obviously then I got into Bisley.

It's often been said that you're just a Bisley clone.

Well, yeah, it's a fair comment, because he has been a big influence. But...I think in my defense, I don't actually copy anything he's done at all. It's basically... If you look at it like this, Bisley and Frezzeta taught me how to paint. But I mean, it's just a style thing really.

I think the problem is that Bisley was the first person who used fully painted artwork.

Exactly, so any other artist who's going to come along and do fully painted artwork is going to get labeled as such. So it's not something you can get away from, really. But I have utmost respect for his stuff though, I think he's absolutely brilliant.

There are a lot of other influences in your work – any particular British Comics?

Erm... I don't know really. British artists, maybe. I really like artists like Trevor Hairsine and Frank Quitely, they're great, they can really draw. And obviously Jason Brashill... I mean, Jason's another one who paints stuff who could be called a Bisley clone, but his stuff's so unique...

He has been called a Bisley clone.

Yeah, well I just think that's rubbish, his stuff's totally, totally different.

You worked with him on Die Laughing, of course, painting Glenn Fabry's stuff. What did you think of Glenn's stuff?

Well, he can certainly paint, that's for sure. He's a very good artist. Again, his work's totally different. It's all nicely referenced stuff, all quite realistic, and to my mind, not really suited to comics. More to covers, and stuff like that. So, erm... Yeah, I really like it though.

What did he actually send you to paint over?

He gave us rough biro sketches. Very rough. He just biroed out panel layouts, and we just painted them up from that. Which I think he'd forgive me for saying was quite a job at the time, to decipher what he'd done!

So from page 36 onwards, it was pretty much all you and Jason.

Well, no, I mean we tried to keep it true to how he drew it, because he's definitely got a style of drawing that's all his own. But there's no way we could spend the time that he takes, the effort he takes to paint each panel.

The 2000ad editors must have got pissed off with him taking about a year to paint each page.

[laughs] Well yeah, it took... I don't know, I think he took about 5 years to finish it.

They said that he started it immediately after Judgement on Gotham, as the follow-up. So Glenn took the entire span of your career to do 36 pages, and you illustrated the second half of the follow-up to the comic that got you into comics in the first place!

Yeah, it's bizarre if you think about it! I've never actually looked at it like that before!

I remember you did Holocaust 12 - that was the first story where I really noticed you.

That was the first painted story I did, but looking back on it, there's only a couple of pages that I actually liked in it. But you know, it was a learning process. It's difficult to say really, but I think I got the Batman/Dredd book on the back of that, so that was a result, definitely, but I don't really think it was that impressive. But I was very pleased with the way Die Laughing came out.

Have you ever been censored?

DC sent a few pages back, when I'd gone slightly too gory. And I'd also shown too much of Bruce Wayne, so to speak. But my argument was that I was trying to redress the balance, because I've drawn a few semi-naked women, so I thought maybe I should draw a semi-naked man. But DC are a bit prudish about that kind of thing. I don't know, I might have gone over the top.

Are you sexually aroused by the women you paint?

No! [laughs] I think they're all slightly too muscly for me! But then again, it's mainly been Catwoman in this recent one, and the way I've drawn her, she is kind of butch.

What about Anderson? You had some nice pictures of her in Die Laughing.

That's true. They did censor that though! If you notice, I think the page before last, there's a bizarre word bubble where she's sitting up in bed, and the bubble is covering her arse! But yeah, she's nice! Actually she is one of the only bits of reference I used in the book. She's the model that Steve Sampson uses for Anderson. If you look at his Anderson, you'll see it's the same girl.

So who is she?

Well, if you cut this bit out of the interview ... [snip] ... so it's a bit of a sensitive topic.

http://homepage.eircom.net/~okku/scifi/j_murray.htm

Frank


"Chief Judge Oswin wasn't blonde in the original script: she was brunette, but making her blonde helped to differentiate her from Hershey"





"Because of her, I received my first ever piece of hate mail, in which I was told to 'keep my opinions to myself.' It's a shame that the sender lacked the guts to use his real e-mail address because there is a fascinating debate there, I think: should a writer be held accountable for the opinions of his or her characters?"

Michael Carroll, Forbidden Planet Blog



Frank




Ace art droid Alex Ronald owns the original page from which this panel is taken (Blockmania episode 5, prog 240, by Wagner, Grant & Smith). He reports that Tippex and black ink have been applied to remove the handles and wire of the garotte Orlok's hands were originally clutching.

The censorship is even more obvious in the colour spread of the following episode, where Citizen Lorien Speck is seen writhing in agony for no apparent reason, then lying in a pool of his own ... grey?



Frank


In case anyone missed it, here's a link to the resourceful JOE SOAP sharing some of his treasure trove of the obscure and arcane. This time concerning Kev O'Neill's abortive, creator owned, proto-Marshal Law project, John Pain.

As SOAP points out, this is exactly the kind of lost gold Rebellion should be collecting via the Treasury Of British Comics, ideally in a Kev O'Neill artist edition.

O'Neill told Chris Thompson he's a pack rat, who has held onto most of his original art, so there's every chance he still owns these glorious pages (from my favourite period of his work). Filed under THINGS 2000AD CREATORS DID TO ESCAPE THE SHITTY WORKING PRACTISES OF IPC :






JOE SOAP

There was also a proposed one-shot for Marshal Law supporting character Suicida to be published by BlackBall – which, at the time, was the intended venue for the future of Marshal Law alongside John Pain!

I don't believe this one got scripted and drawn before BlackBall imploded.




maryanddavid

What BlackBall was that in Joe? Great image, not sure Suicida would sustain 32 pages though!

JOE SOAP



It appeared in PREVIEWS Vol. IV No. 5, May 1994.




maryanddavid


Frank


IN ORBIT EVERY SATURDAY, MONDAY, AND WEDNESDAY

Most issues of the galaxy's greatest comic bear cover text claiming to go into orbit on a specific day of the week. Why that specific day of the week, why does that day of the week change over the years, and what does it mean anyway?

The vacillation started early; the first six issues claimed to go into orbit every Saturday, but on the seventh prog the Godfather, Pat Mlls, rested and gave himself the weekend off. Maybe writing/rewriting every story in the comic was getting on top of him

Exhibiting  a concern with the numerological significance of 7 that would thrill both Mills and his fictional avatar, Deadlock, most progs from 7 to 777 announced they went into orbit on a Monday, which sounds much more dreary and bore no relation to when the comic actually hit the shops.

A dodgy Greg Staples cover announced that prog 778 (11 Apr 1992) was once again a roller skating jam that went on sale on Saturday. Bringing the launch forward was possible only because most of the comic was now written either by Alan McKenzie or someone sitting at the next desk.

Like McKenzie's own mayfly tenure in the editor's chair, this second Saturday era wasn't to last. Prog 1000 dropped the pretence that the comic was in orbit, probably because Dave Bishop is a boring bastard (who tried to get rid of Tharg too).

Bishop describes prog 1000 as the issue he chose to stamp his identity on the comic, and these changes signalled that 2000ad was growing with the audience. It was now aimed at the discerning, more mature reader, who thought aliens landed in Roswell and watched Star Trek TNG.

Prog 1234 saw the return of both the 'in orbit' box (Wednesday) and Steve Cook's eighties logo, because the comic had been bought out by two brothers who were fans in the eighties and Andy Diggle was explicitly trying to remind readers of the good old days, reviving the original Rogue Trooper and the VCs, and running strips about cockney geezers and gladiators in space arenas.

Why Wednesday? Because that's when the comic goes on sale in newsagents. Why was it previously Saturday or Monday? The best guess anyone here can make is that they were instructions to retailers, telling them how long to leave an issue on display and when to order new stock.

So the old Saturday/Monday box was for the benefit of the publisher and stockists, Wednesday is mostly a nostalgia trip for middle aged readers (who were always confused by the Monday thing)



AlexF

These days, people who subscribe to the comic get it through their letterbox on Saturdays; the shops start stocking it from the following Wednesday, and people like me, with a digital subscription, can download it from the internet on that day, too.

Given the way that some internet connections rely on satellites, I suppose it is fair to suggest the each new Prog is, somewhat literally, in orbit every Wednesday...

glassstanley

The only exception to subs copies arriving on a Saturday is when there's a strip I'm really looking forward to reading. Then it's a Monday. If I'm really, really keen to read it, it will arrive on a Tuesday.

The post Christmas prog has often reached subscribers soon after the Christmas prog.