Titan rising: Judge Dredd by Brian Bolland

Obviously.

Titan rising: Strontium Dog By Carlos Ezquerra

It still feels really fucking weird that while the other obvious series like Dredd, Robo-Hunter, Nemesis, Slaine and Rogue Trooper got multiple albums, Strontium Dog only got this one book, and missed out on all the cover fun. There was no gorgeous Johnny Alpha by Brendan McCarthy, no Jamie Hewlett Wulf, or even a tiny bit more painted Ezquerra, because there should have been more. It's also really fucking weird that nobody has made a movie or TV series out of this space cowboy, but I guess Strontium Dog was always all about the weird.

Titan rising: Slaine by Mick McMahon

This is my go-to tee-shirt for proper rock shows.

Titan rising: ABC Warriors by Simon Bisley

This is where the full metal energy of the Biz was first unleashed on the world, full of black hole mayhem, chainsaw motorcycles and sleek, glistening metal. It's dark as fuck - the cute kid in the first cover meets a gruesome end - but the end of the world never looked so sexy. A horned god was the obvious next step.

Titan rising: Judge Dredd by Jamie Hewlett

I flippin' love Gorillaz, especially when they gave me the chance to see Mick Jones and Paul Simonon put on their very best Mick Jones and Paul Simonon personas at an Auckland gig, but I'd take a 8-page Mean Machine Angel story by Jamie Hewlett over a thousand Gorillaz videos.

Titan rising: Rogue Trooper by Dave McKean

Rogue Trooper could be deeply creepy - a stone-cold killer with blank eyes and an impossible resolve - and sometimes artists tap into how unsettling he can be. Some artists, including co-creator Dave Gibbons, just gave us loads of clear, concise and brutal future-war action. Dave McKean is not one of those artists.

Titan rising: Ro-busters by Kevin O'Neill

Kevin O'Neill was so good at the robotic craziness because he didn't have to worry about realism or anatomy or anything like that, and could give his droid creations outlandish features and obsessive detailing. Plenty of other great artists have taken a crack at Ro-Jaws and Hemmerstein, and none of them have come close to O'Neill's fevered vision.

Titan rising: Halo Jones by Ian Gibson

Ian Gibson's female form was absolutely seductive, no matter what form it took - Halo Jones goes from young and independent, to delicate and self-conscious, to tough and seasoned. We can only imagine what the pirate queen version in the lost Book 4 would have looked like, but Gibson would undoubtedly have nailed the look.

Titan rising: Judge Dredd by Mick McMahon

The Judge Dredd art of Mick McMahon was always my least favourite as a kid, more drawn to the crystal clear lines of Bolland, or the bulky superheroics of Ron Smith. Now I genuinely think it is incomparably amazing, with weird anatomy and dramatic shadows. His Dredd is almost always standing wide and firm as he deals with alien scum and mechanical psychos, and is always instantly recognisable. It took me a while, but I got there in the end - if you don't get McMahon's Dredd, you don't really get Dredd.
 

Titan rising: Zenith by Steve Yeowell

Steve Yeowell's art style evolved drastically over the four Phases of the Zenith storyline, from eager clarity to chunky abstraction to a bold, clear line, and there is just a taste of it in the way Zenith is portrayed on the covers of these five books. The Zenith strip was the most 80s thing 2000ad ever produced, but these things still look sharp.

Titan rising: Rogue Trooper by Walt Simonson

This might be the only official 2000ad thing Walt Simonson ever did, which is a damn shame, because his vivid dynamism was well suited to the tiny attention span of British boys comics. (John Byrne did a whole Dredd story once, but we don't talk about that.)

Titan rising: Charley's War by Joe Colquhoun

Charley's War was the one of the very few non-2000ad strip to get his kind of Titan treatment - there were some Jeff Hawke books as well, but who gives a shit about Jeff Hawke? - with Joe Colquhoun doing the usual expereinced brilliance for the covers. While it might not have had robots and ray guns, Charley's War is the greatest war comic ever produced, so it was always worth collecting like this.

Titan rising: Judge Dredd by Simon Bisley

 

It's impossible to overtstate how influential Simon Bisley was on British comic artists of his age. After his astonishingly explosive work on Slaine The Horned God, all of his contemporaries started slapping on the paint, with many ordered to do so by editors determined to capture the magic of Bisley. But the artist, who famously had no fucking idea what he was really doing when he decided to give painting a crack, was lightning in a bottle, as can be sen in these covers. Nobody used colour like Bisley did, or had his weird and endearing awkwardness, and he instantly clicked with the idea that Dredd is an inherently absurd story, and that its blast of dark humour and action needed an absurd face.

Titan rising: Alan Moore's Shocking Futures and Twisted Times by Kevin O'Neill

The Twisted Times book was the only Titan album that I actually bought in the 1980s. They were usually thunderously expensive and rare as hell, but I found these two absolute pearlers - collecting the best of Alan Moore's Future Shocks and Time Twisters - in a Dunedin bookstore shortly before it closed, about 30 years ago. They were in the bargain bin, and going for $5 each, which was still a lot of money for 1989 Bob. So I could only get one and went for the Twisted Times book, mainly because it had all the Abelard Snazz stuff, and that was seriously the funniest fucking shit when I was 14. It was still hard to pass up that other book, especially when O'Neill's cover might be the best portrait of the bearded writer ever produced. The one I did get is still there on the shelf, two metres away from where I'm sitting writing this right now, and I swore I'd complete the set if I ever saw the Shocking Futures book anywhere else. But I never did.

Titan rising: Judge Anderson by John Bolton

Despite being a classical British artist, John Bolton somehow bypassed 2000ad, seemingly going straight from Hammer horror adaptions in the 1970s to Classic X-Men back-up features in the 1980s, without doing a stint for Tharg. And even though this is just about all we got from him in this regard, it proves his soft (and still weighty) line would have made him a majestic Judge Anderson artist.

Titan rising: Nemesis by Kevin O'Neill

Nobody quite does the even sharper edge of alien anatomy and spooky hatred with as much violence and vitality as Kevin O'Neill does. 

Titan rising: Judge Dredd by Dave McKean

When you couldn't get Sienkiewicz, Dave McKean will always do in a pinch. Especially when he is actually drawing something, instead of just going for the eye-popping collage.

Titan rising: Robo-Hunter by Ian Gibson

 

There is an extra level of gleam and shine to Gibson's air-brushed colour work of this period, and while his black and white pages for Robo-Hunter were always gorgeous and energetic, these colour covers gave all that metallic insanity a whole new dimension.