Dragon's Claws 2008

This is probably one of my favourite pieces of work in my portfolio for a number of reasons.

This is a redraw of a piece I did for charity back in 2004, the theme was British characters. Well, I loved Dragon's Claws as a kid (probably even more than I loved the X-Men, and that was quite a bit!) and as they were based in the UK, it was a no brainer for me.

I asked all my writer friends if they could do me a one page script but none of them were familiar with the characters so, having just come off doing Transformers illos for Panini, I thought I'd go right to the source and shot Simon Furman an e-mail asking if he'd write a script for me.

Two days later sat in my inbox was the script for the final Dragon's Claws story ever.

At the beginning of 2008, I heard that Dragon's Claws was being collected by Panini so reworked the (in my opinion now rubbish) earlier version.

At the Bristol Expo '08 I sought out the editor of the collection about the possibility of using my piece as an epilogue to the canon. Showing him my original 2004 version, I could see that he wasn't really that impressed. I pulled out the work in progress of what you see here (it simply had panel 1 finished and the rest laid out) and he immediately said yes.

This lead to me doing the illustration for the credits page, being comissioned to do a piece of pro Dragon's Claws work, something I'd dreamt of since June of 1988.

Jason Cardy (the incredibly talented colourist who threw his hues onto this) said it looked like a scene from 2000ad, which seemed to be echoed when I showed this to the editor of 2000ad...

Oh yeah, to any Dragon's Claws fans who may see this, I've got a nice little in-joke, if you can spot it...