His groundbreaking work on such seminal characters as Judge Dredd, Preacher and Punisher is being celebrated with a posthumous show of his remarkable legacy
Dillon’s adopted home town of Luton is currently running an exhibition at the Hat House’s Basement Gallery, featuring work from the artist’s early days through to his illustrations for the satirical dystopian lawman Judge Dredd from British weekly comic 2000AD. There are also pages fromand Warrior, the magazine that launched the careers of a number of British comics luminaries in the 1980s.
“Steve has a special place in this town,” says Samuel Javid, creative director at the Culture Trust Luton. “We have roads called Preacher Close and Cassidy Close, some of his ashes are buried here, and his local pub has a picture of him behind the bar, sticking his middle finger up … ”Ennis, who also collaborated with Dillon on Judge Dredd and Marvel’s gun-toting antihero the Punisher, first got to know the artist in the early 90s.
Although Dillon was at home with the exaggerated macho heroes beloved of the genre , he also brought a more grassroots, individual look to his characters; he was renowned for drawing the type of people you might see in the pub. Moore once wrote that if you shaved the heads of every female Marvel character they would be almost identical. Dillon, however, put as much care into the expressions and looks of his characters as he did the dynamic, detailed panels of his narratives.
“Steve’s passing was an absolute sickener,” Ennis says. “He was doing some of the nicest work of his career at that point. There were a couple of massive piss-ups after he died, one in New York, one in Luton, and at both of them I had the same feeling: this is a great celebration of a fantastic guy’s life, and he’d love seeing everyone like this, but tomorrow we have to carry on with a huge gap in our lives. I’d give anything to have one more pint with him.
“One of the storylines towards the end of our run: Damnation’s Flame. Maybe a bit overwrought on the script side. Steve was doing a lot of heavy rendering. He eased up for the move from Hellblazer to Preacher.”“This demonstrates my point about his [Dillon’s] faces and emotion perfectly. The narrative was paramount. Conversation scenes were no problem for him because he got so much emotion into his characters’ faces. He did a lot of storytelling simply by capturing people’s expressions.
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