Review by Luke Williams
Sean Phillips has been at this art game a long while. Your scribe remembers the first time he had encountered him was in a fill in episode(s) of “Third World War” for Crisis, and that is a long time ago now, but his first work was in girls comics in his mid teens a few years prior to that.
It’s astonishing to remember how long Sean has been in the spotlight, but equally befuddling is the length of time since he last regularly worked for 2000AD. His work perhaps hasn’t garnered the attention that other artists of the same generation has, but it has been more than significant, both as a front and centre strip artist, and as designer on the early editions of the Judge Dredd Megazine.
For the most part he is famed for his work with Ed Brubaker on various highly successful crime and thriller comics (their Criminal is soon to be a streaming series), but perhaps is his big breakout was Marvel Zombies, teamed with writer Robert Kirkman, riding the undead wave with his decaying and necrotic renditions of the Marvel Universe’s good and great.
However, 2000AD and its sister publications is where he spent a large part of the early part of his career and this is a timely retrospective (especially with the aforementioned Criminal series on the horizon) of some of his work for the ‘Prog and the Meg’.
With this volume, the editors have taken a different approach to the Art of Judge Dredd by Jock. Whereas the Jock volume is a collection of unlettered art, sketches, roughs etc,the Phillips book has complete lettered strips, prefaced by a short introduction, along with a selection of his design work, roughs, characters sketches etc across the Tharg’s Empire.
This collection covers examples of most of his work from the early days for the Meg and the Prog, demonstrating how versatile Phillips is an artist and his willingness to experiment. From the early mixed media work on show here, such as the weird John Smith collaboration “Danzig’s Inferno” and the underrated “Armitage”; to his attempts at aping Simon Bisley’s heavy painted, overly muscular style to the exaggerated, angular, cartoony almost Kirby style of his Dredd’s (perfectly illustrated and his noir work on “Downlode Tales”. There are a few curios here too, such as his collaboration with Peter Hogan on “The Steel Claw”, taken from the anomalous “Action” (not “that” Action) special from the 1990s, all subtle lighting and noir, foreshadowing his Hellblazer and Criminal work.
There are notable exceptions. The magnificent “Devlin Waugh: Swimming in Blood” is absent, mainly because it’s been collected so many times elsewhere. It would have been good to see his work for the agitprop experimental comic Crisis, where his work on “Third World War”, “Straitgate” and “New Statesmen”, where his talent really started to bloom.
Sadly, like a lot of Rebellion’s reprints, occasionally the reproduction of the art lets the package down. Phillips work can be moody, but he has a strong sense of colour, and even on these glossy paper some of these pages are a tad muddied, dark, ill defined, spoiling what is otherwise an excellent and worthwhile package for one of the most underrated and underappreciated artists in the industry.
Luke Williams
The 2000AD Art Of Sean Phillips
by Sean Phillips (Artist) and Dan Abnett, Ian Edginton, John Smith, Dave Stone and John Wagner (Writers)
Out: 26th November 2025
Hardcover | 256 Pages
ISBN: 978-1837865291
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Brought up on a diet of Commando, British Boys Annuals and Asterix, Lucas Williams’s day job limits his reading time. Luckily for everyone else this also restricts his writing time.
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