Tripwire Talks To Nick Percival About His New 2000AD Strip And More

Nick Of Time

Tripwire’s contributing writer Paul N Neal recently spoke to veteran Judge Dredd artist Nick Percival about Iron Teeth, his latest project for 2000AD, and more…

TRIPWIRE: You have illustrated a handful of horror style stories for 2000AD and Judge Dredd The Megazine for writers Michael Carroll and more recently Kenneth Niemand. How do their scripts compare?

NICK PERCIVAL: Well, they can both sling a few words around, so it’s all good. I’d had a long break from comics and Mike was the first Dredd writer that I worked with when I returned to Dredd, so I’ll always have a soft spot for the old fella! They can obviously both handle all genres from my experience. Mike’s scripts are a bit more open and more on the sci-fi adventure side of Dredd, with a larger cast of characters, whereas Ken’s scripts have been more tight and contained with some great dark horror elements. Both have a good ear for Dredd’s dialogue and his deadpan humour and it is always in there. The character is very consistent. They leave me plenty of room to put my visual spin on the content of the script, so if I’ve had to alter a few things here and there, I’ve not had any complaints  – at least to my face! But I respect their craft, so always try to do my best work. They both know the sort of things I like to illustrate and every Dredd script I’ve had from them was written with me in mind as artist, so that’s a cool working relationship for sure.

I’m still working with them currently, so that’s a good sign! I actually have a cool one-off Dredd story from Mike on the drawing board at the moment and Ken and I are developing the follow up to the ‘Iron Teeth’ storyline which I’m excited about.

TW: Many of your fans might be well aware you have a soft spot for horror movies and horror comics. Before I ask you about your latest project, would you be able to name some of your favourites?

NP: I’m a huge fan of the old EC Horror comics. It’s the classic horror tittles that I love the most (Universal Monsters and so on.) So those comics for me contained everything I liked:  fantastic art, dark humour and lovely gruesome stories with a neat twist at the end. Anything illustrated by Graham Ingels I would point out as to being one of my favourites from the EC era. Probably my all-time favourite would be a 10 page short story called ‘Jennifer’ written by Bruce Jones and illustrated by horror master Bernie Wrightson. It was published back in 1974 in Creepy Magazine. All those old horror magazines by Warren are worth picking up. I love Wrightson’s storytelling in this tale and the splash page is amazing and again, it has a great twist at the end. I highly recommend anyone to check it out. They even did a loose TV adaptation of it for the ‘Masters of Horror’ series I believe.

TW: How about the 70’s Marvel titles like Werewolf by Night?

NP: Oh yeah, for sure. The 70’s Marvel stuff is great. I love Mike Ploog’s art on Werewolf By Night and Gene Colan and Marv Wolfman’s Tomb of Dracula is just a masterpiece. The black and white Essential volumes are beautiful. The early Man Thing and Swamp Thing, House of Mystery are all up there too. The black and white magazine that Marvel did in the 70’s, Tales of The Zombie, particularly stayed with me as a kid. Those early Boris Vallejo and Earl Norem painted covers were awesome. I actually got a chance to paint Marvel’s resident zombie character Digger in the revamped Dead of Night mini series some years ago which was fun.

NP: This is just one of the title pages I did for the Marvel Dead of Night series (above).

TW: Before talking about Iron Teeth, can you say a little about the previous strips you have created with Kenneth Niemand? Is it worth your fans rereading them before the release of your new strip together?

NP: We’d both been meaning to work together for a while and had been planning that I’d do some of the Dredd Zombie art for the 2000AD/Megazine crossover event that came out a few years ago. I was busy on the Dark Judges at the time, so that didn’t happen (I did get to paint the Zombie Dredd cover art for the story though which was nice.)

NP: Anyway, various emails finally led to the Dredd three-part story, ‘The House On Bleaker Street’ for 2000AD – a short but sinister tale of Dredd and a newbie Judge tracking some criminals into the Undercity beneath Mega City One. Needless to say, things kick off when they get attacked by the undead and other creatures that reside there, partly powered by the spirits of the victims killed in the epic Necropolis saga. In the story, we are introduced to the sadistic, supernatural evil Judge Roche who had been possessed during Necropolis and has been lurking in the Undercity ever since then, carrying out all sorts of sick and twisted shenanigans down there. Without any spoilers, some of the things we started in the ‘Bleaker Street’ storyline do evolve in ‘Iron Teeth’ and will go beyond that with future stuff we’re creating.

NP: Ken and I also worked together last year on the 2000AD/Battle Action crossover event where we did the Dredd portion of the story which teams him up with Judge Anderson and Cursitor Doom as they take on supernatural forces under Mega City One. You can see a theme developing here.

TW: Could you please give us some info about Iron Teeth? What is the story about? How many parts is it? When does it start? What can readers expect?

NP: It starts 15 May in 2000AD Prog 2382 and runs for six parts. Ken and I wanted to expand on the horror/supernatural side of Dredd’s world, so the ‘Iron Teeth’ story kicks all that off.

It deals with a group of orphaned kids who have run away from a Mega City Care facility on their quest for a creature –  a sort of urban legend – who is rumoured to lurk in the Undercity way beneath the Mega City’s surface. But or course, on their journey they end up with much more than they bargained for. Dredd ends up being the one to investigate their disappearance and you’ll have to read the series to find out the rest!

Above: Nick shared an exclusive image of Iron Teeth For Tripwire.

NP: It’s firmly in the horror genre  – things hiding in the shadows as we go deeper and deeper into the caverns and tunnels that exist beneath Mega City One – dangerous places that we haven’t seen before. There’s a strong supernatural element to the story as well and, as I mentioned, it does link to our previous Dredd tale, ‘The House On Bleaker Street’ but also lays the groundwork for what will come after – especially on the final page of the final episode.

Another page from Judge Dredd: Iron Teeth 

NP: For me, it was a another chance to go full on with building the mood with lots of shadows, cinematic lighting from the limited light sources down there and hopefully a nice, slow build as we get further into the world of Iron Teeth. We don’t fully reveal him straight away – he’s mostly in shadow but you get the idea of the gruesome and terrifying things he’s been getting up to when you see his lair and hear some of his disjointed narrative thoughts. It’s a new threat for Dredd and I like story scenarios where he’s on his own – no other judges to help him out  – but of course, it’s still Dredd, so he doesn’t scare easy –  if at all. I guess some of the Dark Judges work I did also had similar themes visually but I feel this is much more contained and much darker in content.

NP: The main influence for the story, as Ken pointed out to me comes from the legend of ‘The Gorbals Vampire’ which I wasn’t familiar with but is spot on for what we wanted to do.  “In September 1954 in Gorbals, Glasgow, rumours had spread among the school children of a terrible, 7 foot tall vampire with iron teeth. Rumour had it that this vampire had kidnapped and murdered two young boys and feasted on their corpses. Despite the adults and the police trying to calm the hysteria, the children decided that action had to be taken to bring this terrible ‘Gorbals Vampire’ to justice.”

When we were developing the idea, I did a concept painting, to get some visual ideas down, just to  try a few things and get the tone and mood for the story clear in my head. We were also discussing the film, ‘Stand By Me’, mostly for the kid dynamic of the plot. That was a good starting point for how we’d approach some of the storytelling – loss of innocence and so on. There’s a scene in episode 3, where we show a whole bunch of new, supernatural things in Dredd’s world that to be honest, any one of them could have their own storyline, so a lot of potential and stuff we want to explore in the future.

TW: Could you share what is on your drawing board currently and your plans for the future.

NP: As always, it’s the usual multiple projects going on at the same time. There’s some film concept artwork I’m working on as well as private commissions (these are ‘real’ paintings on canvas).

NP: 2 recent private commissions. Acrylic paints on canvas. Judge Donald Duck (based on the famous Carl barks painting and to celebrate the 90th Anniversary of Donald Duck) and a Judge Alfred E. Neuman from MAD magazine)

NP: For comics, I’m currently working on a strip for the upcoming 2000AD crossover event, that I’m sure will get an official announcement soon and I have some more Dredd lined up, along with various covers and so on. I also have a couple of larger comics projects bubbling away behind the scenes but probably a bit too early to talk about at the moment. One thing that I’m hoping to finally get underway is a film project that got waylaid in the pandemic but fingers crossed looks like things are finally clicking back into place, so that would be pretty cool to get cracking on that.

Judge Dredd: Iron Teeth starts in 2000AD this week.