No. 49 Mark Harrison

First Prog: 682 (cover artist); 717 (strip artist); 1082 (colourist)

Latest Prog: 1899?

First Meg: 3.52 (aka 155), as cover artist

Latest Meg: 330, as cover artist

- curiously, he’s only provided one piece of strip work for the Meg, an episode of Durham Red: the Scarlet Apocrypha in issue 4.18.

Total appearances: 191 and counting

Creator credits:

Glimmer Rats; The Ten-Seconders – and arguably also Durham Red counts, not as a new character but as a dramatically new re-imagining of her look and situation.

Other art credits:

Judge Dredd

Strontium Dogs

Damnation Station

Grey Area

Plenty of Future Shocks and other one-offs

Notable character creations:

The hell dimension of the Glimmer is something of a memorable character…

If not for Durham Red herself, Harrison certainly gets credit for her new supporting cast, chiefly Judas Harrow and Matteus Godolkin (I’m pretty sure I’ve not quite got those names right…)

Molloy and Harris from Ten Seconders, and a handful of the Gods, although the two I can easily bring to mind are Reed Richards parody the Scientist and Ben Grimm analogue Damage

The evolution of Durham Red...

Hanging out with the Gronk, still a Strontium Dog, still mostly in red.
Words by Peter Hogan

Now twice as gothic, and almost all in black.
Words by Dan Abnett (or maybe it's Alan Smithee..?)

Those clothes are rapidly disappearing...
Words by Dan Abnett

Almost entirely naked, and now almost completely feral.
Words by Dan Abnett

Notable characteristics:

background noise; working with computers a lot; vast space vistas; incomprehensible crowd scenes; dense detail; space opera; future war; guns’n’splosions – see also bombs, energy weapons and violent, gooey death.

It's a safe bet that Harrison likes James Cameron's Aliens.
Words by Dan Abnett

 

On Mark:

Harrison launched into 2000AD helping to set the scene for one of the biggest Dredd epics in years. Wilderlands, ultimately, didn’t go down as an all-time classic. But the set-up, which began with the Mechanismo storyline, was a big deal. Harrison’s chapter, Conspiracy of Silence, was perhaps the biggest deal of all. In the story, Dredd discovers that Chief Judge McGruder has been lying to him. She, in turn, discovers that Dredd also lied. It’s a pretty major part of Dredd history, and his relationship to the whole system of Justice in Mega City has been simmering away ever since.*

Harrison’s art, at that time, was kind of ropey. But it brought something new to the comic and especially to Dredd’s world that really grounded the story, making it feel real. Partly it’s the digitalesque painting (I don’t know if he was already using just computers at the time. I guess probably?), but a lot is his immediate and effective use of hurling around background noises every which way. Yes, a city is a living, noisy place. Yes, in the future, there will be a lot more electronic humming and robotic / pre-recorded safety announcements. Also, insects still exist, especially when they’re functioning as metaphors.

Harrison's debut for Tharg was full of mood and menace.
Words by John Wagner

Given that a big part of Dredd’s world is that robots do so much of the work that most people are unemployed, it’s a shame that Harrison hasn’t put in more episodes. A single story and a handful of covers since his debut.

Harrison's Mega City 1 is a lived-in place, full of background goings-on.
Words by Rob Williams

But maybe this is because he was soon tapped for another series – Strontium Dogs. He arrived during a troubled time when Ennis had quit the series, replaced by Peter Hogan, who evidently wanted to tell a story that Tharg wasn’t especially keen on. I wouldn’t like to guess at the exact whys and wherefores of it all, but someone got the idea of bringing Durham Red back into focus, and then got the idea that Harrison drew her rather well, and then that the character really ought to be in a spacewar setting. Which in turns suggested noted Warhammer 40,000 writer Dan Abnett. Maybe it was the other way around, and Abnett got the character first, then chose to push her into the future?

Whatever the chain of events, Harrison got to pay his dues drawing some arguably plodding adventures of Durham Red, the Gronk, Feral and the Wandering Lady before launching into a series that was one of the biggest deals at 2000 AD as it neared the Year 2000: Durham Red. Yes, she was the same character as invented by Wagner, Grant and Ezquerra, but what she looked like and what she got up to was really an entirely new series. And boy, did Harrison ever put his all into it. Also, Tharg and the higher ups knew a marketing opportunity when they saw one, and sexy redhead vampire ladies were not far from covers and publicity materials for a while there.**

Why yes Mr Bishop, I think that cover will shift a few extra copies of the Prog.

Again, I have no idea what techniques he used for each book of the three-book Durham Red in space saga, but it was obviously a lot of work. It may even be the case that he created 3D versions of various spaceships so he could spin them around to find the perfect angle to shown them from in any given panel. It’s that sort of level of crazed detail. Astonishing stuff.

Harrison put a lot of effort into the characters, too - arguably a little too much. Like many comics artists before and since, Harrison used likenesses of actors for his cast, although he fiddled them a bit. Nothing wrong with this, and I’m all for more Julian Sands in comics, but I do think this decision made it a lot harder for Harrison to draw the same character from different angles and keep them recognisable. At times, it is not immediately obvious which character is which in certain scenes. On the other hand, when a panel is great, it’s gorgeous.

I’m getting ahead of myself a bit, but it’s well worth saying here that this is an issue that Harrison has completely ironed out in his present work – certainly since Damnation Station.

Durham Red overall is something of a flawed masterpiece. It shifts around in tone from gun action to space opera to snide comedy to family drama, with a rather neat through-line in religion and the problems of being a messiah. The ideas are great, the characters fun, but the episodic narrative not always matching. Harrison’s art, meanwhile, stays fairly consistent, and I wonder if it’s this that upsets the tone a bit. The gunplay is exciting but not always clear; the space opera is beyond magnificent, and the messianic stuff is pretty great, too – but sometimes it was all a bit too murky. To be fair, a lot of this is a question of print. On computer, his art is far shinier, as a rule.

A Durham Red moodboard, lifted from Barney

In between Durham Red books, Harrison poured equal amounts of digital ink into the Glimmer Rats. As other reviewers have noted, the very fact that it’s sometimes hard to see what’s going on actually suits this series down to the ground. A team of prisoners/soldiers are sent through a portal to wage war in hell against largely unbeatable spooks and spectres. If it was a film, it’d be the most 18-rated action film you could imagine, only with more gooey explodey death. I didn’t care for it that much first time around, but it had lingered in my head for more than 10 years now, and a recent re-read was much more favourable. Seriously grim, seriously moody.

I think what's happening is that a man is possessed by some sort of phantasm and then implodes gorily.
Just go with it.
Words by Gordon Rennie

When someone makes a mistake in the Glimmer, they will get gunned down AND exploded.
It's the only way to be sure.
Words still by Gordon Rennie.

Around this time, Harrison wrote and drew a handful of Pulp Sci-Fi stories. It’s probably not the case but I can imagine then-Tharg (Andy Diggle, I think?) invented the series largely as a vehicle for Harrison. His stories don’t have traditional twists like Future Shocks, but they are proper 2000AD, with hard Sci-Fi and violence and a hint of weirdness.

Some fine laser guns right there.

In a complete change of pace, Harrison provided a single episode of the Scarlet Apocrypha for the Megazine, in which Durham Red is re-imagined in a number of different vampire contexts. His version sees her as 60/70s horror icon on the convention circuit, and he unleashed a caricature Mort Drucker style, unlike anything he’d done before, and an utter delight. So much glorious background detail.

References to the Twin Towers and Rebellion taking over 2000AD were well soon after the facts...
Words by Dan Abnett (and is that actually a caricature of Abnett on the far left?)

To Harrison’s enormous credit, he went on to channel this sort of creativity in future work. The Ten Seconders is much lighter than his earlier work, the characters less openly (if at all) based on photo reference, and generally the storytelling is clearer. And yet, there was room for improvement, as if he was playing around with new techniques that weren’t quite gelling yet.

A mix of draightsmanship and digital manipulation really sells the action of
boarding a plane in mid-air.
Words by Rob Williams

Damage: part Mongrol, part the Thing.
Words by Rob Williams

 But gel they did, when Harrison emerged after years doing mostly covers (especially for Rebellion’s novel imprint, Abaddon), to tackle the latest Space War saga, Damnation Station. To my mind, it’s the perfect synthesis of his cartoony style and his ultra high-def space opera goodness.

That alien is soo delightly gooey and creepy. Love it.
Words by Al Ewing

Harrison always puts the effort in, here showing the torutred inner-thoughts
resulting from PTSD in space.
Words by Al Ewing

The same style is currently lending itself absolutely perfectly to Grey Area. Harrison appears to have come full circle, working in tandem with Dan Abnett on a space-spanning saga involving cynical, sour-faced humans and sexy alien ladies.

And, as ever, a continuous stream of background noise.
Words by Dan Abnett

More on Mark Harrison:

He has a gallery hosted by Barney here.
Covers Uncovered old(ish) and new.
Thoughts on Durham Red from The Hipster Dad
-haven't found any interviews, though, which is a shame as it seems as if he's a dude who'd have stuff to say.

Personal favourites:

Judge Dredd: Conspiracy of Silence

Durham Red: The Scarlet Cantos; The Vermin Stars

Glimmer Rats

Damnation Station:  The ending (technically 5 different stories, but they were presented as a continuous run of 12 Progs)

Grey Area: Nearer my God to Thee – and everything since then, too.

 

Somehow, the crazy alien face is showing empathy. Amazing.

*It keeps nearly being resolved, especially with Origins and its follow-on saga Tour of Duty, but never really is. I guess because the only actual ending would be for Dredd to come out against the system and demand a new style of government in MC-1 (presumably involving things like Democracy and a return to trial by jury, or at least trials of any kind!), which would pretty radically re-write the rules for how to tell a basic one-off Judge Dredd story. Not gonna happen.

**See also the computer game BloodRayne, which officially did not appropriate*** Harrison’s redesign of Durham Red.

***Not that 2000AD as an institution has much of a moral leg to stand on when it comes to borrowing existing designs every now and then.

No. 48 Steve Dillon

First Prog: 194

Latest Prog: 1164 (printing an old but unaired episode of Hap Hazzard);
before that Prog 783

First Meg: 3.39 (aka 142)

Latest Meg: 3.63 (aka 166)

Total appearances: 196

-including 24 episodes of Preacher that were reprinted in the Megazine, and giving double credit to the handful of stories he wrote and drew by himself.

Creator credits:

Hap Hazzard; the new Harlem Heroes; Tyranny Rex

Deadline magazine, along with Brett Ewins*

Cinematic

Other art credits:

Judge Dredd

Rogue Trooper (mostly the hitman version)

Ro Busters/ABC Warriors

Bad Company (speed-inking over Brett Ewins for a one-off story)

A selection of one-off tales

Notable character creations:

Abelaard Snazz (Dillon was certainly the first in the Prog to draw him, I assume that gives him co-creator credit?)

That 'double-decker dome' design with four eyes
is just delightful.
Words by Alan Moore

Orlok the Assassin (Again, Dillon was the first to draw the character, but he may have been working from someon else's designs. Who knows?)

Werewolf Judges

The Mutant (cloned version of Owen Crysler, the Judge Child – pretty sure Dillon came up with the look)
The Alabammy Blimps (I’ll never forget them!)

Tyranny Rex

Hap Hazzard and his gang

Judge Joyce (Paddy, father to Fintan from the recent Dredd story)
The new Harlem Heroes were promoted to the hilt when they debuted, with a star scan for each. As a reader at perhaps my most avid at the time, they’ve stuck in my mind about as much as they’ve failed to go down in history.** 

Reader's first view of Orlok, who ended uo being one of Dredd's regular recurring foes.
Context by Wagner & Grant

Notable characteristics:

Sneers and snarls; economical use of lines to define people and objects; cheekbones; communicating story through facial expressions; punches that explode out of the page:

He has vampire teeth because this alt. future version of Dredd is, sort of, a vampire.
Words by Wagner & Grant

And eyes that brim over with fear...

Close up of bulging eyes and sweaty brows - it's Dillon 101, and it screams anguished fear.
Words by John Smith

On Steve:

Steve Dillon must have worked on some comics before he got his first gigs at 2000 AD, because he’s one artist who burst onto the scene fully formed. His first Dredd strip, Alone in a Crowd, stands out as being both delightful and as equally well-drawn as his last Dredd work some 10 years later.

Dig those oh-so telling beads of perspiration
Words by Wagner & Grant

For an artist often celebrated for his phenomenal speed (without compromising on quality), it’s kind of a surprise that he didn’t get more long-running work at 2000 AD for a number of years. He kicked off book 2 of the Mean Arena with a real flourish on The Jensens, introducing a team of ne’er do wells (who don’t last long against Matt Tallon and his cyborg pinkie), and generally giving everyone hilarious snarls and arched eyebrows. 

Subway trains always add an air of urban menace
Words by Tom Tully

 

If he’d stayed on to draw the rest of that series (which he could have, in terms of his facility with tight deadlines), it might even now be a recurring strip. As it is, he instead disappeared for a while, occasionally slotting in with the odd Dredd here or there; frankly not enough of them! Cry of the Werewolf is a much-loved classic, but even a minor outing such as The Wreckers was thrilling violent, too. 

Fun with comics: drawing a giant Dredd head in the background in lieu of a separate panel
Words by Wagner & Grant

Another Giant Dredd head, this time with added werewolf transformation sequence.
Words by Wagner & Grant

He should have been the sole artist on City of the Damned, a mega-epic that was aborted half-way through by Wagner and Grant. It was silly, to be sure, but also a lot of fun, and always best on the episodes drawn by Dillon. 

Lovely warp effect as Anderson enters a time machine. No computer tools in them days to rely on, neither.
Words by Wagner & Grant

Whether he was too busy or just not trusted to do the whole thing, I don’t know, but his episodes were the best. And his design for the evil but poorly named ‘The Mutant’ was well creepy.

Dillon did at least get to contribute semi-regularly to 2000AD’s annuals and specials, turning in two memorable Alan Moore scripted robot tales, and the OTT action of a Hammerstein game from Diceman. Judge Dredd: Beyond the Wall, for the 1986 Sci-Fi Special, is fantastically good. One of those rare Dredd tales in which love gets to win (sort of), and Dredd appears to have some compassion, requiring the sort of emotional unsubtlety that Dillon excels in.

Dillon does Film Noir (with added demons) in an episode of The Dice Man
Words by Pat Mills

I want to say that Dillon’s style was forward-looking: late 90s but seen in the early 80s. But this is probably cheating, because my own experience of late 90s comics was shaped by precisely Steve Dillon, on Hellblazer, Preacher and Punisher (with huge nods to Garth Ennis, writer on all three series). I can’t help but think of Dillon’s work as good, solid, accessible comics, always a pleasure to read and never hard work – not a million miles from the straightforward pleasure of Tintin. The storytelling definitely comes first, and Dillon’s over-the-top snarls, sneers and violence help make it exciting. 

How do draw suspicion mixed with lunacy, followed by fear mixed with desperation.
Words by Wagner & Grant

So it’s a little sad that Dillon never really graced any great, long-running stories for the House of Tharg. For a while, between Progs 500-700ish he was in the Prog as often as not, mostly working on a solid but far from his best Rogue Trooper. There was nothing wrong with the story or the art, and on an episode by episode basis it provided thrills and twists – but it was never way-out weird in the manner of the early stuff. Perhaps it suffered from being too competent and coherent? More on this in another creator’s segment a little way down the line. 

Happily enough, Dillon stuck with the character long enough to a) get the chance to script an episode, having a lot of visual fun with a story in which Rogue is temporarily blinded, and b) getting to draw the best Rogue story (ever? maybe not, but it’s close) – Cinnabar.

Written and drawn (abnd lettered too, I think) by Steve Dillon

Dillon pencils, Walker inks
John Smith writers

 

This tale also marked the start of Dillon’s work as, essentially, a mentor to then-newcomer Kevin Walker. Dillon provided pencils, using his innate genius for storytelling and panache, while Walker put in the graft of inking and tone. The duo went on to draw an epic (in length if not quality) run on the new Harlem Heroes.

One imagines the look of the Heroes was dictated by editorial, but Dillon certainly made each work within its remit, although there remained (for me at least) a never resolved agreement on the ethnic identity of hacker-dude Patrice. Somewhat non-stereotypical erudite black man, or ultra-stereotypical ‘kewl’ wigga? I’d like to give the benefit of the doubt, but when it comes to Harlem Heroes, there’s no doubt whatever that it went obvious an unsubtle at every possible turn. Again, more on this another time.

I will say, in its defence, that the look and feel of the group is surprisingly similar to much-loved TV series Firefly…

Firefly was great. Harlem Heroes, not so much

Silver is: Kaylie

Deacon is: Mal and Zoe combined

Slice is: Jayne

Trips is: Wash

Patrice is: ethnically confused

Along the way, Dillon would take time to keep on giving great Dredd.

And let’s not forget that this most fertile period for Dillon saw not only his investment in Deadline Magazine, but also his creation of two new characters for Tharg. And, a few times, meaning he filled out 2/3 of the Prog all by himself!

Tyranny Rex, from the fevered imagination of John Smith, was a sexy mercenary with lizard skin and a dinosaur tail. There may have been a theme about the world of art (including music, sculpture, painting, the human form etc) in the far future, but if so it was pretty muddied. Dillon was, I think, an essential part of Tyranny’s initial and to some extent enduring popularity, while Smith’s stories verged on the impenetrable. 

Wait, why is Prince in this story? I thought it's set in the future.
It is - that's a clone of Prince. An official, record Company sponsored clone.
Not an illegal clone that is an analogy to contemproarty music piracy.
I give up. Let's just enjoy Dillon drawing some angry clone versions of late 80s pop icons, eh...
(Words and barmy ideas by John Smith)

From the left: Mel & Kim; Holly Johnson from Frankie goes to Hollywood; Bono from U2; Grace Jones.

 

Then there’s Hap Hazzard, a character written and drawn by Dillon who only ever had a handful of outings. Basically it’s about a twenty-something waster and his friend, and the shenanigans they get up to in and around barsh, gangsters and unemployment. You can understand why he clicked so well with writer Garth Ennis in years to come. The strip is set on an alien planet, and it involved various sci-fi elements, so it’s not at all out of place with 2000AD. In fact it’s especially in place with the tone of the comic at the time, since it seemed directly aimed at 20-something readers, and not at all at 12 year-olds who were the comic’s original target.

Hap Hazzard is quite the scamp.
Words and pics by Steve Dillon

The plots and jokes in Hap Hazzard are pretty sharp, if you ask me, but something about the series feels as if Dillon sort of dashed it off to see what it’d be like to write as well as draw, maybe testing the waters of the sort of comics that would soon be appearing in Deadline. I’d be curious to know why it was so short-lived. Did Tharg just stop commissioning new episodes, or did Dillon simply run out of ideas / time to take it further?

Dillon saw out his time on 2000AD back where he did his best work – Judge Dredd. After teaming up with Garth Ennis for the first time to have fun with potatoes…

This Potato Gun comes with six settings...
Words by Garth Ennis

He abruptly ended his tenure with the first episode of A Magic Place, the return to one of his greatest works.

He did turn up in the Megazine many years down the line when Preacher ran there, and as I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, I thought it was a series unique and new to that publication. I was wrong about that, but so what? It’s a great comic, with Dillon’s art a treat throughout. He’s been in steady demand in the US comics scene ever since, and deservedly so. But if he could come back for one last Dredd, I wouldn’t be sorry.

Ma Blimp. Name aside, and in context ofthe story, actually a decent character.

More on Steve Dillon:

He has a Tumblr here (not sure how often it gets updated)

And there's a neat review here of Cry of the Werewolf on Comics Bulletin

But otherwise it's mostly stuff about his later work with Garth Ennis.

Cheek bones, snarls, guns and billowing hair.
What more do you want from a Steve Dillon comic?

 

Personal favourites:

Judge Dredd: Alone in a Crowd; Night of the Werewolf; The Wreckers; The Hunter’s Club; Alabammy Blimps; Beyond the Wall; Nightmares

Rogue Trooper: Hit 1, 2 and 3; Cinnabar

Hap Hazzard

*I didn’t read Deadline at the time, but it was heavily advertised in 2000 AD, and is noteworthy for many things, not least of which was providing a training ground for future 2000 AD contributors including Jamie Hewlett, Philip Bond, D’Israeli, Shaky 2000…

Worth celebrating here just as much as on Brett Ewins’s entry.

**Hell, I even have an old home-made pack of 2000AD top trumps where each Harlem Hero got THEIR OWN card. Madness. Later iterations wouldn’t even give Sinister and Dexter separate cards.