Trombone

Doot!

#bards #KelvinDrawsThings

Alphorn

I drew another bard!

I feel like I'm getting closer to what I see in my mind's eye with this one. Not quite, but getting there. #bards #KelvinDrawsThings

Lute

I drew a bard!

I'm still (re)finding my feet, and there are some old bad habits in there, but I'm enjoying drawing again. #bards #KelvinDrawsThings

4000ad

I've been looking through my 2000ad collection* and I thought I'd highlight this one: Prog 2000, released in December 1999 as a double celebration; a big end-of-year special, and a semi-surprised "Crikey!" that 2000ad lasted up to, well, 2000AD, when pretty much every other British comic -- aside from stuff like The Beano or Commando that will likely survive the heat death of the universe -- had folded years before.

This is more properly Prog 1173.5 -- the "real" Prog 2000 would come in 2016 -- but given the date of publication, I can understand why they would jump the gun. This started** a tradition of big end-of-year specials that were numbered by year until 2016 when they switched to the weekly numbering, so there were also two 2001s, two 2002s, and so on.

Still with me?

I don't get many of the weekly issues these days but I always pick up the big end-of-year specials, and I think this first one is one of the best. As a look back at the glory days of the comic, they managed to bring back some big name artists who had long before departed for the US comics industry. There's a cover from Brian Bolland -- who apparently "enthusiastically agreed" -- Dave Gibbons coming back to draw a Rogue Trooper -- sort of -- story, Kevin O'Neill returning for the final episode of the batshit insane Nemesis the Warlock, and Mike McMahon and Cam Kennedy on the two Judge Dredd stories.

Aside from the "old" superstars, you've got incredible detailed black and white art from Kev Walker on ABC Warriors, the underrated Simon Fraser on Nikolai Dante, the genius Carlos Ezquerra on Strontium Dog, glorious painting from Greg Staples on Sláine and Simon Davis on Sinister Dexter, and Mark Harrison's impossible*** paint/digital hybrid art on Glimmer Rats.

Not every story is good, as such, but it all looks amazing, and is probably the most consistently good-looking of the specials.

Here, have a look:

Mike McMahon:

Dave Gibbons:

Kev Walker. Good gosh, look at it:

Simon Fraser. Most of this story is a sex scene, and I try to keep this blog relatively family friendly, so you get crying in the rain instead:

Carlos Ezquerra, experimenting with some slightly dodgy 1999 computer effects:

Greg Staples. This is a weekly comic, remember:

Simon Davis, ditto:

Kevin O'Neill, the only person to have his entire art style banned by DC Comics. Their loss:

Mark Harrison, the same one who drew "The Travellers" in White Dwarf, engaging in some sort of sorcery:

Cam Kennedy:

Not bad for £3.95 Earth money!

*(It's not much of a collection; a few issues from when I was reading the weekly comic, and every end-of-year special since 2000.)

**(There had been the traditional British Christmas annuals -- different to US comic annuals -- but those stopped in the 1990s... except they did an annual in 2025, in addition to the special, just to confuse matters.)

***(I can't work out how he did it in 1999, anyway.)

Most Wanted

If anyone out there has unwanted copies of any of these books, I am willing to pay a fair -- as in, not absurdly inflated collector numbers -- price for them. Let me know!

The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill and... Well That's It, Actually

I walked up a hill yesterday.

#MayThe4thBeWithYou

Happy Star Wars Day everyone!

#MayThe4thBeWithYou