Beyond Watchmen & Judge Dredd

The Art of John Higgins

Do you read comics? Quick couple of questions. Name your favourite letterer. How about your top three colourists?

The influence of these professionals is getting brought to the fore more often in comics (for example the excellent work of Nick Filardi, Lee Loughbridge, and Matt Wilson in Cry Havoc). However, colourists’ impact on the tone of the story still often gets overlooked. Beyond

Watchmen & Judge Dredd goes some way to address this shortfall.

Watchmen is one of the most famous comics on the planet. Alongside Alan Moore’s ground-breaking story, and Dave Gibbon’s world class artwork, it is the use of colour by John Higgins that influences the mood and emotion of the story. Beyond Watchmen & Judge Dredd goes into great detail about some of the decisions for the colour choices made. As the title suggests there is far more to enjoy here. Part biography, part retrospective, and part technical manual, Beyond Watchmen & Judge Dredd is conversational in style, yet there is a lot of detail here. For example, the description of colour temperature is fascinating, and Higgins makes the point that a good colourist can create a mood and emotional response.

Higgins’s career has ranged from line drawings for books (the sequential of a candle melting down a skull to animate the face is one of the best illustrations you will see), to his self-published comic Razorjack. As you would expect this book is full of lush illustrations, with work from 2000AD, The

Hills Have Eyes, and Jacked. My personal favourite? The unsettling cover of World Without End #3.

If you have even a passing interest in comics I would highly recommend Beyond Watchmen & Judge Dredd. It’s not a book that tells you where the bodies are buried, but with its advice on techniques, setting up a workspace, materials, and work practices, by the end you could probably draw some suitably decaying corpses.