No. 87 Simon Harrison

First Prog: 522

Final Prog: 903

Total appearances: 102

 

Creator Credits:

Bradley

Revere

Other art credits:

Strontium Dog

A handful of one-offs

Yes, the punchline of this early Harrison Future Shock was someone sneezing into their spacesuit. But he's the perfect artist to convey mucus-based terror.
Words by R. Corona

Notable character creations:

Bradley

Revere

Feral Jackson

Notable characteristics:

Rounded knees. Skater outfits. Faces so stylized they almost don’t look like faces anymore. Tons of atmosphere. Can combine deadpan comedy, anger and hi-speed action. Not being Carlos Ezquerra.

Quite a radical departure from what had gone before
Words by Alan Grant

On Simon:

I wasn’t actively reading 2000AD at the time Simon Harrison first appeared, just glancing over my brother’s shoulder, but I vividly remember encountering his work on Bradley and loving it. When I started reading each Prog for myself, I found out that he had at some point taken over from over from Carlos Ezquerra on Strontium Dog. This blew my tiny mind blown clean off. 

Or is it better to say it blew out my optic nerves?
Words by Alan Grant

It’s almost a cliché of late 80s/early 90s comics – editors were desperate to prove to their increasingly adult audiences that they weren’t making comics for children any more. And what easier way to do that than to take a childhood favourite character, strongly associated with a particular artist, and then give it to someone with an extremely different style?*

In a second cliché, why not also get said artist to design an all-new character for the series, one who is exactly tailored to suit the new art style (and wouldn’t work at all when drawn in the old style, as proved, sadly, by both Colin MacNeil and the mighty Carlos himself). Which led to Feral Jackson, one of my favourite ever characters and star of my official favourite ever 2000AD cover.**

 

I mean, it’s like imagining Steve Ditko’s Spawn or Jack Kirby’s Warlock (the cuddly techno-organic alien from the New Mutants). Feral Jackson is seriously kewl.

If I dressed like this I'd look quite the fool. Feral pulls it off, somehow.

Feral in his natural habitat: urban squalor
Words by Alan Grant

As well as having no nose and crazy claws, Harrison found a new way to draw with Feral, suggesting the idea that part of his mutation was being preternaturally fast.

Mucking about with a photocopier, perhaps?
Scary as all hell, like that one Aphex Twin video kinda.
Words by Alan Grant

Then there’s the costuming. Feral is part of a skateboard gang*** and as such has the early 90s baggy thing going on, presumably with chains in pockets and all that. Which brings me back to Bradley. What IS Bradley? 

He's a sprog. Fairly common slang for a child nowadays  how common was this in 1987?
I'd love to see what direction writer Alan McKenzie gave Harrison for the design, if any.

I think I assumed he was an alien for a long time, and that the whole series was set on an alien world, Ace Trucking style. Then I gathered it was a far-future setting, so maybe people have evolved to look quite different from today. Original story Alternators is based around a sci-fi toy, after all. Although it can’t be that far in the future, because we later learn that Bradley’s granpa is meant to have been a teenager in the 1990s, and clearly an earthbound teen at that. So Bradley is set, at most, in around 2050.

So delightfully weird.

So basically it comes down to Harrison drawing people funny. Bradley (and pals Milton and Arabella) are the weirdest looking 6 year-olds. Or possibly 12 year olds by the time we get to the fairy-tale era? But if he hadn’t drawn them that way, the strip wouldn’t have half of its charm. But it speaks to the heart of Harrison’s approach to comics illustration – just go with your instincts. If he wants to draw people with round knees and leathery skin, more power to him. If all clothing hangs in folds everywhere, why not? 



The tone and atmosphere oozes out of every panel, and it’s weirdly suited to the zany comedy of Bradley, the action thrills of Strontium Dog, and perhaps most potently of all, to the flat-out nightmare/dreamscapes of Revere.

What would you expect this series to be about?

I’ve sung my praises for Revere before, but I’ll be honest – it’s the art that really makes it. Smith has some interesting ideas going on, and does a neat line in coherent incoherence, but it’s Harrison’s tale really. I’m pretty sure the initial premise was his, too. Said premise being: a teenage boy-witch, whose powers including vomiting acid**** on people, lives in a future London where climate change has rendered everything into a barren dust-desert, and people live under the yoke of an authoritarian government.

A teaser for Revere from the 1991 Comic Book Price Guide.
What a tagline!

All the stuff that’s well-articulated in episode 1, and then almost entirely ignored for the rest of the strip while Smith goes off on one. Anyway, about that art…

That's a definite 'no' to the vomiting question.

The dude on the right has his post-acid-vomit face on

Goblins pop up from a mirror-world at one point

Spanning across 3 books, that at the time had interminable gaps in between, you can see Harrison developing his style, getting shinier and even more obsessed with page composition (not always to the benefit of storytelling, although in the world of John Smith at his John Smithiest, you can't entirely blame him). 

  

A moment of calm

More deadly vomit. Also dig the contrast between Revere's leather-skin vs the mannequin's smoothness

A new painting technique at work. Digital? Those blacks really suck in your soul, don't they.

Revere in full-on action hero mode, readying a minigun. That giant wheel in the background puts the whole thing in motion.
All words here and above by John Smith

Super shiny, super mystical. Yet also, exactly what a bathroom looks like.

His final efforts for the Prog had an ethereal quality, and just the most mesmerising textures. I’m not surprised he moved on into the fine art world.

Same style, applied to a completely different series.
Bradley's nose, in adolescence, has apparently been flattened by wearing a plastic bag over his head

Another legendary artist, like so many both before and since utterly unique in the medium. A painterly cartoonist, a violent action aficionado, with a great line in being both very grown up an charmingly juvenile. A shame in many ways that we never got to see his version of Dredd…

More on Simon Harrison:

There’s nothing obvious online that beats the interview that ran in Megazine 343, covering his more recent work as well as a bit about the early days.

There’s this one blogpost by Daryl Marsh analysing Harrison’s line work.

Come on internet, embrace the charms of Mr Harrison, eh?

Now that's what I call a pile of dead bodies.
From the 2000AD art tradition of going that extra mile and then some with each passing panel.

Personal favourites:

Bradley: all of it until the music pastiche years, then the Sprog Prince

Strontium Dog: The No-Go Job; The Final Solution part 1

Revere

*As per the fascinating ECBT podcast interview with then-Tharg Richard Burton, it may not have happened the way I’m painting it here. But since Burton clearly can’t remember what the thought process was, I’m making up my own legend to print!

**As per the end-of-year Prog featurette from a few years back, anyway. It remains top 10 of all time for sure.

***what is it about the word ‘gang’ that isn’t wrong but instantly makes me sound like a super out of touch old person?

****The corrosive kind, not the head-trip kind. Although that’d be a neat witch-power too. Paging Brendan McCarthy…

No. 86 Peter Doherty

First Prog: 766 (cover and strip)

Latest Prog: 1995 (colours); 1957 (strip art)

First Meg: 1

Latest Meg: 341

Doherty was one of the few post-McCarthy artists on Dredd to embrace that radical triangular helmet / shiny look.
Words by John Wagner

Total appearances: 104

-including a couple of lettering credits on his own art, and an ever-increasing handful of colouring credits. I gather health prevents him from doing very much drawing, which is a massive shame

Creator Credits:

Young Death

Breathing Space

Other art credits:

Judge Dredd

Armitage

Devlin Waugh

As single Terror Tale, and a one-off for Crisis

Notable character creations:

Sidney D’Eath* (and his demon dentist dad)

Mrs Gunderson

Ratfink

Notable characteristics:

Generating palpable atmosphere, usually of the urban horror variety: dreary, hopeless, downtrodden, chilly and infused with dread. Also characters with pointy noses and chins (except when they have no chin at all), beady eyes, sinister affect, skin that doesn’t quite fit. And, in among all this, a facility with comedy – often the kind of comedy that comes from everything being so horrible. Doherty has almost exclusively worked in the world of Dredd, which is kind of all about people living in a society that is at root pretty unpleasant.

A comic story, but the oppressive atmosphere of Mega City 1 oozes through
Words by Chris Standley

On Peter:

Doherty’s first work was technically on an issue of Crisis (I’m afraid I don’t have it)

 – but for me, and I imagine most readers, his true launch was super high-profile, bursting onto the page in the very first issue of the Judge Dredd Megazine, with Young Death. Although America is the story everyone turns to and talks about now, at the time I recall Young Death being the more hyped series – not least because it had an obvious hook, namely the secret origin of Judge Death. Certainly before the Meg actually came out, this was the story that made me want to buy it.

A must buy cover!

Now, there are many who’d argue that this same series is the very one that’s guilty of turning Death from a truly horrifying character into a comedy character. The series is often played for laughs, with the evil dentist and of course dear old Mrs Gunderson. But I think it’s ripe for re-evaluation as something seriously sinister. Not least in the light of the recent Deadworld series, the bleakest thing ever, but also, arguably, a spin-off from Young Death (via Anderson: Half-Life).

Whatever you think of the script (I didn’t love it at the time, but find I warm to it more and more on subsequent re-reads), it certainly allowed a new artist the chance to show what he could do. In terms of the painting, he’s got the atmosphere pretty much perfect from page 1:

What a way to launch your career, with an acid-dissolved body being hoisted out of a pit!
Words by John Wagner

But when it comes to people, he’s still, to an extent, learning on the job. I find it makes his work especially human, even with his tendency to depict a rather exaggerated version of humans (often as rather weaselly). Something about Doherty’s style, even now, sort of allows you to imagine him drawing them on the page. I can picture him using a very sharp, thin pencil to sketch out a bug-eyed loser coming to a sticky end…

The fear is all in the whites of the eyes...

 For all the roughness around the edges, Doherty’s cartooning instincts are immaculate.

While poor Brian Skuter enters the dreadful chill of Death's room,
Mrs Gunderson indulges in some slapstick
Words by John Wagner

By the end of the twelve issue run, he was largely fully-formed. His work since then has improved and improved, but the essence hasn’t changed, to my eyes. It’s its own thing, and unlike anything else. And of course there’s that magic ingredient about Doherty’s artwork - it always elevates whatever script it’s attached to.

Ah, the delights up the 'up the nose, staring at the gums' panel. Doherty at his nastiest...
Words by John Wagner

Case in point: Justice One. The story lingers in my memory as a minor classic, even though the murder mystery at its heart never quite lived up to the premise and the setting, and above all, the super atmospheric art.

 

Actually, I can't remember if this is from Justice 1, but it's an awesome panel of carnage.

Judgement Day, the next Doherty/Ennis collaboration, has its porblems, one of which is the weird mix of artists that work across the series as a whole. While an Ezquerra solo effort would clearly have worked, I'm kinda sad we didn't get Doherty doing the whole thing. His early, zombie-focussed episodes were some of the best, and it would have lent the whole mega-epic a very different tone from others. Hell, I even liked his 'secret origin of Sabat' Beano-inspired epsiode. 

 

 And of course, there's his Johnny Alpha:

 

Doherty did get to take on a mini-epic by himself, Mechanismo II. It takes the comic violence of MacNeil’s original and turns it into a tight-knit thriller (kind of like the reverse of the Alien-Aliens transition). Still with comedy.

How does Doherty make this cover so moody and silly at the same time?

More carnage! (In the MacNeil tradition, of course)
Words by John Wagner

Bury my Knee at Wounded Heart - which could, in different circumstances, have been a well-liked but not especially remembered Ron Smith Dredd from the 80s – ends up as perhaps the single best Dredd episode to grace the Megazine, and certainly an emotional high-point of the 90s. It even manages to be funny, too (not least in the ludicrously convoluted pun of the title). In a world where ‘funny’ means feeling angry and sad while laughing. Sure, it's in Wagner's script, but Doherty brings so much to the storytelling:

This panel hanuts my dreams. So cold!

Exploring the banality and extreme importance of death across three panels

 

Dredd apologises, but can't hide his shame.
Words for all the above by John Wagner

 There's no real compairons in style (except I guess an overload of wrinkles), but some of this work puts me in mind of John Ridgway, that other master of telling you exactly what his characters are emoting.

Prologue (the unimaginatively titled, but crucially important scene-setter for the Tenth Planet, itself the prologue to Wilderlands) has this epic exchange**:

Panel description: 'Hershey looks taken aback, but you can also tell that one of her deeper secrets has just been exposed and she can't quite hide it'
Words by John Wagner

  

More perfect character work, no?

Of course, there was time for pure comedy, too, with the likes of Mr Bennet joins the Judges (not without its dark and sinister moments)

A riff on UK children's TV show 'Mr Benn'
Words by Mark Millar

 

And the All-new Adventures of PJ Maybe, who always did manage to be a figure of both fun and horror. But this isn’t him, of course! It’s another in a long line of Dohertyian sadsacks.

There's quite a jump in years from the previous panel to this - and you can see Doherty has more confidence to his line. The colours here are by Chris Blythe, if you're wondering why they seem especially different.
Words by John Wagner

Doherty completes (well, almost) his tour of major Dredd supporting characters with Night School, a tale of Dolman and Vienna, the Dredds who managed to ignore the call to work in justice dept.

Words by John Wagner

And, hopefully not his Dredd swansong, he got to deliver a brand new and recurring villain, perhaps the closest Dredd has come to pure nastiness, the sneering, leering Ratfink. If some readers were turned off by him, it might just be because Doherty did too good of job of realising a figure that is almost too horrible too look at, let alone spend time inside the head of. Chilling.

A sadist enjoying the chase

Even the people sent to catch the Ratfink are corrupted by his nastiness.
Also, check out that rain! Doherty is the king of foul weather.
Words by John Wagner.

 Still within the world of Dredd, some years earlier, there was Breathing Space. Sadly Doherty was only able to complete full art for the first two episodes before ill-health forced him to step back to colours only. But he’d done more than enough work to set the tone for this very odd noir-ish thriller that is ultimately about a man having a protracted mental breakdown.

And this is the opening episode!
Words by Rob Williams

Still technically within the world of Dredd, but really quite far to one side, Doherty delivered what remains the most recent outing for Devlin Waugh, a character he really nails. It’s partly a flashback story, but for me it’s the homely scenes of Devlin and his mum on the sofa having tea and cake that just feels really right for the character.

Devlin's pose in that panel nails the character.
Words by John Smith (now write some more, please, Mr Smith!)

I don’t know if he is just super picky and won’t take on anything less than Dredd (or his world), or if it’s just that Tharg finds him super-suited to that world. He did tackle a couple of Sinister Dexter covers; I guess Downlode is probably as horrible a place to live as MC1! Certainly it's not short of mutant weirdoes.

 

Since then, significant colouring projects include Mandroid II, Ichabod Azrael II and recent 3riller Mindmines, his lightest job yet! I suppose it’s not that his colouring is inherently dark, more that his subject matter tends to be on the moody side, so this kind of thing sticks out.

So bright!
Words by Rory McConville (a newish droid who must have been over the moon
to hear his story was going to be illustrated by Colin MacNeil AND Doherty on colours)

 

And maybe it’s right to end with his most recent bit of strip work, the Terror Tale Night Shifts, a kind of throwback to the 1980s world of monster movies.

Words by John Smith

 

Across a near 30-year career for Tharg, Doherty hasn’t been as prolific as some, but by gosh what he has delivered has been from the top drawer of the top chest of drawers.

More on Peter Doherty:

His own blog (sadly not updated in quite some time)

Another examination ofhis career, looking beyond 2000AD as well

And he’s the subject of an old episode of the Panel Borders podcast:

 

Personal favourites:

Young Death

Judge Dredd: Justice One; Moving violation; Mechanismo Returns; Bury my Knee; Ratfink

Breathing Space: the story is flawed (but still good); the art is terrific.

Devlin Waugh: Innocence and Experience

 

*Potentially, ‘De’ath’ is just an alias. But it’s all we’ve got! (And it is a real name)

 **Which I was delighted to see checked in the History of Female Judges series; check it out for thoroughness and fascinating insights!