Classic 2000 AD Covers by Dave Gibbons

Rogue Trooper to Earthside 8

Mar 29, 2023

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.

A production cover from 5th December, 1981 for 2000AD Prog #241.

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.

A scan from a convention booklet I still have in my collection for UKCAC (United Kingdom Comic Art Convention) 1985, and an amazing illustration by Dave Gibbons.

This one’s an interior production page from 1.5.82 (so it says on the back) for 2000 AD Prog #262.

Production art from 17th October, 1981 for **2000 AD** Prog #234.

2000 AD Prog #175 - 30th August 1980. Unfortunately I only have the black film for this. The colour sheet is missing.

I give you 'The Comic Merger'! Something I always loathed as a kid. It was usually the death knell for the ‘and’ publication. 2000 AD and Star Lord production art from Prog #86, 14th October 1978.

I discovered a cuttings file, full of wonderful memorabilia including this Birthday Celebration cover by Dave Gibbons for Radio Times, June 1988.

From July 1996, this is the cover art for the Rogue Trooper Action Special by Dave painting digitally, and supplied on disk.

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.

From 1992, an extremely rare copy of Earthside 8.

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.

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