No. 138 Mike Dorey

First Prog: 6

Latest Prog: 409

Total appearances: 62

Why yes, that is an intentional reference to Samson pulling down the pillars of the Temple,
from that one Bible story (it's in Judges if you're interested)
Words by Geoff Miller*

Creator credits:

Psi Testers

No idea which, if any, comics artist invented the panel where the hero 'sees' the villain in
an extreme eye close-up - but it always works.
Words by Alan Hebden

Other art credits:

Invasion!

MACH 1

MACH Zero

Ro-Busters

Victor Drago

Rogue Trooper

A handful of one-offs

If there's one series by Dorey you should check out, it's the original Invasion!
Words by Pat Mills / Gerry Finley Day
(although based on the pun, I'm inclined to credit Finley-Day with this panel specifically...)

Notable character creations:

Victor Drago, perhaps?

-This strip, from 2000AD tie-in comic Tornado, was conceived by editorial, and scripted by Chris Lowder, as new adventures of Sexton Blake, a hugely popular character from years ago. Presumably Mike Dorey drew him as such – but then at the last minute editorial determined they couldn’t use this non-IPC owned property, so gave him a cheeky name change, technically making him an all-new character. Did Dorey fix the art even a little bit to match (or some in-house bodger) – unknown! He doesn’t half look like Peter Cushing, either way…

 

Peter Cushing, of course, played a great version of Sherlock Holmes -
himself part of the blueprint for Sexton Blake

Notable characteristics:

The thickest blacks, and he’s not afraid to smudge them (using a j-cloth, it turns out).

Explosions of literal mud and metaphorical anger there.
Words by Steve MacManus

A function of the same stylistic choice, Dorey’s work oozes atmosphere.

MACH One is at its best when it's showing Probe diving / running / kicking his way through a story
Words by Pat Mills

He’s also keen on broad facial expressions that really let you into a characters head (nuance added as required, and in 2000AD, it often isn’t.) 

This must be from a Future Shock but I can't seem to track it down...

On Mike:

Mike Dorey is what you might call a proper unsung hero. He was a mainstay of the Prog’s early years, but not one who got much attention, despite being, in one very important respect, a huge part of nailing the ethos of 2000AD. To whit, unapologetic, glorious and above all enjoyable violence.

The very idea of using a London bus as a murder machine is funny.
Words by Gerry Finley-Day

 

Although he didn’t come onto the strip until Prog 8, Dorey is perhaps the key artist on Invasion!, which was, don’t forget, the opening thrill and tone setter for 2000AD for most of its first year. And what Dorey did better than any other artist (except, perhaps, for Jesus Blasco in the opening episode) was to draw Bill Savage offing Volgs in ridiculous ways, and looking dead happy about it. And, in a nutshell, that’s about 50% of the appeal of 2000AD – earned ultraviolence with an imaginative bent and a sociopathic heart.

See that pseudonym - that's a reference to his artistic tool of choice, the j-cloth.

Dorey did it so well he soon took over as the lead artist on the series, alternating(ish) with Carlos Pino. I could fill this post with pictures of a grinning, death-dealing Savage, but I’m going to restrain myself…

This one's for the Space Spinner boys...

Much the same trick saw him deliver the goods on MACH 1,

James Bond was never as fun as this...
Words by Charles Herring

Although it’s notable that he used a thinner line, and really emphasised the movement and action nature of that strip. What’s it like seeing a Hyper-powered man do thing no normal human could? Answer: pretty awesome!

In fact, this was before his stint on Invasion!, and while he could have done more with John Probe, for me it was a wise decision to keep Dorey with Bill Savage, as his thick inking far better suits the grubby, working class soldier in the mud nature of that war story.

That first panel showing Big Nessie putting the put in is pure Desperate Dan stuff,
but given a 2000AD makeover.
Words by Gerry Finley-Day

See also his work on MACH Zero, a working class riposte to the suaveness of MACH 1’s spy world.

Dorey was perhaps the perfect choice to develop the leage of Vagrants, London tramps who end up helping out poor Zero. It's all mud and pollution and oily hats.

MACH Zero is also another strip that combines a bizarre range of tones: comedy, tragedy and of course ultraviolence. Here's the villain named Cousin George indluging in a bit of bullying; Dorey mixes the comedy of a kick up the arse with the horror of burning a man's hand, selling the central core of  as both a bit silly, but also really quite moving.

An early example here of the 2000AD notion that people in capes are evil!
Words by Steve McManus

Let's move on to Dorey's work on Ro-Busters, another class war thrill with its themes often more memorable than its actual plots. Because this strip is all about robots, it’s inherently futuristic. But this is very much a run-down future, where the robots are unwashed, unloved and of course, rebellious. Dorey does well to hold his own on the epic story The Fall and Rise of Ro-Jaws and Hammerstein, sharing art duties with Mike McMahon and Kevin O’Neill. While they excel on setting and weirdness, Dorey brings great characterisation to the likes of Gottlieb and the human-looking crash test dummy.

There's a palpable melancholy here, which marks out Dorey even from the
greatness of McMahon or O'Neill.
Words by Pat Mills

One didn’t know it at the time, but once Ro-Busters was done, Dorey didn’t get a ton more work. There’s a bit of Victor Drago for Tornado, that short epilogue story for MACH Zero,

Best rendering of rain ever!
Words by Steve MacManus

some nonsense with Tharg...

Look how Dorey nails Tharg's inherent self-confidence and smugness
Words by Steve MacManus

and then just two outings on Rogue Trooper. He’s a good fit for all of those, perhaps most especially the grungey, earthy violence of Rogue. But, by that point perhaps Dorey was considered a little old fashioned, compared to hot new things Cam Kennedy, Colin Wilson and Brett Ewins. To my mind, Dorey does add his own texture to Nu Earth, and it’s horror – a vein Gerry Finley-Day could have tapped into more often had Dorey remained available, perhaps.

This just left Dorey going out with a bang on a moody, horror-tinged Time Twister:

Love these 'person going mad surrounded by jeering faces' panels
Words by Chris Lowder

and, nearly 100 Progs later, one of those thrills that sort of falls between being an extended Future Shock and a trial run for a new series: Psi Testers. Heck, at two episodes it’s not even a 3riller, although it would have fit that template perfectly had it existed back in 1984.

More j-cloth action, this time to represent psychic powers

Outside of Invasion!, this is easily my favourite Dorey work for the Prog, as it allows him to flex more story-telling and world-building muscles. Will we see him again? Seems unlikely, but for someone who set such a dramatic tone for the entire comic, it’s kind of sad that we’ve yet to see an artist who has anything like his skill with muddy, grinning ultraviolence.

And since writing up this post some months back, Dorey has indeed resurfaced! You can enjoy his wartime skills in the 2020 Action Special, drawing Hellman of Hammer Force.

More on Mike Dorey:
A proper good interview covering his whole career on the Thrillcast.

Personal favourites:

Invasion!

Rogue Trooper: Petrified Forest

Time Twisters: This is your Death

Psi Testers

*For some reason Dorey is credited as 'Mike Donaldson' on Barney for this story - pretty sure that's a typo. It's definitely Dorey! Writer 'Geoff Miller' may or may not be a pseudonym for Steve MacManus - anyone know anything about him, beyond his credit as scripter on Flesh II?

No. 137 Dave Kendall

First Prog: 1370, but then not again ‘til 1946 (barring a couple of covers)
Latest Prog: 2200

Total appearances: 63 and counting
-but not including his work on Psycho Killer for Toxic! comic.*

Can't get two more different artists than Dave Kendall and Dom Reardon -
and yet he's created a super evocative version of Demon Jenny.

  

Creator credits:
Fall of Deadworld
Blade Warrior

Other art credits:
Tales of Telguuth
Sinister Dexter

Notable character creations:
Fairfax
Psilence

 

Fairfax and Byke - two great tastes that go well together.
Words by Kek-W

Notable characteristics:
Fantasy and horror and fantasy horror. No offence to Mr Kendall, who may in fact have great range as an artist, but so far for 2000AD he’s found his niche and is sticking to it! But when you’re this bloody good at that thing, who cares?

 

Fantasy art as you like it.
Words by Steve Moore

He does an especially good line in gaunt faces, oppressive mists and people who don’t quite look they’re alright. (Although these are all such key features of his magnum opus that it’s not really fair to assume these are general characteristics of his work)

On Dave:
So yeah, as mentioned above Kendall’s association with 2000AD presumably began soon after his early work for Pat Mills in Toxic. But I guess he never got a break from Tharg for whatever reason, and I didn’t discover Toxic until the mid-2000s. I first encountered him in that other experimental wonder, the 2005 ‘new talent’ Winter Special. Not well-received at the time, in fact a decent crop of artists (if not writers) did get work in the Prog in due course. Kendall delivered Blade Warrior, a pretty generic fantasy/gore comic that showed him to be a considerable talent with a paintbrush, if perhaps not a master storyteller.

Blade Warrior - does what it says on the tin.
Words by Ben Counter**

But it had an air of professionalism that marked it above some of the other offerings in that special, and certainly when he appeared soon after on Tales of Telguuth you wouldn’t have marked him out as a ‘new’ artist. So yeah, I imagine that in that long gap after Psycho Killer he was painting and getting paid for it for and indeed improving his skills. If I had stopped to think about it, I might’ve wondered ‘this guy does good fantasy art, with violence. I guess he’s really hoping for a shot on Slaine…’ – but as it happened, the queue of wannabe Slaine artists was too long and too talented! (He did sneak in one cover for that most excellent fanzine, Zarjaz)

...the one where P. Mills let some fans have a play with his creations.
He should do that again!

And he produced a handful of fine covers for 2000AD, too.

Say what you will about Pat Mills's most recent iteration of Flesh,
Gorehead Rex is a great character.

It’s at this point that Kendall gets to have perhaps the single best ‘so how did you get to be an artist for 2000AD?’ story of all time – he had a dream. A nightmare, to be more precise. A nightmare of encountering the Dark Judges on Deadworld, which inspired him to paint some dread pictures and send them to Tharg, who was sufficiently moved to give this relatively untried artist a shot at the bigtime. And boy, did it succeed!

Paired with Kek-W, Kendall has gone on to craft this weird, horrible, tragic, compelling and downright oppressive horror mood piece called The Fall of Deadworld. Four one-off stories turned into a series that has become something of a relentless beast. For a fully-painted series that can, one imagines, only have one conclusion, it returns year on year with more and more episodes.

NB the Dark Judges themselves aren't in the seires very often,
which is a good thing.

Kind of the entire point of the series is to watch what happens as Judge Death and his cohort literally murder an entire planet full of people. So far, so bleak. But the genius of it is that such a project would take rather a long time, and in that time there are still-alive people who have their own stories to tell. And there’s a pretty fascinating world to tell those stories in. For a start, we’ve got a planet that is more or less dying. An air of disease and despair washes over everything, not least the plants, animals and insects, the result of some sort of Dark Judge horror. It’s also abundantly clear that the Justice Department, notionally the ruling power of the cities on this world, are beyond the point of being corrupt, and are actively involved in the business of killing.

 

This series really pushes your tolerance for beautiful depictions of horrific things.
I guess some readers might not like that? But boy does it work for me.
Words by Kek-W

So you get pockets of people doing what they can to escape from the notice of the Judges, and indeed throwing their lot in with organised criminals, who offer something of an alternative to Justice Dept in terms of keeping order and maintain some sort of functional society.

And then within Justice Dept itself you’ve got politics and manoeuvring and even perhaps a handful of ‘good’ people who are fighting to stay in control of their own minds. And throw into all that some AI and some psychic humans who may or may not be able to escape the reaches of Death’s own psychic attacks, and you can cling to some tiny vestiges of hope that this story isn’t necessarily going to end the same way that we know the original Judge Death’s story ended before he showed up in Mega City One.

Sister Psilence, one of the more upsetting character designs of the last few years...
Words by Kek-W

Now, in describing all this story-based stuff you might think I’m giving short shrift to Kendall, the artist. But he’s so integral to all those things I just listed you can’t ignore it. He paints the dread despair, he designs the weird (and decidedly not wonderful) characters, he injects those occasional bursts of hope, and he reminds you at all turns that it's not obvious who, is anybody, we readers should be rooting for. Rather than me rambling on, here's the good stuff: artwork scanned from top comics!

 

Intrigue!

Morality plays!

 

Action!

Death!

Introspection!
All words above by Kek-W

And let’s not forget what a stunning job he did/does on the original Four Dark Judges. Fear in particular has never felt so dreadful as under Kendall’s pen.

Proper chilling!
Words by Kek-W

So yeah, there’s more Deadworld to come, and likely they can spin it out til they get bored. I wonder what 2000AD property he might get to try next...?

 

More on Dave Kendall:
His website: https://www.rustybaby.com/
A recent episode of the Thrillcast (with Kek-W, too)

Personal favourites:
Dreams of Deadworld
Fall of Deadworld
Deadworld

I like Deadworld a lot, is what I'm saying.

 

*This days it doesn’t seem quite so odd, but when I first came across the idea of a comic strip featuring a protagonist who kills people and is simply called ‘Psycho Killer’ I thought it was proper hilarious. It’s pretty gnarly, too.

**I'm suddnely struck wdonering if this is a pseudonym along the lines of 'bean counter', as in, a hack writer doing this jonb for the money? Nah, can't be.

No. 136 Phil Winslade

 

First Prog: 1374
Latest Prog: 1451

First Meg: 350
Latest Meg: 424

Total appearances: 64 and counting
Including a one-off in Revolver

Marshall Metta Lawson. Technically not Winslade's creation, but she
sure has built up a commanding presence under his pen...

Creator credits:
Lawless

Other art credits:
Judge Dredd

Winslade - the key 2000AD artist who never quite was.

Notable character creations:
Everyone but the main character in Lawless -they're all great!

So many distinct players with distinct looks and personalities!
Words by Dan Abnett

 

Notable characteristics:
Leather clothing. Crowd scene. Elaborate backgrounds. Acting.

It's Winslade who first really made me think about the fact that Judges pull themselves into tight-fitting leather costumes every day. He makes that just a little bit fetishistic, which it definitely should be...
Words by Dan Abnett

On Phil:

Look, so Phil Winslade has a whole body of varied work behind him in his artistic career, but anyone coming to his work from a 2000AD perspective is really only here for one thing – Lawless! Beyond 50 episodes and a fair few covers for that series, he’s only ever contributed to the Prog a handful of times: one Dredd tale, one Dredd cover, and one Terror Tale.

Kinda jarring to see Winslade drawing Judges in colour, but he's no less good.
Anyone else getting mid-period Simon Coleby vibes?
Words by John Wagner

 

Already displaying that extreme attention to textural detail.
Words by Steve Moore

 They’re decent. And yes, at the very start of his career he had a slot in the first issue of Revolver, delivering some suitably art-y art to go along with a typically pretentious Revolver-style tale:

 

That weird mix of VERY good art with decent enoguh writing but an obscure sense of humour which defind early 90s 'comics from grown-ups'.
Words by Igor Goldkind.

But let’s get our Lawless love on! I mean, everybody loves Lawless, right? It’s kind of unassailably the best strip to run in the 30 year history of the Judge Dredd Megazine, barring perhaps America, and just maybe Devlin Waugh. And while Dan Abnett’s scripts and plots are a big part of that, frankly the thing that really grabs you by the lapels is Winslade’s art, which is just super detailed and gorgeous and consistently gobsmacking and has been in more issues than not since 2015. The man is a drawing machine! Especially when you consider just how much he pours into details such as hair braids, clothing folds, gorilla fur, rivets and rust patches on robots and machines, and those astonishing city scenes full of architectural detail.

Every page is an excuse to get lost in the art.
Words by Dan Abnett

I don’t often throw in comparisons to so-called fine art, but here’s a painting I’ve spent a weird amount of time with* that would not look at all out of place in an episode of Lawless:

 

Derby Day by William Powell Frith**

I kind of feel that rambling on more would be redundant. Instead, here’s a small selection of great, GREAT work from a great artist.

 

 

I don’t know that anyone wants Lawless to stop – especially after it kind of already came ot a satisfying(ish) conclusion a while back, before Abnett found a way to give it a whole new lease of life.

But, you know, I’d love to see Winslade have a crack at a 2000AD series, perhaps something super far future sci-fi ish like Full Tilt Boogie.

 

More on Phil Winslade:
You gotta listen to this Thrillcast where he and Dabnett discuss their ideas and methods and ambitions for Lawless.
And here's a Covers uncovered.

 

Personal favourites:
Lawless, by god

The Judges are bad enough, but the SJS, man, they're something else.
So much eeee-vil right here.
Words by Dan Abnett

 *thanks to a jigsaw puzzle I had as a child
**No relation, although by amusing coincidence my wife's maiden name is 'Powell'.