Stylin' with Mean

Ah, Mean - my favourite buttist. I was thinking recently about how squeamish current film makers and image creators are about showing the head-butt due to censors applying a more restrictive certficate. No doubt because - as Martin Amis writes in his great book 'Money' - it's a very intimate way of fighting and it appalls and shocks. I remember reading elsewhere about some apparent controversy in the the Lord of the Rings films where there's the odd 'Bok' between Aragorn and the Uruk-Hai. Funny what gets people's danders up when you consider what else is shown on screen. Didn't seem an issue for the creators of 2000AD where, for many characters, it was their preferred method of settling a dispute.
Anyway, I've been trying to nail some sequential styles - with varying results. I've been going back through back-issues of 2000AD to use their story-lines to test some styles - a deadly thing to do as the artwork is so great and can't help but influence my easily malleable approach - not a good thing. The above frame is one of a very few that came out OK - taken from the Dredd storyline 'Dredd Angel' and found in Prog 380 (should you want to see the original frame). That's going back some, citizen.

Scrappin' it - Mean & Fear

Just some scraps for this post, faithful visitor. I'm having computer meltdowns at the moment and new gear is in order. Transitions are always painful and time consuming, so having nothing better to show, I've gone back through the virtual sketchpad and sifted through the many doodles, trials and experiments I'm always scratching away at. Most of them don't see the daylight as they're usually unfinished, lame or dead in the water, etc. But sometimes a judicial crop here and a bit of text there can inject a bit of life. So in the absence of anything more note-worthy here are some perennial fan-art faves from the greatest comic in the universe: Judge Fear and Mean Machine Angel (again).