No. 132 Tiernen Trevallion

First Prog: 1533

Latest Prog: 2210

First Meg: 289

Latest Meg: 399

Total appearances: 86 and counting

 

Creator credits:

Strange Brigade*

Absalom – the series and most of its cast, if not the central character.

Other art credits:

Judge Dredd

Absalom

Fiends of the (Western/Eastern) Front

Various one-offs

Notable character creations:

Sgt Jimmy Sangster

Sangster (named after one of the better screenwriters from Hammer Films) is the beefy lad bursting out of his jacket.
Words by Gordon Rennie

Daniel, the South London parkour champ. (Or however one ought to refer to him)

Trevallion likes to show Daniel in super cool poses as often as he can. He's a cool dude.
Words by Gordon Rennie

Notable characteristics:

Eyelids. There’s something about the way Trevallion draws the lines that demarcate his characters’ eyes that I find really distinctive.

It's especially the lines just above the eyelashes, but beneath the eyebrows.
Don't know the anatomical name for that.

He draws some of the best tear ducts in the business.
Words by Gordon Rennie

He’s also quite into thin lines, and, perhaps in tandem with that, he’s good on spindly characters…

His name is Mr. Critch. It fits.
Context by Gordon Rennie

…or bulky characters whose bulk is often highlighted by sticking them in suits that are a little too small for them.

I miss the contrast of nattily-dressed Dexter and scruffy lived-in Sinister.

Dare I suggest he carries a hint of the Mike Mignolas about his work..?

Just a beautiful panel that presents a menacing clockpunk demon creature who has ill intent.
Not nearly so easy as he makes it look! 

And as with a lot of 2000AD greats he can really get you into the head of a character, especially one with a single-minded agenda.

Again, Trevallion makes it look much easier than it is to render a character.
Here, that means ugly angry mob lady.
Words by Al Ewing

He's also an exceptional artist to convey a sense of place, chiefly London, which he's shown both in the past:

and the more-or-less present:

1970s at the top, 2010s at the bottom, and both reek of London.
Words by Gordon Rennie

On Tiernen:

Time for another hero who feels deeply, unapologetically new. This is just a function of me being a 30-year Squaxx, because Trevallion has been in Tharg’s employ for more than a decade, and for much of that on one popular ongoing series, as well as banging out some pretty high profile Dredd outings. His era is marked out, in one fashion, in that he’s been used in both Prog and Meg fairly interchangeably, a result no doubt of editor Matt Smith being in charge of both publications. This is also one of those ‘new/not new’ phenomena!

Anyway, what about the art? I suppose the trick for a lot of 2000AD hopefuls is not just to be good, especially at drawing weird things – which early Trevallion undoubtedly was, whether in scratchy pencils:

I do like an artist who draws lots and lots of little lines.
Words by Jaspre Bark

…or full lurid inks:

A neat contrast of super-detailed with stark chiaroscuro.
Words by Al Ewing

you also need to land on a series that matches your talents. Trumps came up twice for Trevallion.

Thus he was tapped to bring back new (that pesky word again!) Dredd villain Ratfink in the pages of the Megazine, chanelling his inner Pete Doherty:

More beautiful set design. Who doesn't love a severed head with nails in it?
Words by Alan Grant

And of course, to bring back the world of Caballistics, Inc through protagonist Inspector Harry Absolam – now rechristened Absalom, channeling hints of Dom Reardon.

 

Let’s consider Ratfink’s Revenge first (although it did come later). Gosh it’s nasty. Superlatively so. Not much for me to say about it, it's better conveyed through some pictures of the leering, horrid face of Ratfink.

Trevallion dials down the sexual horror of Doherty's Ratfink, but dials up the general grossness
Words by Alan Grant

And this is just cute (horrible) fun (nastiness)
Words by Alan Grant

 

Trevallion's main event really is Absalom, a proper recurring series with a middle, more middle, and just recently an honest-to-goodness ending. And goodness is the word, with Rennie putting in the effort to play some narrative tricks on us, allowing Trevallion to spread his wings with demonic weirdness alongside emotional character beats and, of course, some dreamlike closure for our hero.

Absalom's dream palace is a British seaside postcard in the pre-woke era.
Words by Gordon Rennie

Artistically, Trevallion surely has as much fun as Rennie in drawing panel after panel of our Harry being an exact mix of confident, world-weary and just plain fed up.

Absalom chides a perp

Absalom gets one over on his own shadow

Absalom reminiscing

Not to mention, delivering on fight scenes between human, half-humans, and goodness-knows-what, which mix means it’s always just a little bit funny, even when the details are in fact rather nasty.

Such as satisfying punch-in-the-face panel, you can really hear the cogs coming apart. 

Sometimes you just wanna keep it simple with a sword through the face.

In amongst all the Absalom, Trevallion knocked out a few more Dredds. Once again, there’s ample room for the humour to come out in the midst of the violence. Dredd’s world (in this case including Texas City as well as Mega City) has always been allowed to go bizarre and funny, embraced by at least three generations of artists. If Trevallion is in the third generation, then he’s drawing inspiration from a legend of the second gen, namely Kevin ‘Dredd’s chin is hewn from granite’ Walker.

Chin of stone!
Words by Michael Carroll

A good Dredd artist, of course, needs to convey the wild weirdness of future cities and citizens

This is a con-urb of Texas City, actually.
Words by Michael Carroll

and it helps if they carry with them some distinctive flavour of their work more generally. For Trevallion, that means spindly weirdoes being a bit occult...

If you want an eldritch creature looming, call Trevallion!

 

But for now Trevallion’s key collaborator remains Gordon Rennie. They bothered to put a lot of effort into the computer game advertisement that was Strange Brigade. I mean no slight in that description – it was literally billed as a short story designed to entice people to play the game. 

Is the game any good? I guess it did OK?

And it’s more Mignola-y stuff with a look back to the past, not as it was, but as it was imagined by pulp writers of a century ago, when all heroes were hyper-competent, and all ancient tombs came with their own curse.

Speaking of ancient curses, Trevallion’s next big job didn’t stray too far from the world of the eldritch and the occult – it’s vampire on bat action with Fiends of the Western Front. In case you need the context, this is a decades-later prequel to the vampire story set in WW2 called Fiends of the Eastern Front, about German soldiers fighting Russians. Western Front again follows German soldiers, this time fighting French and British troops during WW1. This story is also a crossover with an old non-2000AD strip called Black Max. I think he's an evil German scientist who controls bats?

Vampires in bi-planes flying over gothic castles - hard not to love!
Words by Ian Edginton

I confess, I hadn’t even heard of Black Max before reading this series, and I think that makes me a less than ideal reader. It felt a bit like that old movie Freddy versus Jason, where you were meant to root for one of the two villains, but knew that it’d have to end in a draw. Me, I’m team Constanta all the way.

Constanta comes off worse in this encounter...

...but takes the upper hand later on!

If Trevallion has a favourite of the two villains, it doesn't show in the art. Mostly he’s having fun rendering period fighter plane action and, of course, wicked monstrous people doing wicked monstrous things. In other words, we’re all winners!

I get the impression this story will return – but even in the absence of Absalom, there’s always space in 2000AD for scratchy demon infested violence, and thus more glorious penmanship from Mr T…

 

(and in between the months when I wrote this post up and actually published it, lo indeed Fiends is back, with T. Trev on duty and gnarly as ever)

More on Tiernen Trevallion:

Don’t get too excited, but he does have a website…

Currently boasting a single, but rather splendid, design.

Much more fruit to be plucked from 2000AD Covers uncovered

Personal favourites:

Judge Dredd: Ratfink’s Revenge, Deep in the Heart

Absalom: all of it

Fiends of the Western Front

Now that's a suit!

*Based on a Rebellion computer game, not clear how much Trevallion was involved in character design for some or indeed all of the people who appear in the two-episode comic.