An actual published 2000 AD cover, not a standalone painting, crediting writers Alan Grant and John Wagner alongside pencillers Val Semeiks and John Dell, priced at £2.95 with the weekly's familiar barcode strip along the bottom edge. The art shows Judge Dredd on his Lawmaster motorcycle squaring off against Lobo, weapon drawn, while a green-skinned alien creature looms behind them both. It's a genuine crossover cover rather than a fan-service mash-up, and it captures something specific about Bisley's career: his relationship with 2000 AD ran in both directions. He got his start there in 1987 after editor Pat Mills spotted a painting he'd done of a robot cradling a baby and put him to work on the relaunched ABC Warriors, and he went on to draw both Sláine and Judge Dredd for the anthology before his redesign of Lobo for DC, done alongside writers Alan Grant and Keith Giffen, made him equally associated with American comics. A cover crossing Dredd and Lobo is, in a sense, Bisley's two biggest character legacies meeting on the same page, one a British 2000 AD mainstay he helped define visually, the other an American cult icon he built from the ground up. The credits line here also underlines how much of Bisley's most memorable work was collaborative rather than solo, Val Semeiks and John Dell handling the pencils and inks on this particular cover while Bisley's earlier design work on both characters shaped how they're drawn regardless of who's actually holding the brush or pen for any given issue. It's a nice piece of comics-history trivia as much as it is an image: proof that these two very different characters, one grim-future law enforcer, one biker-gang bounty hunter, actually crossed paths in print.
Lobo Vs Judge Dredd
