He's a Little Medieval

I've been reading a lot of Hellboy recently.
For:




I'm afraid you really need to Download View it for the best experience.


Ok, so in terms of my process when I was making this I started out with the thought "How can I make this mine? How can I make something that I find interesting and which hopefully no-one else has done?".

I'm not quite sure where it came from, but I did a quick search for "Judge Dredd knight" on Google and found nothing that looked like Dredd as a medieval knight, rather disappointingly. So I stopped to put an image together in my mind, and then worked to try and realise it.

As I mentioned; I've been reading a lot of Mike Mignola's Hellboy recently, mostly to refresh it all in anticipation of getting the latest collected anthology, The Storm and the Fury. Mignola's always been a part of my artistic style, in some cases much more than others, and I wanted to see what I could do within his style now, with so much more experience as an artist than last time.

I drew a lot from Seed of Destruction and The Corpse (in The Chained Coffin and Others), and while I'm not happy with the sky and the sun, I think it's a fine image. Unfortunately, I think uploading it at a hight enough resolution to allow viewers to enjoy it would proportionally make it more and more unwieldy as a submission, simply because of the vast size.
I was a little over-ambitious in that regard.


All that aside, I have since been musing on how this knighted, horse-riding, lance wielding Judge Sir Dredd fits into a medieval, magical (as I had been imagining it) setting.
Dredd, traditionally, is a law enforcer in a vast metropolis, and yet there is no hint of an artificial construction in my picture.

This, to my detail-obsessed mind, was a problem.

So. I think that Dredd is in Cursed Earth. But instead of them being nuke-scarred and radioactive, they are instead magic-blasted and highly - though probably unintelligently - malevolent. Some kind of combination of the high energy magical areas on Terry Pratchett's Discworld (places which can magically mutate you into virtually anything just by you wandering into them) and a very high density of the kind of strange magical, occult or eldritch site that Hellboy often investigates or finds himself in.

I'm not sure why Sir Dredd is out there, though, and to be honest your guess is as good as mine. I think we'd all like to see a sword-wielding Dredd in platemail tackle a Cthulhoid monstrosity in the best traditions of Hellboy, wouldn't we?