First Prog: 950
Latest Prog: 1535
First Meg: 1.18
Latest Meg: 2.36 (aka 56)
Total appearances: 92
-not including that
one Daily Star Dredd he did, or his issues of Lawman of the Future
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Adlard's first zombie?
Context by John Wagner |
Art credits:
Armitage
Judge Hershey
Rogue Trooper (Friday
era)
Nikolai Dante
Judge Dredd
Savage
a episode of Pulp
Sci-Fi
Notable character creations:
Bill Savage was hardly
new, but Adlard did get to reinvent him for a new age.
Judge Logan was a new character introduced by Adlard,
but not exactly a ‘creation’ as he’s based on the late Stewart Perkins, a real-life
person (and 2000AD fan) who truly earned his way into the fictional world of
Mega City One.
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Meet Judge Logan
Words by John Wagner |
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Notable characteristics:
As with many an artist
who started in the early 90s, Adlard jumped through a few styles before
settling into a groove. So there was Adlard the painter, somewhat indebted to
Sean Phillips,
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You can see Adlard's eyes already in this early effort
Words by Alan Grant |
then black-and-white
Adlard, almost deliberately keeping it simple to react against the painted
stuff,
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Suddenly it looks like modern day Adlard
Words by Dave Stone |
before we get to
Adlard the supremely confident cartoonist.
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Ah, who doesn't love a good 'train + tunnel as sex' visual
Words by Robbie Morrison |
For me the most
notable thing about Adlard’s work is that he’s just so accessible and
easy-to-read. There’s a reason that the
Walking Dead became a huge hit under his pen, and it’s a lot to do with the
fact that people who don’t normally read comics can slip into his style without
having to muddle through the trick of learning how to actually read comics.
Other more specific
characteristics include: big eyes, but never Manga eyes; a surface sheen to
pretty much everything, from skin to clothes to just the air around the
characters. He also has a real knock for knowing when to draw full figures,
when to draw half-figures, and when to go for the close-up.
On Charlie:
I’m in danger of
repeating myself here, not because Adlard is really like any other 2000AD
artist in his style, but because he’s another of the new wave that emerged a)
in the early 90s and b) on David Bishop’s Megazine. Another talent who perhaps
was not at his best from day one, but was well nurtured and given enough
chances to get properly good.
And let’s be clear,
like many of his contemporaries, he can be forgiven for his earliest efforts
because he was basically forced into doing the painted art thing, and, more
specifically on his first series, trying to do it like master craftsman Sean
Phillips.
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I won't say it's my favourite cover, but it sure does jump out o fthe page at you
BIG EYES! |
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The colours and textures match Sean Phillips's previous series remarkably well.
But the faces are all Adlard
Words by Dave Stone |
What strikes me most
about these early pages from Armitage
are the expressions, which stand out as Adlard’s own voice. Following the
template from Phillips and of course writer Dave Stone, Steel is angry and
Armitage is bitter. But where Phillips displays this as much through fashion
and posture, Adlard kind of brings the emotion to the fore and puts it in their
eyes and faces.
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Adlard experiments with angles and close-ups
Words by Dave Stone |
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| Huh? |
Don’t ask me what the
goblins are doing, though. Armitage
went off the rails as a story weirdly quickly, although it got itself back on
track in the long run. A story for another post down the line…
Again in keeping with
early 90s trends, where once an artist was asked to paint, suddenly they were
asked / chose to work in the exact opposite style...
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Could be a page right out of Walking Dead, no?
Words by Dave Stone |
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I, for one, much
preferred the look in this ‘Flashback’ sequence from Armitage (a meta-text reason for Adlard to use the black and white
style, although I’d be curious to know if this was an editorial suggestion in
the first place).
It’s clear from this
work that Adlard was a pretty great draw-er. And, compared to his earlier
painted work, the tone and atmosphere really come through. There’s a bleak
grandeur to his image of Birmingham
as post-nuclear wasteland that makes it easy to imagine yourself there.
In largely the same
style, Adlard brought Treasure Steel over for a team-up with Judge Hershey, and
he earns many points for being a boy’s adventure comic artist who draws
action-adventure women as nature intended them, i.e. not as fodder for ogling
readers. It’s weird that I feel the need to point this kind of thing out, but
even in 2000AD there have been artists who draw men as characters and women as
pin-ups.
The next step, then
was to marry this up with a more traditional pencil/ink/colour look. A short
learning curve went from this, which is weirdly lacking in body:
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Love the clouds and the general atmosphere; less taken with the figures
Words by Steve White |
to this, which is just
plain great:
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That's some top drawer cartooning right there. Not complicated, not flashy, but boy does it get across the
inner thoughts and feelings of the characters. Note the subtle smugness on Andreas Romanov.
Words by Robbie Morrison |
For a while there,
Adlard was the clear best of the deputy Dante artists. Unusually for a new artist, Adlard
has only drawn a single one-off type strip for Tharg, an episode of
Pulp Sci Fi. It's worth bringning up becauise it's one of the very few
bits of full-on science fiction space opera type thing that Adlard has
done (to my knowledge), and I wouldn;t have thought it'd be his thing.
Of course I was wrong!
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City-wide devastation and crazy spaceships galore! Epic.
Words by Gordon Rennie |
I’m not sure if was
kicked off by John Burns (and you wouldn’t say no to John Burns if he asks for
a gig, now would you), or if they just chose to swap over, so Burns got Dante and Adlard moved onto Dredd.
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| A cover that promises balls-out action, if ever there as one |
Again, it’s the tone
and atmosphere that shines through in his Dredd,
although if I’m honest his cartooning doesn’t fit this character and his world
nearly as neatly as it did on Dante. His epsiodes of the sprawling 'Doomsday' epic were, as ever, easy to follow (unlike a lot of that story), but perhaps a little basic (althoguh there again, one can lay a lot of blame on the lacklustre plotting - no offence, John Wagner, but it wasn;t your finest hour!).
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| Super-villain watches action on video screens. Ho Hum. |
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A refreshing use of close-up and silhouette, rendering this moment that much more dramatic.
Context by John Wagner |
A couple of years later, he did get to have a bit of fun on The Satanist, a very odd story in
which Dredd is plagued by psychic visions that turn out to emanate from a Satanic
cult leader in Brit-Cit who may in fact be the actual devil.
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God saves Dredd from the Devil - grand theological horror for a change of pace
Words by John Wagner |
Oh, and it features
Vienna Dredd in a big way, pushing that rare Dredd-thread of wondering just how
much he’ll let himself be pulled around by his family ties, and whether or not
he is capable of plain and simple familial love. If anyone but Wagner had
written the script, people would’ve cried foul, I’m sure. Adlard uses his way
with a close up to make sure the emotional through-line is clear.
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Vienna isn;t crying, or meant to be, but by gum you can see the film of water that keeps her eyeballs clear.
So much expression with so little ink
Words by John Wagner |
What do you do with
someone who has natural skills as a cinematic storyteller and a finder of
emotions? Why, give him a shotgun-wielding nutter to draw.
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Funking Hell! Bill Savage is back.
Words by Pat Mills |
Except that Savage isn’t Invasion. Sure, Bill Savage is the same person – and even the same
character – in both series, but the trappings couldn’t be more different. Where
Invasion was (for me, as a reader who
only knows it as a strip from ye oldene days of the Prog) an excuse to revel in
gleeful, vengeance-fueled violence, Savage
was, and remains, a hard-hitting look at what it would be like to live in a
country that has been invaded and overtaken by a hated enemy. Reading those early books in 2003, right in the middle of media onslaught covering our invasion of Iraq, it was powerful, poignant stuff.
Which is where Adlard
comes in. Sure, he can deliver some violence and make it fun,
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You can never really get away from Savage spouting hilarious murder-themed slang
Words by Pat Mills |
|
but mostly what
he brought was a thick atmosphere of despair and anger, lightened by a tinge of
hope. Although ‘hope’ in this case means ‘occasionally getting the chance to
murder some Volgs and not get caught’.
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A double dose of pure emotion. And note well Adlard's ease with drawing what amounts to a conversation,
but mixing up the angles and expressions to match the mood fo the dialogue. MUCH harder than it looks.
Words by Pat Mills |
There’s a dichotomy at
the heart of Adlard’s art. He’s so accessible, even freindly in his style, and
yet it has lent itself extraordinarily well to tales of doom, gloom and pointing out the hypocisies of the world we live in.
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| Shadows and rain |
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Couldn;t end without another trademark Adlard extreme close up!
Words by Pat Mills |
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I guess one day the Walking Dead will eventually end
(even though it’s not supposed to), and maybe one day Adlard will find himself
on the Prog, delivering an epic 200-part series without ever missing a week. A
Belardinelli-style workaholic in waiting?
More on Charlie Adlard:
Unsurprisingly, dude is all over the internet, and he's happy to tlak about his 2000AD work as well as Walking Dead.
Sadly there’s no
footage of him live-drawing at the 40th
Personal favourites:
Armitage: Flashback; Flashback II
Nikolai Dante: Masque fo Dante; Tour of Duty; Last Dance on the Trans-Siberian
Express
Judge Dredd: The Satanist; Gulag
Savage
-and although I haven't got a copy yet, I'm very intrigued by his foray into European comics:
