Meltdown Man sketch.

It's been a while since I posted on here, sorry. Mostly that is because the material I have been working on is either 'hush-hush' or not particularly interesting.

Anyway, here's a thing I did fairly recently. Done in a sketchbook that a guy is passing round to as many 2000AD artists past & present as he can. I was totally free to draw whoever I pleased from the 2000AD stable, which for me would normally mean Rogue Trooper, however, since there was already two scarily fantastic Rogue contributions from both Dave Gibbons & Colin Wilson (yes, really... sheesh) in there, I decided to spread my net wider. Dredd was considered, as was Johnny Alpha, Matt Tallon (from the original Mean Arena), Slaine & various others. But in the end I came down to this guy, Nick Stone, 'The Meltdown Man'. I'll not go into the details of the original story, but I remember enjoying it, it involved Nick Stone (an ex SAS trooper) in a kind of a 'man out of time, Planet Of The Apes' thing, with beautiful artwork by Bellardineli. I suspect that when he drew the strip he was given an early still of Kurt Russell in Escape From New York (which was more or less contemporary with the strip), since as you can see, the resemblance is striking. What occurred to me only recently is that many years after this strip, Bravo Two Zero veteran, Andy McNab,  took to writing novels about an ex SAS trooper called Nick Stone. Coincidence or homage, who knows.

Any way, here's the sketch, done with a fineliner pen, & a brush pen. Also, a still of Kurt Russell in the aforementioned flick, for those unfamiliar with it.