2000AD British Comics

As a child I remember going down to the corner shop to get the latest 2000AD comic and as it was every fortnight it really chewed up my pocket money, especially as I found out that back issues were going for pence at the local comic shop.

I used to sit and read these little story wonders and think what it would be like to create these, I used to spend hours drawing characters and worlds based on mega city one and any thing I saw in the 2000AD comic, by far the most noticable character was judge dredd (forget the film though!) but there was other comic book greats such as slaine, rogue trooper and a few others that stuck out for me, my imagination was gleaming.

I used to sort of prefer the black and white versions, the look and feel of the pages was part of the reason why I looked forward to these comics to come out, but as I got older and they started adding painted artwork in them I soon came round to the idea, and even recently when they have used computer colouring as part of the publishing process, just like every comic book now they have an almost quality movie feel to them that is just unmatched.

The likes of Judge Dredd just really fascinated me with the stories and the artwork.

Perhaps one of the other main icons of the 2000AD format was regular characters you could identify with, Slaine was the equivalent of a conan type character, but remains quite popular today, still going strong against the heavy weights like judge dredd and rogue trooper.

The art of Mike Mcmahon still looks impressive even to this day, I always refer back to the art and the way the stories unfolded through the art and the writing.

Rogue was a genetically-engineered warrior, bred to fight in the galaxy's deadliest war-zones. But the G.I.'s brothers-in-arms were ambushed at the Quartz Zone Massacre, betrayed by one of their own generals. The only survivor, Rogue went A.W.O.L, vowing to hunt down the traitor general and bring him to justice.

I was always intrigued by the story of rogue, as it was a story of revenge and how this story evolves in other story arcs that came well after, as always the art was inspiring to me, as it was one of the mian stories that got me interested in drawing my own comic books.