2000 AD Covers Uncovered: Running Into The Void With Boo Cook For Prog 2334 and some ‘psychedelic space jazz’

3rd June 2023

Every week, 2000 AD brings you the galaxy's greatest artwork and 2000 AD Covers Uncovered takes you behind-the-scenes with the headline artists responsible for our top cover art – join bloggers Richard Bruton and Pete Wells as they uncover the greatest covers from 2000 AD!

This week, celebrating the new series from David Hine & Boo Cook, the cover is all about Void Runners with Boo giving it the full-on psychedelic sci-fi treatment!

In Void Runners it's time to discover a substance like no other, a harsh galactic regime reliant on its supply, a captain and her crew given an offer they can't refuse, and a revolution that can't be stopped!

It's an eight-episode psychedelic sci-fi series following Captain Shikari and their crew of alien misfits on the search for Kali's Dust – the drug that essentially holds the universe together. But if and when they find it, will Shikari fulfil their mission and take it back to the rulers of the Federation or have they got other plans? Well, that's to be discovered in the pages of this latest out there sci-fi adventure in the pages of 2000 AD. Strap in folks, this is one that Boo describes as ‘a hallucinogenic space manual on how it's a real pain in the arse to live full of hate.’

Now, over to Boo Cook for the making of a very special cover for the debut of a very special new strip…

BOO COOK: As this cover was intended for a brand new cosmic sci-fi strip, I wanted to try and give it an epic film poster vibe in the vein of the old Star Wars trilogy paintings and various Drew Struzan posters where you have a montage featuring all the different players in the story.

Scale of characters is to be played with in these ventures so I used the different scalings of the characters to aid the composition. It had to be a cosmic piece but I also wanted to focus it and have the main character projecting forth so I added a couple of sidebars and the flat width of the Subjugator's hammerhead ninja headpiece worked great for a potential text zone.

Having paid attention to much of the current debate surrounding A.I. generated art I purposely decided that this cover needed to be a fully organic acrylic painting. I’m not strictly against AI as such – it's something of an inevitability at this point but some incredible artists I know are already losing their jobs in various industries as a result. Also, most of what I’ve seen created by AI, whilst very slick, seems to lack soul and real emotion which tends to leave me feeling somewhat sickly and bewildered. While I’m not exactly railing against it, I figured a good standpoint to take would be to swerve all my creative endeavours towards the organic and visceral – capitalise on my own human element, hope that it's recognised as such and therefore an un-reproducible commodity in itself…

With all this in mind I foraged out some great figure reference for Captain Shikari and stretched the image so I had a real nice lanky figure to work from. The greyscale rough was banged together in Photoshop so I could shift things about easily, then I sent it off to Tharg for approval.

I think he pretty much said ‘go for it’ so I lightboxed my rough onto a piece of A3 Bristol Board using various fine liner pens, embellishing the details as I went for a more finished look and threw in some solid blacks. After that, I taped it to a wood panel and began to add a deep purple wash over the line work.

Boo sent over a load of incredible bits of artwork which we’ve added in as galleries through this Covers Uncovered. But the gallery process cruelly crops some of them, which is why you can find them in all their full-size glory at the end of this piece!

It's nice to get the initial wash good and dark but without burying the guide inks.

Once that was dry I was quite keen to start introducing some of that psychedelic space jazz, so I started with the Pleroma jellyfish entity and its crazy glowing ‘nubules’ which led into adding the kozmik sky background with a few stars etc.

It was starting to take shape but I like to get some of the important key areas in early so I have plenty of time to assess and correct them if needs be during the course of the painting. I think Moondog's disapproving smirk was first to go in followed by Shikari's dazzling dayglo yellow skin.

The keen-eyed will twig that in the strip she has constantly morphing skin tones based loosely on the Blue-Ringed Octopus but aside from being insanely time-consuming in real paints I thought there was a chance it might confuse readers.

This would be the first time many people would see the new character and I didn't want anyone to immediately be presented with a ‘what's going on with her skin? it's all blotchy… is that a weird print anomaly?’ confusion so I abbreviated it to straight yellow here. She can morph it at will using sub-dermal chromatophores so it's fair to say she can go sans pattern where required… FACT!

Then it was a case of filling in all the remaining areas – I think the freaky carapace of the Ankorite came next. Weirdly, this was influenced partially by images of Heidi Klum's horrific human worm fancy dress costume which did the rounds on the Internet recently – I mean hats off to her she knows how to cosplay!

Slowly all the areas went in plus some final tweaks with Prismacolor pencils – I think the entire painting took about 6 days in all which is pretty lengthy but I seriously enjoyed every minute of it.

The last element to be added was the stony tones of the sidebars. I was very tempted to leave them purple but was glad I didn't as a few weeks after I finished the piece a gorgeous Mark Harrison cover for The Out appeared with a shockingly similar composition with purple sidebars no less! Obviously, there was no way he could’ve seen my painting and vice versa, just a crazy coincidence based I guess on the idea of a film poster vibe and a composition to propel the action forwards.

One of the toughest stages of doing a real painting for publication is the scanning. I scanned it at home and the colours were absolutely murdered by my scanner and I started to panic a bit.

Cue the amazing Michael at Prints Regent repro shop in Eastbourne! He scanned it beautifully and I was relieved (to say the least) so massive props to him!

It's quite easy to see the difference in colours from these phone pics to the final scanned image – there's always going to be some level of compromise going from analogue to digital but thanks to Michael I was very happy to go to print with it.

Here's some close-ups of the finished piece and finally a pic of my paint palette which had become a strange cosmic brown by the end…

If I do any more covers I fully intend to keep it organic.

Eventually, I’d love to do the strip work inside with real paints but at the mo’, time constraints mean I have to keep the colouring process digital. But I do intend to experiment with a short strip to see if I can speed the process up. At least it's my fallible human brain making the decisions…

Oh, we think Tharg will be wanting more covers from you Boo! He knows great art when he sees it after all!

So there you go, thanks so much to Boo for sending that along, particularly as he was under pressure of deadlines – and you know you don't want to get on the wrong side of TMO when it comes to deadlines! You can find the first episode of Void Runners right now in 2000 AD Prog 2334 wherever you pick up your weekly dose of the Galaxy's Greatest, from comic shops, newsagents, and 2000 AD web shop.

For more from Boo, there's a couple of Covers Uncovered pieces that he's done for us – Prog 2188 & Prog 2305 and then there's three interviews – Death Cap and Blunt with TC Eglington, plus one for Judge Dredd: The Pitch (Prog 2302) with Rob Williams and Arthur Wyatt.

You can find him online at www.instagram.com/boocook and his musical outpourings with bands Motherbox, Forktail (with fellow art droid Simon Davis), and his solo work under the name of Owlmask can be found on the Menk Records.

Now, as promised – all those full-sized, un-cropped Boo Cook images… ENJOY!

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