30 days of comics I love #28: He's tough... but he's fair!

Judge Dredd by Brian Bolland Masterpiece Edition 

By Big Brian Bolland

Only the tiniest fraction of original comic book art ever makes it to my part of the world, so when I've seen it in stores and art galleries in my travels around the globe, it's always been a goddamn delight.

Bolland has always been the absolute man, ever since I saw his Judge Death when I was six or seven, but I've only ever seen a handful of page or two of his original art in the flesh (especially with his focus on digital production in recent years). I saw some of it at the Cartoon Museum in central London, and all the stolen treasures of the British Museum around the corner were nice and all, but seeing Brian's smudges with my own eyes was way more exciting.

So of course I was ravenous for the Apex edition books that 2000ad publisher Rebellion has been putting out, with page after page of pure Bolland in the biggest, most luxurious package possible.

Unfortunately, it also cost three hundred and fifty freaking dollars, and that was far out of my price range, so I was happy to wait for the smaller Masterpiece edition, which costs less than a third of that. It's obviously not as impressive as the bigger book, but getting to see pages of Bolland brilliance like this is still remarkable.

There's at least there or four pages of Bolland Dredd art in this book that I hadn't seen before, but covers and panels that were burned into my brain at a worryingly young age come alive again in this reproduction of the original art. The smears of inks that were blurred out in newsprint give the most familiar images new vitality, and the focus on his impeccable line becomes clearer than ever before in stark black and white, while you can almost smell the paints used in his early colour efforts, before they were slicked up for the cover of an annual or something.

This is, like, the fifth coffee table book of Bolland art that I own, but it's the most raw, and possibly the most beautiful. I don't get to the great art galleries around the world so much these days, but this will always be on a nearby shelf.