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.

Jim Baikie

As mentioned elsewhere, my entry point into 2000AD prog-wise was the early 300s, and in those initial issues a short-lived strip was begining to wind down.

Skizz, by Alan Moore, was the story of an alien interpreter from Tau Ceti crashing to Earth and evading the Authorities with the help of a local kid. It was E.T, I knew, but I also recognised that Moore had other things to throw into the mix: this wasn't the autumnal suburban hills of California that Interpreter Zhcchz was dragged into, but central Birmingham amid the bleak early 80s winter of Thatcherism, record unemployment and bleak opportunity Its human protagonist is Roxy, a girl - still a newish thing for 2000AD and in retrospect predicting Moore's realisation of the same in Halo Jones.  In short, it's E.T meets Boys from the Blackstuff by way of a little bit of contemporary TV (Philip Sandifer nods towards the likes of Minder and Grange Hill, but therese are minor influences at best), and while the clash of realism and fantasy would recur in the years that followed in the comic, this was the first roll off the slipway, and one of the best-remembered.

Key to me is Moore's script alongside the art of Jim Baikie, whose time at 2000AD was just beginning, Baikie had come from a variety of UK illustration jobs, often working on various licensed products and titles (Monkees, Star Trek, Hammer House of Horror, Look In and Countdown, for which he provided some Doctor Who art) plus forays into TV spin-offs such as Charlie's Angels, The Fall Guy, and more recently, Terrahawks. Like Moore he had a previous association with Warrior magazine, and was imported into Tharg's team from there. Baikie has a pen-based apporach, with  nice heavy brush on shading anfd a flowing approach to his linework. I can see a lot of contemporaries in his work - Jim Burns and Steve Parkhouse in particular. He likely co-created the look of the kangaroo-like Skizz with Moore, but he could do fantasy well enough - although it's the realism in his work which sells Skizz and becomes a recognisable trait in his work. Baikie's humans arent the elongated strips of sinew that Mick McMahon rendered the likes of Dredd and Slaine, nor the beefcake slabs of muscle under Bisley's tenure, but realistic, unexaggerated forms. His Dredd looks harder for this, and importantly for Skizz, his Lol,Roxy, and tragic no-hoper Clarence Cardew look as though they've come off a Birmingham high street - their fates accrus a pathos because of their recognisability.

Outside of Skizz Baikie also turned his hand to Dredd, helping out with the mega epic Oz, and providing some memorable shot stories and one-shots - in particular the three-part Hitman with its loathsome, toad-like human assassin, and the classic In the Bath which features early 90s cranky Joe Dredd doing what he does best... well,that would be telling.

Baikie went beyond the parent comic to work on spin-off Crisis, where he collaborated with John Smith on the action-oriented New Statesman, as well as turning up Stateside for a brief run on Star Wars. The relaunched Eagle magazine saw him team up with fellow Scot John Wagner for their dinosaur romp Bloodfang, which I look forward to covering in a future instalment of Where Eagles Dare.

In the early Nineties he returned to Skizz for the second series as an artist-writer, giving the story a more satirical edge, but the first story remains the superior, and I'd say so because of its more worldly elements. 'Reliable' is an epithet I apply to a lot of artists who turn in just that sort of work - consistent, faithful, relatable, and it's no dismissal agaist the likes of innovative artists like those above. Blaikie's work remained no less recognisable and was always faithful to its subject. Those first few encounters with his work in Skizz made a big impression on me, and no doubt will remain for some time.

Rest in peace, sir.

Jim Baikie 28 February 1940 – 29 December 2017

Where Eagles Dare

So, the season of Doctor Who is now over, and the airwaves from Sofageddon Towers will go quiet until the inevitable swansong of Peter Capaldi at Christmastime.

Or is it?

Actually, it's not! Dave and I have, we must admit, been flagging a bit in our Who fandom of late, and rather than sputter out under the strain of supporting ebbing enthusiasm, we've diversified into comics.

Where Eagles Dare is our brainchild, a look back at the [New] Eagle of the 80s and early 90s, which brought a very boys-own stab at a magazine-styled comic into the age of the latter Cold War, Thatcher, New Romantics, home computers, The A-Team, and god knows what else.

These factors are a point of interest in themselves - because whereas the likes of the splendid 2000AD-themed podcast Space Spinner 2000 have an embarassment of riches to cover the heyday of the late Seventies to late Eighties in that title, poor Eagle probably peaked early, and the following drop was one marked with the dreaded staples of UK comics - mergers, cheaper printing, and reruns of old stock. But we'll see where we go, and as the magazine element of the comic has an eye on the real world, it just might be interesting to cover that, too.

Oh yes - and there are those photo strips, too.

So if you're at all curious, head over to the Sofageddon Wordpress site and give Dave and I a listen!

Where Eagles Dare 1 - The Eagle Has Landed!

Jose Ortiz

On 23rd of December 2013 the world of graphic novels lost Jose Ortiz Moya.

Hombre

 Ortiz was one of the old school of European artists working in Fleetway’s stable in the 70s and through to the 80s, although he did far more than those familiar comics, and even worked with some bigger names, in particular Vampirella and the celebrated post-Apocalyptic series Hombre. A talent for portraying the macabre and desolated landscapes would serve him well, however, with what Fleetway had in mind for him.

Tower King

My introduction to Ortiz’ work was through Eagle and the- yes, post-Apocalyptic Tower King. Set in a modern London after the entire planet has had its electrical power ripped away by a rogue satellite, The Tower King nodded its way to Mad Max and his predecessors, but unlike, say, Damnation Alley or A Boy and his Dog stayed entirely within the city, sensibly taking up the opportunities its slow decay could offer visually – Ortiz’ sketchy style seems perfect for reducing such landmarks as Big Ben’s tower and, of course the Tower of London itself to dusty, matchstick ruin. I love the look of it, and Ortiz renders his hero Mick Tempest like his other leading men - weathered and drawn, sketchy and leathery, toughened by the challenging landscape around them.  Similarly, his turn on companion strip The House of Daemon drew on Ortiz’ skill with horror to produce a truly phantasmagorical strip that, in black and white simple ink, held its own impressively among the comic’s louder photo strips. I relished both Tower King and Daemon, and stuck with them until their equally satisfying conclusions (reliably, scripted by John Wagner and Alan Grant), but as I’ve described earlier on this blog, I didn’t linger with Eagle; my loss, in a way, because it meant that I missed out on the comic’s devouring of ill-fated horror mag Scream and the much-celebrated Thirteenth Floor series, a horror based around a sentient elevator which reunited Ortiz with Grant and Wagner.

House of Daemon

I’d moved to 2000AD, as the story goes, but Ortiz moved with me, providing the initial episode of a Dredd world strip I still harbour a soft spot for, Helltrekkers (Wagner and Grant again, testing the waters early for the Judge Dredd Megazine) and more ambitiously, a stint on Rogue Trooper, which moved the blue-skinned genetic infantryman from Nu Earth to the even more alien world of Horst. Ortiz’s turn (and the larger Horst storyline) isn’t recalled fondly, following as it does such a strong run by the likes of Cam Kennedy and an at-his-peak Brett Ewins, yet Horst’s weird, bestial soldiers based around the forms of bats, lizards and (to a suspiciously Gigeresque end) horseshoe crabs came out the better for being rendered by Jose, I think.

Rogue Trooper

So Ortiz, for an old-school artist, proved an effective bridging artist between my Eagle days and my 2000AD future. His work didn’t have the immediate crazy thrill of a Mick McMahon, Kev O’Neill or Ian Gibson piece (alongside whom he’d feature), nor the clean lines of Brian Bolland and his detractors, but instead alongside other Euro artists like Ezquerra, Massimo Belardinelli and Jesus Redondo, he’d bring in a fluid style that for a while complemented 2000AD’s woozy, weird and ravaged worlds.

It's a style which I miss already.

Strangeness on a Train

I am thirteen, it is the dawn of a new year, and I and am about to set foot on the North Island for the first time.

1983 was the first year I'd left the Mainland, spending a week on Stewart Island for a school trip in Second Form; but this time, for the 10th New Zealand Scout Jamboree, I would be in Fielding for  ten days of outdoor activities, burgeoning testosterone, cold showers, open-air latrines, physical challenges, military catering and some of the worst sunburn of my life.

Scouting for me was a central activity from the ages of around eight through to around eighteen, and being a young simian a lot of my early life experiences involved scouting or variations of it.  There had been an Jamboree at the local racecourse 'round the corner from my house in Oamaru in 1978, so when I was old enough to make the trip myself, it was a no-brainer. I reckon that in our town that summer of 1983-84 was a halcyon period for many parents who, given the choice, could have shipped their boys entering or in that 'difficult age' off to such parts as Fielding, Palmerston North (where my brother went for a Venturers camp), or Mystery Creek in Hamilton (for Boys Brigade. I distinctly recall checking off my backpack contents with my Dad (who hadn't put his teeth in... details...) in our post-Christmas lounge the day before I was to take a chartered train up the east coast, then over to Picton, across Cook Strait to Wellington, then another three hours to Fielding.

The train journey was long. Looong: around 24 hours on the rails with l only two Making of the Return of the Jedi, the first issue of my new comic order from the local bookshop - (I'd ditched Eagle for 2000AD), some preserved ginger (I hated the stuff, but my Gran, assuming the opposite, always made sure I got some for Christmas every year) and a carriage full of adolescent males shouting, wrestling, playing cards and generally stinking the place up to pass the time. It was Lord of the Flies on rails. But, we made it through the night, saw in the new year while  in transit (one of the lads was a Bowie fan and duly played 1984 at the appointed striking of midnight.) By morning we'd reached Picton, boarded the Interisland ferry and carried on over to a quiet and grey looking Wellington - I'd never have thought it would be my future home.

The main event was a hell of a thing - a virtual tent city with seemingly hundreds of camps for individual contingents from all over the Asia Pacific region. It was all pretty chaste stuff, while there were stories that a boy had been stabbed one night on the other side of the camp, I talked and swapped badges with kids from Australia, Canada, the US and the Pacific, left my own contingent for twenty-four hours on an overnight tramp in a nearby forest; and though I dreaded what I took to be an inevitability, in the end I was sad to see the camp's abseiling tower abandoned at the end, unassailed by me. The photos I took from the jamboree are, I presume, long gone, and by memory would have been dull fare indeed - camp sites, Manfield race track (where it was held), and a few other tricked up sites of other scout contingents (Mt Roskill had a banner based on the Return of the Jedi poster which I'd thought was very cool). My memories of the trip and the event are now nudged along by some remaining artifacts - the books I took to read with me, an open air film we watched en masse (weirdly, Battlestar Galactica: Conquest of the Earth) and pop culture snippets (number one at the time: UB40's cover of Red Red Wine, local high flyer - Split Enz's Straight Old Line.) I developed a strange addition to carob bars; and with my fellow troop devised ways to avoid the Roman-styled latrines and the regular wave that would pass under the unwary sitter as it flushed the rows of seats. The showers were something else: open-air, cold water and communal.  My friend Alister managed to brave the boggy entrance to the plywood ablutions block and exited cleanly laundered only to slip arse over kite and land back in the muck again. Ee, but we were 'appy...

So much for scouting and my one and only jamboree experience, but it was an exciting, tiring time, and looking back from thirty years on, a clear disembarking point for some old my pre-high school life (I was so glad to be shot of intermediate school - and frankly, Jedi saw the end of my Star Wars interest) and the hopping-on point for a lot of new stuff and new friends.

So - New Year's Eve 1983, thirty years ago.

The OTHER comic for boys

If you were to ask me what my formative experience with comics was, I'd tell you without blinking that it was 2000AD. And I'd be lying. There were a few comics I read casually before The Galaxy's Greatest. Usually they were one-offs, because I didn't have the pocket money or the stamina (or the town's bookshops didn't seem to have the get-go for sequential ordering?) for a decent run. One or two disparate Star Wars comics, ditto Ghost Rider, and the one success, a two-shot Blade Runner adaptation which I still have. My actual comic collecting however began in 1982, with Eagle magazine.

Eagle is, was, and was again, a time warp. Initially launched in the Fifties and spearheaded by the still iconic Dan Dare, it was rested a year before I was born, and then was resurrected fresh-faced for my teens. Dan Dare was back, alongside a host of new heroes and topical features, and recalling the title now it seems to me that if the original comic was a naive throwback to more innocent times, the comic of choice to the Baden Powell generation, then the revived title arrived just in time to try to recapture that same innocence. Britain was entering the Eighties, a decade that promised pride and prosperity after the fag end and bleak winters of the latter Seventies. The Queen's eldest son had married his future queen in Westminster, Manchester United - the 'red devils' were top of the FA Cup league, and the Falklands War alerted my maturing eyes and mind to the new generation of battlefield technology - Harrier jump jets, Mig Foxbats, infra-red night vision goggles. This was the flavour of the new Eagle, a mission statement of pop stars (Suggs! Easton! Stevens!), celebrity athletes (Coe! Thompson! Dando!), and the various comic guises of Lenny Henry. It was, to a fault, cheerily British, and I lapped it up as I did Noel Edmonds' Late Late Breakfast Show.

The early revival was a bit of a misfire, though. Photostrips - the style usually adopted by girls' Romance comics, was a prevalent style, with drawn strips the poorer sibling, and this was the model for some time, with only Dare in colour (and drawn effectively in the Frank Hampson style by Gerry Emberton) but rubbing shoulders with darker and more intriguing illustrated fare - Doomlord, The London Mad Max-style Tower King, and the grand guignol of Jose Ortiz's artwork in The House of Daemon. Years later I'd see why these stories appealed - while the straightforward adventure of Tower King was by Alan Hebden, a then-2000AD roster writer, the more tongue-in-cheek and visceral Doomlord and Daemon came from the minds of John Wagner and Alan Grant, creators of 2000AD's titanic Judge Dredd and Strontium Dog. Small surprise then that some twenty or so years later the illustrated Doomlord would see an unauthorised fan reprint, as would Wagner's other serial from Eagle's final years and mingling with ill-fated horror comic Scream, The Thirteenth Floor. All of which would be beyond me by those days, as I'd long since abandoned the earnest but ultimately juvenile Eagle and properly discovered Wagner and Grant's superior stomping ground (along with would-be Dare revivalist Pat Mills) in 2000AD. By 1989 I'd abandoned 2000AD, for a few years at least, and the Eagle had crash-landed.

So far as I can tell the revamped Eagle isn't fondly recalled to this day, though the aforementioned strips do get the odd mention on the forums. I've always felt that the title suffered from an identity crisis - too young and establishment to be 2000AD, and not as polished to even equal sometime 'AD rival (and the true home of Strontium Dog) Starlord. And yet, it's where it all began, and perhaps its time will come again.