Steve Dillon

Just bloody gutted to read this this morning. 

Steve Dillon was one of my early art heroes. Coming into the world of Eagle's second generation return, and then into 2000AD meant that a banquet of inspirtional art was suddenly opened to me after childhood years of rote caricatures and established characters through Disney comics and UK kids' titles. I've not thought until now just how immediate the variety of styles and techniques hit me. There was no way any of these guys - the O'Neil's, Ezquerras, Kennedy's and especially McMahons would ever be mistaken for something from Key Comics. As I got older these stylistic and idiosyncratic outings became more and more intimidating as I vainly tried to copy them and develop my own confidence in drawing.

Cry of the Werewolf

Fortunately, among these artists was a younger name, only eight years older than me, whose style was more relateable. Assured, yes, but solid - really solid, well-defined and very 'readable'. Steve Dillon's  art was easy to aspire to, but reliably more complex than its his clean lines and nice black and white balancing suggested. That said, though, if there's a style that I took to most readily, it was Steve Dillon's. I mean this as no damped-down praise - Dillon was a master of ink, confident in every line, especially given his young age, and I've no doubt that I'm not the only young artist who ran to his deceptively-effortless work as a masterclass (paging Guanolad...)

City of the Damned

The rest, for Dillon at least, is history. Some early Doctor Who Magazine work, initially as a backup artists, but later to provide the work for Steve Parkhouse's last regular story The Moderator in which both Parkhouse and Dillon combine two then near-inconcievable Doctor actions - the Time Lord crying and shooting a gun, and turn the result into something very Doctorish indeed.   Lots of 2000AD, including three of the big hitters in the Eighties - Judge Dredd (the momentous death of series regular Judge Giant is pictured here, from Block Wars), Rogue Trooper and ABC Warriors plus some lovely covers for Zenith), and then, into the Nineties and more recent years, Transatlantic success, the most notable being Preacher, which he co-created with fellow 2000AD alumnus Garth Ennis. His line of stories for The Punisher has already been credited on several comic boards as being the reason some readers returned to the series, Dillon was that effective, that readable.

54 is no great age to depart this earth, though the very young age at which Dillon started his career (drawing Nick Fury and the Hulk at sixteen! And thanks to the keen foresight of Dez Skinn) means there are decades of his work to see, and a mighty field of followers who saw and were inspired by his instantly recognisable style, an who went on to draw for 2000AD, DWM, Marvel and DC. With the late Brett Ewins he co-created the influential breakaway pop-culture comic  Deadline and from that venture we have Peter Milligan, Jamie Hewlett and Tank Girl among others. The comics world has indeed lost a great storyteller.

As others have said already, completely unexpected. Thank God his prodigious start and global success means his talents and influence won't be forgotten.

 RIP.

The Moderator, Doctor Who Magazine