In the late 1970s Brian Bolland left an indelible mark on the minds of many a British comic fan with his stunningly original work on 2000AD's Judge Dredd. He went on to attract a US audience with Camelot 3000 and Batman: The Killing Joke and he remains a popular and much sought-after cover artist.

Bolland Strips!, a collection of his whimsical short comic strips, was published in 2005, described by Neil Gaiman as a "strangely English mixture of precision and madness, the sweet-and-sour of funny and sad, like the result of a perverse breeding experiment between Heath Robinson and Alan Bennett."

"Why does Mike McMahon give Judge Dredd such big feet?"

It's a very familiar question. All over the country young people are wringing their hands and shaking their heads at the size of Mike's 'feet'. It was at a comic convention that I saw one soul grinding his teeth and showing all the signs of this peculiar anguish common in so many of his contemporaries; so I told him he ought to ask the man himself, which he did...

Mike McMahon came out of obscurity in early 1977 to start his professional career with the first ever public appearance of Judge Dredd. His drawing style, at first only partially formed, was an imitation of the artist who co-created Dredd, Carlos Sanchez Ezquerra. Carlos pulled out of the series early on, but here was a fresh new artist named McMahon who could do a reasonable Carlos impersonation. I wandered into the 2000AD office soon afterwards and couldn't get anybody to talk to me, and the reason was that six pages of artwork had just arrived from Colney Heath. It was The Return Of Rico story which appears in this book. A choice piece of Pat Mills' writing had inspired some very tasty Mike McMahon artwork and to this day a lump comes into the throat of those of us old enough to remember it.

Around this time a style emerged that, throughout his work on Dredd, and even now, is still developing and changing while remaining instantly recognisable. It's hard to explain what's so good about this work when I can see so clearly what the unconverted might find disagreeable. The lines appear to be slapdash; often the anatomy goes out the window; I personally often find the overall texture of the pages a bit uniform; and as for those feet... Weeell!

Allow me to pull the veil from before your eyes. Mike sweats and slaves over his pencils, often spending over a day on one panel, occasionally throwing yesterday's work in the bin and starting again... And the result is exquisite, precise and delicate (yep, delicate) penciled pages, with lines so faint they never have to be erased after inking. Then, with everything worked out, ON GOES THE INK! Or if this is full-colour artwork, out comes the plastic raincoat and the bog-roll and ON GOES THE WATERCOLOUR! The latter processes taking hours rather than days. This is known in the Art trade as 'Expressionism', and has the effect of making the artwork look fresh, and alive, and un-stodgy... but it can also make it look deceptively simple.

There's some pretty weird draughtsmanship in there too, but Mike has created his own personal vision and everything in it is correct according to its own rules, and in doing so he creates people, places and situations that are more recognisably real. People are never seen standing chest out, legs four feet apart. They stand as you or I would stand, weighed down by the world, fed-up. For all their weird clothing they are people less recognisable from comic books than from the 70s and 80s London. Take a good look at Dredd. Some say he's a very straight-forward character, but with his face looking like a slab of raw meat, and those feet, he's a very complex and contradictory character. He's heroic and macho, he sneers and postures, but the joke is on him because he doesn't know that he looks ridiculous. In fact the joke is on some readers too, because they fail to see the fine balancing act between straight adventure and the comic satire that's always present in a Dredd story, and at its best under the team of Wagner and McMahon.

Mike won't approve of this blurb. He's a no-nonsense type, like the people who populate his pages. He disagrees with intellectualising about comics; in fact the word is that he secretly believes that if he spends his time analysing and discussing his work, or even using reference, it'll spoil the direct act of drawing comics and the simple pleasure of reading them. Well, I'll go along with that, but don't be fooled reader, for what you'll see in the following pages is a great deal of subtle wit and imagination.

Oh, and before I forget, the official word from McMahon himself is: "Dredd doesn't have big FEET… he has big BOOTS!."

Brian Bolland, 1983
From the introduction to Judge Dredd 2 (Titan Books)