After graduating from London’s Central School of Art in 1974, Lincolnshire born artist Brian Bolland quickly gravitated towards the comics industry. A firm fan from an early age Bolland grew up on a steady diet of DC stories, with Green Lantern and The Flash being favourites. He spent a couple of years working on such diverse assignments as Powerman (an Nigerian published superhero comic) and House of Hammer magazine as well as illustrations for various fanzines and a short stint on Syd Jorden’s Jeff Hawke daily newspaper strip. In 1977 he came to the attention of UK publisher IPC who were on the lookout for artists for their proposed new weekly science fiction comic 2000AD. His first work for the title was the cover to Prog (issue) 11 and, after a few more covers, he was commissioned to draw the comics most popular character: Judge Dredd.
Seattle based publisher Fantagraphics are currently reprinting EC’s hugely influential line of comics from the 1950’s. This is their first release…
Corpse on the Imjin! And other stories by Harvey Kurtzman
When I first heard that Fantagraphics had acquired the rights to the EC Comics archive I was initially a little wary. Over the last few decades there have been several attempts to reprint the EC library in various different formats culminating with Gemstone Publishings short lived plan to reprint all the comics in their entirety, with each hardback volume containing 6 entire issues. This reprint series, which would have included all the classic EC titles – including Tales from the Crypt, Vault of Horror and Weird Science amongst others – stalled after only a dozen or so releases. Continue reading Corpse on the Imjin!→
Over the past six or seven years there has been a welcome boom in the number of high quality, hard cover art books focusing on comic book artists. I suspect the profusion of superhero movies is probably partially responsible, but whatever the reasons I hope the trend continues. Continue reading The Art of John Byrne (1980)→
The Chronicles of Judge Dredd was a high quality reprint series first released by Titan Books (the publishing arm of the Forbidden Planet comic shop chain) in the early ’80s.
