‘Big Jimping’ was my second story for ‘Zarjaz’ and my first
comic script from a writer other than myself for a long time. Zarjaz editor
Dave Evans emailed me with the script on 4th February 2011.
After reading the script by Lee Robson which had some great 'Dredd' one liners. I roughed out the pages. These
can be seen below.
More information regarding the evolution of the story can be
found on Lee’s blog via this link.
Above: Rough page layouts for pages 1 and 2.
Above: Rough page layouts for pages 3 and 4.
Above: Layout for page 5.
My characterization of Dredd is constantly evolving so I
decided to tweak my art style to account for the humorous nature of the
story.
I wanted to include characters from different ethnicities
into my art (after all Mega-city is home to 400 million people) so this seemed
to make sense.
I decided to give the make-up table seen in the story a
futuristic make-over. Therefore I replaced the square table seen on layout page 3, panel 5 for some thing more visually
appealing.
Above: Finished make-up table design.
I then started work on the inked page art. At the time I was
still drawing everything on seperate bits of paper, scanning and laying up the
pages on computer.
Artists adding extra visual jokes to their page panels is a
long established 2000ad tradition and one that I like to uphold with my
artwork.
Sometimes these ‘extra jokes’ get covered up by text
bubbles. This was the case with panel 3, page 1, which you can see now below
without the lettering.
Some 15 months later ‘Big Jimping’ has been published in
Zarjaz 15, which can be bought from Futurequake publishing via this link. http://www.futurequake.co.uk/shop.php
A review for the issue 15 of Zarjaz has been posted on the
Forbidden Planet blog by regular blogger Richard and can be read via this link. http://forbiddenplanet.co.uk/blog/2012/zarjaz-more-thrill-power/
