Classic 2000 AD Covers by Dave Gibbons
Rogue Trooper to Earthside 8
Having recently bought and thoroughly enjoyed reading Confabulation: An Anecdotal Autobiography, the new book by Dave Gibbons, (primed for my bookcase, below), it reminded me that I had scans of some of his amazing 2000 AD covers that I brought with me from London to California, that I can share with you here.
Some of these appeared years ago on my original Secret Oranges blog, and were also re-posted by the folks at 2000 AD on theirs. What I can exhibit here in no particular order, are vintage 2000 AD covers in their full glory, and not how they looked after they’d been printed on bog standard paper stock.
As an explanation of the process; The black & white line art has been printed onto an acetate overlay and a duplicate of that has been printed onto a separate sheet in blue line. The colours have been hand painted onto the blue line sheet and the two are married together before being sent to press. This is how things were done in the 2000 AD Command Module, circa 1981.
Here are a couple of covers featuring Dave’s artwork that I designed myself. The Rogue Trooper Special was designed digitally using Quark and Adobe software, but the much earlier Earthside 8 was put together in ye olde design and paste-up way, using typesetting and a logo that was created using Rubylith and a scalpel. Rubylith consists of two films sandwiched together. The bottom layer is a clear polyester sheet, and the top layer is a translucent, red colored sheet. The top layer can be cut cleanly and precisely with a scalpel, and peeled away from the bottom layer. It gives a much cleaner, sharper edge to lettering than even a rOtring pen.
Earthside 8 was to be a younger version of 2000 AD in the style of an offworld TV Channel, but was aborted after the feedback from some school kids and a bit of market research. Apart from the cover by Dave Gibbons, other artists featured were, Carlos Ezquerra, Colin MacNeil, Brett Ewins, Roger Langridge, Mark Eyles, Paul Peart and Jamie Hewlett, with stories by John Wagner, Mark Millar, Pat Mills, Clint Langley, Dave Stone and Glenn Rice. All issues were returned after the research was concluded, and pulped… except for this and a couple more!
Anyway, back to the Confabulation book. It’s great! Go get it!
Lew Stringer, Cartoonist has written about it on his blog right here.
And John Freeman has written about it on his Downthetubes site.
The Radio Times cover was hand separated at Marvel UK!
I have to admit that I traced a couple of those covers back when I was trying to work out how to do this stuff. Dave is such a great technician.