Carlos Ezquerra

Some very sad news to wake to this morning: Carlos Ezquerra has died, after a ten year battle with cancer.

This is a huge blow for UK comics fans, and in particular fans of 2000AD and Judge Dredd. The affectionately-named 'King' CarlosEzquerra can be fairly described as one of the fathers of Dredd, providing the first designs of the future lawman, a mix of Death Race's Frankenstein and Conquistador - fitting for a Spaniard, perhaps. And to me, somehow, Carlos' work evoked a Mediterranean sensibility more than any other artist in Tharg's stable.

Carlos draws himself as one of Tharg's art droids

Ezquerra's work is there from Prog 1, and continued through to 2018, with very few breaks. He was a warhorse, from the likes of Battle (Easy Company) and Starlord (gifting the world of comics the brilliant space western Strontium Dog and its mutant bounty hunter Johnny Alpha), and even ventured to other IPC/Fleetway titles - a brief stint for Eagle, plus Crisis and inevitably the Judge Dredd Megazine. As the ubiquitous Dredd and Strontium Dog artist Ezquerra surely occupies the highest triumvirate alongside Bolland and McMahon. Speedy, prolific, and still eminently collectible, we'll see his work for some time to come.

The phrase 'making it your own' is a cliche, but so applicable to Ezquerra's adaptations. Dredd is such a robust character that he's endured countless interpretations, but despite occasional flirtations with other considerable talents, there's really only been one Strontium Dog artist, and even in prose I can't picture anybody in the role of Harry Harrison's 'Slippery' Jim DiGriz than Carlos' James Coburn lookalike in the Stainless Steel Rat series.


For me, though Ezquerra's  style barely changed, that was its greatest strength. Instantly recognisable, effortlessly consistent, but with a worldly, carnal appeal. His dredd and Alpha are virtually the same cloth - burly and tall, but not ridculously muscly, while his women (vampire bounty hunter Durham Red, femme fatale Angelina DiGriz) are pultritudinous, leggy and unapologetically curvy. Like many of the Dredd artists he delights in grotesques - besides Strontium Dog's colourful cast of mutants, Carlos drew a mean brace of Fatties for Mega City One. Even the robotic Blackblood on a rare outing in ABC Warriors is given an idle killer's pot belly. All with a knowing wink, each consistent and so meaty you could slice them like salami.

I still can't quite get my head around the Dredd mega epics entirely to his name: Apocalypse War, Necropolis, Inferno, Wilderlands - not to mention all those epic Johnny Alpha tales - Portrait of a Mutant, Wanted, The Killing. Phew.

My early collecting of 2000AD can be summed in Ezquerra covers: my earliest 2000AD cover by Carlos: Prog 181 (Johnny Alpha "It's taken my best shot - and it still won't die!), my earliest Dredd cover by Carlos: Prog 245 ("Let the Apocalypse Begin!"), and many more followed, of course. There'll likely be a huge tribute in the pages of 2000AD to come, and in the mean-time heartfelt tributes from the likes of Pat Mills, Karl Urban, and a good number of Thargs and Megazine editors past and present.

The King is dead, but his legacy will live forever.

Fakes Seven

This is the second of three synched blog reviews with Jamas and Al - check them out!

Battle Beyond the Stars (1980)

It is 1980 and I am ten. I have never heard of this movie. In 2014 I finally see it. Can I stop now?

Oh, alright then.Three years after Star Wars borrowed elements of Akira Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress, another 'noted' name of Hollywood sysnonymous with low-budget, profit-making schlockbusters did the same, purloining the master's Seven Samurai - and setting it in space!

Of course, between Kurosawa and Corman there was John Sturges' The Magnificent Seven, and it shold be said that Battle owes much more to the Western version, stealing dialogue and one of its stars - Robert Vaughn playing virtually the same character, as it does. I haven't seen Sturges' film, but I have seen Kurosawa's, and I'm biased, because my ideal sci-fi adaptation of Seven Samurai features robots (the Meknificent Seven) and was written by Pat Mills Tharg.

Corman's robots aren't bad - all disco moves and all, but they're no Hammerstein and company, and so the rest of the movie falls - too many humans in bad makeup, not enough sci-fi spectacle, and a space ship with a really distracting rack.

You have to give props to an actual spaceship to try to upstage Sybil Danning, but the organicaly-designed Nell does - for the most part, helped along by the very very thin character given Danning's Valkyrie, secreted somewhere between her Thor-lite costume and increasing innuendo. Seriously - Google will provide what I won't: fill your boots.

Our hero is Richard 'John-Boy' Thomas and a rag-tag bunch of desperadoes - the aforementioned Vaughan (taciturn gunslinger - nice idea, but phoning it in), Danning (The Howling II is only five years away!) and an affable George Peppard as an actual space cowboy ("I'm from Earth - ever heard of it?") alongside some nice but frankly squandered ideas - a female robot technician who technicians no robots, Nestor the gestalt entity who has a really nice jellyfish-like spaceship, and Cayman - a lizardman who is the last of his kind (awww.)

All have reasons valid and spurious to off chief baddie Sador, a limb-replacing, shiny-faced megalomaniac who farms civilisations, destroys planets and never leaves his ship (maybe he's in another movie? I wouldn't put it past Corman.) Honestly - would it have hurt Corman to actually have a end-level fight with the big bad and the hero on their feet and properly duking it out rather than all these interminable dogfight scenes? I don't care if they were the work of James Cameron - this is one of many wasted opportunities!

I'll draw this thing up. I'm glad I've finally seen Battle Beyond the Stars, but I fear a year of film studies and The Galaxy's Greatest Comic may have spoiled the novelty for me. This movie is just too contrived and cheap - its spaceships made from butchered Star Wars models, its dialogue lifted from another movie. As it turned out, I do believe I have seen this movie - or bits of it at least, aged fourteen watching the daggy ends of Tom Hanks opus Bachelor Party, where segments feature as part of a 3-D movie at the film's climax (still my favourite part of the movie - both movies!) Had I seen this aged ten, chances are my memories would be as fond or at least as vivid as those I have of The Black Hole. But at fourty-four I'm officially Getting Too Old For This Sh*t. And that's my review of Battle Beyond the Stars by Roger Corman.

RIP Brett Ewins

Strange Days - Ewins channels Tenniel

I was very much saddened to hear of the passing of UK comics artists Brett Ewins earlier this week.

Ewins was at his height in the pages of 2000AD just as I began to take notice of it and started collecting. Through the middle era of Rogue Trooper and then on to memorable stints on Judge Dredd and its spin-off Anderson PSI Division, Ewins’ work was rarely out of the mag for long, and in time he’d notch up another well-loved series to his belt, the quite brilliant Bad Company.

His work made an immediate impression on me, for various reasons. It was recognisable, reliable, and easy on the eye – you could admire the brilliance of artists like Mick McMahon or Carlos Ezquerra, the robust meatiness of Cam Kennedy’s brushwork or the precise lines of Brian Bolland, but Ewins seemed more accessible to the illustrator in training. This isn’t to say his work was the less, or not as sophisticated than his stable mates, but to a degree – and in particular in Ewins’ middle era of the mid-Eighties in 2000AD, there’s the ability to anatomise his work; he paints with a heavy brush, all elements on the page readily-identifiable components; his work, while dynamic and obviously influenced by US comics artists, had a layered arrangement which was easier for me to pick apart and see how he’d put everything together. To this day McMahon at his height, and Kevin O’Neill with him, seem to defy compositional analysis on my part – some panels are brilliant messes – orgies of limbs and skewed planes, but Ewins’ work, which became crisper and more stylised over time, was a great lead-in to the world of illustration. I’d say that his work, alongside his colleague and friend Steve Dillon, was the style I most frequently looked to in developing my own meagre talents.

Judge Gellar, one of three Ewins covers for HoSH9

Personal favourites of mine seem to echo those of a lot of others from Ewins' portfolio – the psionic thriller The Haunting of Sector House 9 is regarded as a bit of a throwaway Dredd story, but it introduced some great characters in PSI Chief Judge Omar, and my favourite male PSI Judge the never-seen-again Judge Gellar, whose half-head of hair standing on end made for such an attractive prog cover. Maybe it was the fact that for such a short story Ewins provided no fewer than three covers for Sector House, but it with its spectral terrors, heavy line work and fun script, it was an early highlight in my collection.

The Possessed - Ewins channels Polanski!

Ewins also seemed the natural successor to Bolland in depicting Judge Anderson – other reliable hands like Cliff Robinson and Robin Smith had drawn her, too, but Ewins’ outing on the classic The Possessed cements the Eighties Anderson entirely – all bubblegum curves and Debbie Harry hair combined. Added to that his off-the-leash body horror panels and quirky design choices (Exorcist Judges!) made for a really fun strip. That same approach to the phantasmagorical led to Ewins and past co-creators Jim McCarthy and Pete Milligan working on the mad and memorable Bad Company, a SF Vietnam allegory on a heaving alien jungle world detailing the descent of a band of misfit soldiers into hell, led by their Karloffian sergeant Kano.

Looking back, I think Bad Company was Brett Ewins' peak at The Galaxy's Greatest Comic; despite being the first artist to draw ABC Warriors' Deadlock in strip form, despite Ewins' involvement in Dredd's The Day the Law Died, and visualising the Wally Squad, perhaps it's the unity of having one artistic team in  Ewins and McCarthy that makes the later series the most visually memorable.

After Bad Company came Deadline, Ewins' own title with Steve Dillon which introduced readers to Jamie Hewitt and combined Ewins' two loves of music and comics, being the mature readers' pop culture magazine that 2000AD couldn't yet manage to be. Though short-lived and seemingly doomed by the fate of its greatest character's movie adaptation, Deadline gave the world Tank Girl, and arguably in Ewins and Dillon Tank Girl has two godfathers.

Unfortunately the pressure of real-life deadlines and multiple commitments seem to have had a deleterious effect on Ewins' mental health, and as commissions suffered and dried up, the artist went into a long period of illness against which he fought to the endwhich contributed to his all-but disappearing from the industry. I remember seeing his work in 2000AD around 1992 - pretty much the last work he did for the title, and how it had diminished, becoming even more stylised, less textured, relying on tricks like duplicate panels and close ups, seemingly to cut corners - the whole effect was only increased by the early, flat computer colouring of the time. Not knowing the story behind the pictures, I was perhaps too dismissive. 

Like a blue Wendy O Williams: Venus Bluegenes

There's still a huge amount I love about Ewins' work for 2000AD. Much of it is of its time, a sort of Eighties Noir with Dutch angles and swimming in shadow. Also, it was a rare thing to see in the early years of 2000AD, but Ewins was  an artist unafraid to embrace the, er, 'cheesecake', and I'd be lying if I didn't say that his Anderson and Rogue Trooper's femme fatale Venus Bluegenes made a discreet impact on my flowering adolescence. I still reckon Ewins drew Venus best.

I hope we'll see a decent Ewins collection from Rebellion Publishing in time. For me, he is the epitome of the comic in the Eighties.

A Box of Progs

My trip down south coincides with the clearing of my Dad's place, and with it (somewhat inevitably), some rediscoveries of old, long-thought disappeared treasures. I've found quite a few now, but chief among them has to be my collection of early 2000ADs. Hooray!!! Every home visit for maybe the last ten years has been frustrated by me not being able to find two large cardboard boxes of issues (or 'progs' to use the magazine's own futuristic vernacular), but this month with what seemed the last ever attempt to find them by hand, they let their hidden presence be known.

As expected, and then some more, these boxes have turned out to be as much a time capsule as my own juvenilia. A friend once went into a virtual state of mourning after our flat was burgled and he lost his entire music cassette collection; his reasoning being that among those often redundant and patchy collections of albums and dubs he could name the times he first heard certain songs, the places he'd visited or the mood he was in. The act of consuming media is a weird two-way street sometimes; it seems to me that the more vivid or visceral the experience of reading or listening, watching... is, the more that experience takes in and 'records' other experience around it as an unconscious contextual backdrop. And so in that regard I've memories of when I first read in the pages of my progs the series Helltrekkers, discovered the histories of the various 80s ABC Warriors,  got into Slaine (on a train, as it turned out), followed Dredd and Anderson through the City of the Damned, had my mind blown by the likes of Pat Mills and Kev O'Neill in Nemesis the Warlock and Metalzoic. It's all there, and flowers like fireworks in my brain when I open those pages again after twenty-five to thirty years of simply getting on with life. It's remarkable.

My boxed progs are only part of my collection - it's not complete, but may now number over a thousand, and the process of integrating these old issues (I've only brought up around thirty so far) with my collection here will be a slow but interesting one. I've been selective with the ones I've brought up - two boxes, one of my earliest progs (I think Prog 180 might be the oldest of them?), and another of a selected run comprising the aforementioned Helltrekkers, some of Bryan Talbot's stint on Nemesis, and all of Metalzoic (on which I'll post soon). Of course, the issues I left behind will eventually make their way here (fingers crossed). In them is the end of my 80s infatuation with 2000AD, petering out somewhere past Prog 500 and, as it seemed to me, the end of the magazine's early golden age and its short transformation from adventure comic for boys into ephemeral accessory of the Acid House set. I did reacquaint myself with 2000AD during my Uni years, and those progs are also at home, but the prospect of having all of these issues together at last (still incomplete, I must stress) is an exciting one. Happy times and places in every issue, and, of course, the stuff of Jetsam.

Reissue, Repackage - The Meknificent Seven

And now, for a change, something I actually DID throw out. Well okay, I replaced it, and the story goes a little something like this:

Here is the earliest edition of the collected strips of 2000AD's original series of ABC Warriors, bringing together the escapades of this rag-tag™ unit of war robots on Mars, created and written by Pat Mills and illustrated by a slavering roster of future heavyweights of the UK scene - I'm talking Gibbons, O'Neill, Ezquerra, Brendan McCarthy and of course Mick McMahon, who provided the gorgeous cover illustration for this imprint by early 200AD licencees Titan. Inside are all of the Mars stories written by Mills, plus an introductory strip by Mills and Kevin O'Neill, like the cover, produced exclusively for this collection. Years passed and this imprint was discontinued. I saw it as recently as a couple of years ago in Graphic in Cuba Street - shame I didn't pick it up then.

After Rebellion purchased 2000AD they went into their own reprinting venture, and started things off modestly. The reproductions are pretty good, although suffer from some downscaling due to the original comic's page dimensions not being A4 compatible. This (left) is the cover of their initial run of The Meknificent Seven. The cover is by future ABC art droid Kev Walker in a post-Simon Bisley painterly style. Walker produced vibrant and consistent work during his long tenure on the strip, but the choice of illustration - itself a very post Black Hole era design, is Awl Rong. It's ABC leader Hammerstein, which is fine, but it's a nineties redesign of the robot, doesn't sell the crucial image of the ABCs as a team, and it seems like an afterthought to provide some sort of continuity with the later reprints of the colour strips. I wonder whether the original reprint was a Titan-owned piece, which might explain its absence along with the dedicated introductory strip? Apart from setting the template for future ABC reprints, this is the least-collectable version, and it's the one I replaced as soon as I could (sorry Dave, to whom I gave it to). Moving on…

Here is Rebellion's second stab at the reprint, produced last year. It's a gorgeous cover - not the McMahon commission of course, but it is a reproduction of a contemporary 2000AD cover by the artist in question, and it's just what it should be - all seven Warriors in colour, retro-coloured to fit the Seventies era style. The contents are a step up too - the Titan strips have been included, Pat does a foreword (this aligns the volume with the others in the series published between editions), and as volume two, the aforementioned The Black Hole by Mills and Bisley/SMS is also in black and white, the first recap chapter of that strip is included as a taster. I was deid chuffed when I got this and didn't regret my purchase. The only way it could have been better to my mind would have been reprinting the original gatefold pages from 2000AD in colour, and perhaps included the Steve 'Preacher' Dillon-inked 1985 Annual story Red Planet Blues. As this wasn't written by Mills but by some guy called Alan Moore however, I could understand why Rebellion might have omitted it.

It's now 2010 and Rebellion are keen to have another poke at the US market. Onward to a new edition of The Meknificent Seven! Spine-wise this ties in with the existing collection, although the cover is a radical redesign - a pretty slick composite of a panel of Gibbon's work within, and it looks cool, but not as cool as the Titan original. Inside what do we have? An introduction by Pat, the Titan strip plus single-page strips for the core five Warriors used in their 80s return, the Black Hole teaser is back in its own volume where it belongs and in colour… Red Planet Blues.

I think I know what they might select for the next reprint now.

…

Mongrol smush greedy publishers!!!