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[MICHAEL MOLCHER]

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The 2000ad Thrillcast Remembering Steve Dillon November 01, 2016 09:00 PM

MICHAEL MOLCHER: There was the work he did on Harlem Heroes and also Rogue Trooper, where he was inked by Kev Walker. Was that a consequence of him being in such demand he couldn't ink his own work?

RICHARD BURTON: Yes, yes. We didn't encourage that, that was the American way of doing things. We much preferred our artists to be in total control of their work.


Episode 1 of The Hit (prog 520)




Final episode of The Hit 3 (prog 603, Cinnabar followed in prog 624):




Heavy influence of Dillon's neighbour, Brendan McCarthy, in the weight and quality of line on that second page.

I can't think of another example of an artist inking someone else's work around that time, other than deadline pressures. Talbot helped Fabry out on an episode of Time Killer and (much earlier) Garry Leach went over Bolland's pencils on The Day The Law Died.

Ewins* and McCarthy had a much looser relationship, swapping pages and individual panels in the pub, but Mark Farmer and Mike Collins were the only duo I know of (sometimes) working on the US model of penciller and inker during that period.


* Who Dillon collaborated with on Skreemer

Speaking of supposition disguised as fact, why did you say Steve MacManus assigned Kev Walker to Cinnabar, when that story debuted in 1989 - 2 years after Burton had replaced MacManus?

What I thought was contrary about your reply was that there's no contradiction between an editor framing an offer of inking work to Walker as an opportunity to learn from an experienced artist and that editor also thinking Dillon's finishing had suffered due to the change from brush to marker pens and the demands on his time from running/contributing to Deadline.

[black]

Trying an experiment: "black".

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[defunct]

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Robot Wars - Call Me Kenneth (defunct)

Luna-1 - Mr Moonie (cube)

Cursed Earth - various (mostly dead)

The Day The Law Died - Judge Cal (pavement pizza)

Judge Death - (fool, you cannot kill what does not live)

The Judge Child - Owen Krysler (dead)

Judge Death Lives - Dark Judges (undead)

Blockmania - Orlok (dead)

The Apocalypse War - Kazan/East Meg 1 (all dead)

City Of The Damned - Owen Krysler/The Mutant (dead)

Oz - Morton Judd/Judda/Chopper (dead/all dead/respected)

Necropolis - Dark Judges/Sisters Of Death/Kraken (dead and loving it)

Judgement Day - Sabbat (inactive)

Wilderlands - Mechanismo robot (discontinued), Justice Department conspirators (dead)

Inferno - Grice (roadkill)

The Pit - Bongo dude (cube)

Doomsday - Nero Narcos/Remnants of East Meg 1 (dead/wet)

The Hunting Party - spiders and sharks (dead)

Sin City - Orlok (dead)

Total War - (dead/exile)

Origins - Bad Bob Booth (dead)

Tour Of Duty - Sinfield/PJ Maybe (in a bad way/dead)

Day Of Chaos - Borisenko/East Meg 2 (dead/at bay)

Trifecta - Bachmann (dead)

Every Empire Falls - Oswin/Texas City (dead/subjugated)

Loved Emond's design of Accident Man which is how I always associate him as looking

I love the energy, expressiveness and humour of Martin Edmond's art, but I can't see the costume designer putting their leading man in a green catsuit and white sports socks.

They're using the girlfriend in a fridge element of the story Edmond illustrated, but they'll probably go with the Armani and Lambourghini aesthetic of the Mighten era*. I haven't seen anything else the director has done.


* Bond, basically

[still]

Destiny's Angels was my first Dredd story so it is objectively the second best one ever.

Can't you see that prog 511's The Beating Heart was the innovative and inspirational story that took the strip in an entirely new direction, which has continued for nigh-on thirty years?

Some readers insist it's a lazy Edgar Allan Poe rip-off, and that you can see Steve Dillon starting to dial down the detail (which would lead Tharg to pair him with Kev Walker as inker on Cinnabar and Harlem Heroes), but they're crazy as loons.

The crash opening meant certain readers were never sure if they'd missed a previous episode (even though it says PART 1 right there at the top of the page) and still have to check before typing this post.

[these]

The best Mean Angel story of the last 37 years is the one where Wagner retired him for good.

I've a lot of time for 'Travels with muh Shrink'

It was a romp!

Destiny's Angel, Son Of Mean, Merry Tale Of The Christmas Angel - they're all enjoyable stuff, but if you'd sat in Tharg's office in 1982 and said 'I want to bring a character back from the grave in quite an unlikely way, but it will be worth it because these are the stories I'm going to tell', the Mighty One would probably have asked if you had any other ideas.

Regarding Richard Dolan, if you know the story of any one of the talented painters who worked for Tharg in the nineties but don't anymore, you can write them all: http://richypickle.blogspot.co.uk/

[Mean is a great character]

Lets not forget Mean Machine.

Great example of why it's best to let Dredd shoot people.

The strip's historians cite Mean as an example of the problem of Dredd's shoot to kill policy, but it's not as if TB Grover did anything remarkable with him once the baldy kid brought him back.

Mean is a great character*, but his post-post mortem stories are great examples of the increasingly desperate measures writers take to keep members of a rogues gallery returning.

The best Mean Angel story of the last 37 years is the one where Wagner retired him for good.



* He looks great and his 'nobody tells me to ____ lessen I sez they can' schtick is just always funny

Which enemy/enemies haven't been in the comics so much?

Dredd doesn't really have enemies; he kills people.

Wagner 3 - Mills 1.

I thought it was an interesting coincidence that this guy and the actress who played the chief judge in the 2012 film both appeared in Holby, but every actor in the UK must have appeared in Holby by now. Johnny Alpha will be played by Charlie from Casualty.

Accident Man is a great idea for a film, sadly it's already been a great idea for a film on at least three separate occassions.

[does]

Can't think of any other obvious examples.   

Tootsie roll puts her head round the door wearing nothing but her boyf's shirt and all Dredd does is ask Rico where he's getting his cash from*? No wonder Dredd thought Fargo overreacted to his relationship with Sequenta Tells.


* ... and senior management are only worried about Rico's bodycount. Dredd does say standards had slipped at that time.

(Burton) should surely own up to some of the blame for the travesty of the RoboHunter reboot ... I applaud his policy of deliberately putting in strips for under 12s (Junker, Night/Beyond/Below Zero etc) to counterbalance the more grown up Shamballas and Hewligan's haircuts

Maybe Burton and McKenzie should read (Thrillpower Overload) before dismissing it?

To be fair, Burton is only responding to questions put to him by readers ... who tell him their cheeky enquiries were inspired by something they read in Thrillpower Overload*.

The all-ages thing is interesting; the idea that he was bringing on new, young readers doesn't really square with the drop in readers from 100,000 to 50,000 over the 8 years of Burton/McKenzie or his acknowledgement that kids stopped reading comics.

These interviews have allowed me to make peace with the Burton era - he's a lovely man who had a series of lovely jobs at a lovely time to work in publishing, commissioning a lot of work from lovely people**. That lots of that work wasn't very good doesn't seem to trouble his memories, and I feel rotten for puncturing his bubble even a little.


* I believe this is genuinely the first suggestion Burton's heard that his time as Tharg was anything other than an unqualified success. Vague reference to Garth Ennis's criticism of Burton and McKenzie was met with a puzzled request for evidence of these sentiments ... followed by stunned silence.

** Some of whom went on to do much better work than the stuff he got out of them

[Mister Maybe]

If being a judge for a spell gave him the opportunity to cock an outrageous snook or cement his reputation as the mass-murderer's mass-murderer, (Maybe would) be squeezing into those regulation Emphatically Yess's in a flash

Attitude, physicality and adherence ... to procedural information and automatic actions in an almost reflex manner has given away a large amount of Jimps very quickly indeed. It is debatable in the extreme if even PJ would last more than a few hours.

Mister Maybe manage to infiltrate the SJS, abducts a powerful Psi-Judge and makes contact with the Dark Judges to make a deal. Does that sound too infeasible?

That's Ms Maybe. PJ Maybe's dead, so the plan above isn't very feasible [1].

I assumed you were asking if Maybe might have cheated the executioner's bullet (and frag grenade) by swapping places with a judge. As Z points out, it's difficult to pass as MCJD for any length of time [2], but I take TordelBack's point that Maybe might be able to keep it in his pants long enough to pull off something spectacular.

I'll now pay extra attention to whether Hershey has grown an Adam's apple, or is dressing to the left.
 

[1] PJ already met and parlayed with the Dark Judges at the end of Day Of Chaos/start of Dark Justice, so you don't have to invent contact between them.

[2] Hitman 571-573

(PJ Maybe)  passed himself off as the mayor for a few years

He enjoyed wielding power as Mayor, but it's difficult to see why Maybe would want to get himself into a position where he couldn't have sex or live the good life. Those are pretty much what PJ lived (and killed) for, and judges can't do them at all.

Maybe had such easy access to Chief Judge Sinfield he was almost able to kill him. If Janet had craved the Chief Judge's chair, he could have murdered Sinfield there and then, swapped faces, and walked out the meeting as Martin Sinfield.

He lived as Don Pedro in Cuidad Barranquila, where his wealth would have bought him any position in their version of Justice Deapartment he wanted. Never showed any interest. I did think he was going to use his resemblance to Judge Corrigan* to dodge his date with Dredd, but that didn't turn out to be the case.


* See Ladykiller (1993-1998)