Mega mega

From time to time I mention that I’d like to run away from London and live somewhere quieter. Somewhere in the countryside. West Wales perhaps. The North probably. I spent most of my childhood in a rural setting, the kind of place where you could wake up and find a cow had invaded the garden. At the time, surrounded by all that fresh air and greenery, where I really wanted to live was Mega City One, the fictional stamping ground of Judge Dredd. This was entirely down to the artwork of Carlos Ezquerra.

Ezquerra illustrated most of the Judge Dredd stories in a run from prog 245 through to about prog 320. He came back every so often and the last big story I remember him doing was Necropolis, but by then my interest was waning.

I've not read enough comics to say that his depiction of the future is unique but I certainly preferred it to the other artists in 2000AD (with Mike McMahon a not particularly close second). When I was a kid megacities seemed a certainty (like BosWash). Now though, what with ecological concerns and the massive advances in IT, we’ll probably all be living in sensibly distributed eco-units, attending work (if at all) by some kind of holographic conference call type thing (like in The Naked Sun or A Very Private Life).

When I was little I used to find it a downer that it was all so far off into the future (the Apocalypse War is set in 2105) and that I probably wouldn't be around to witness it. So I was cheered up by the story Night of the Rad Beast, when two of the characters' dates of birth were given and they were slightly older than me. Maybe I'd live to see the Mega City after all, even if I had to become a decrepit cyborg to do so.

I soon started to buy up older issues of 2000AD (and the defunct Starlord) and saw his artwork for the Strontium Dog stories. Following the caseload of an interstellar bounty hunter gave a lot more scope for illustrating alien life forms. Like Dredd, the stories are shot through with a dark strain of humour. One of my favourites was The Killing, in which plot is dispensed with and, as the name suggests, it just gets straight to business with some fantastic pictures of aliens blasting/gutting/dissolving each other.

There’s just the right touch of pulp or hack work to his pictures – hardly surprising given that I read somewhere that he was churning out the artwork for the episodes of the Apocalypse War on a weekly basis rather than months in advance. In most of his pictures there's tons of grimy detail. In an interview he cited as his major influences Breccia and Hugo Pratt, neither of who I'd heard of but after a little digging I can certainly see the influence of Hugo Pratt.

Sci fi films rarely get both the look of the cities or the outfits right or credible. Often the clothing styles are mimimal, white robes or utilitarian uniform type outfits. Compared to these stiff and sterile depictions Ezquerra’s future seems pretty funky. I’m amazed that no film makers have ripped him off – it can’t be that expensive, just lots of rubbery foam to make the outfits (all those knee and shoulder pads).