There is a Jewish prayer song, a necessary part of every Passover celebration, called “Dayenu,” which is literally translated as “It would have been enough.” The point of the song is that God did many great things for the Jewish people, each by itself a reason for prayer, yet he kept piling on more and more.
If Ian Gibson had only ever been the artist and co-creator of The Ballad of Halo Jones, one of the most celebrated works in British comics history, and partially the reason everyone knows the name of its writer, Alan Moore - Dayenu. It would have been enough.
But it’s not the only thing he gave us.
If he had only been the man in charge of making Robo-Hunter into one the cornerstones of the early 2000 AD - Dayenu.
If he had only been one of the early, seminal artists on the legendary Judge Dredd - Dayenu.
If he had only ever drawn the beautiful The Chronicles of Genghis Grimtoad - Dayenu! Dayenu! Dayenu!
Gibson, who passed away after a long battle with cancer on 11 December, 2023, aged 77, was one of the leading lights of British comics for nearly five decades. At young age he became a fan of Eagle, and later still of American imports, particularly Jack Kirby’s work on The Mighty Thor. He tried for a fine art degree in college, but ended up going his own way. “I soon learned that the whole shit show is as phoney as can be,” he told Paul N. Neal of Tripwire in 2022. “So I went away to study, for myself, Pre-Columbian culture and art.” It was during this period that he had his first his exposure to American comics, citing Kirby as a particular lightning bolt revelation that sealed his fate; he would become a cartoonist.
Beginning in local zines of the 1970s, Gibson soon ‘graduated’ into the grind of professional British comics, where there was always need for a quick pair of hands to feed the hungry beast. He worked on whatever title was available at the time; you can find him popping in a Pocket Chiller Library or a Bionic Woman Annual. Speaking with David Bishop for the 2000 AD history Thrill-Power Overload, Gibson described this period with no particular fondness: “I used to be a utility artist before 2000 AD existed. Remember Action? A couple of times they came to me for an overnight job when the artist hadn’t delivered. So I had to hack out pages overnight. Oh, it's the dregs, give it to Gibson.” His work on the violent Death Wish strip for Valiant (that’s the British magazine, not the American publisher) particularly caught the eye of editor/writer John Wagner, who was already in the process of launching the magazine that would make Gibson’s name: 2000 AD.
Or rather, you could say that it was Gibson who made 2000 AD; he was not alone, obviously, but it's very easy to underestimate how much he contributed to those early issues. In the first year alone he drew nearly 1/3 of Judge Dredd stories, starting in the middle of the “Robot Wars” arc with Prog #14, 28 May, 1977, and helping to establish the world of the strip with stories such as “Luna 1,” “The Academy of Law” and “The Troggies.”
Gibson would continue drawing Dredd for years to come, pushing the humorous bent of the strip as far as possible, as opposed to more serious-minded likes of Carlos Ezquerra or Brian Bolland. In his introduction to The Chronicles of Judge Dredd #19, a 1987 Titan collection featuring selected stories drawn by Gibson, he writes: “I like to make readers laugh rather than be horrified in the hopes that they are more likely to get the message.” But while Gibson’s work tends toward the comedic, with its ornately decorated figures and a caricatural line comparable to that of Jack Davis, I was always struck by his sense of scale. In “Rumble in the Jungle” (2000 AD #343-345), Gibson draws the Judges in urban combat with massive crowds escaping amidst the larger landscape of Mega-City One. You laugh first, but you can’t help being impressed by the sheer world-building involved. Even a done-in-one gag story like “High Society” (2000 AD #364) depicts a heavily-detailed space station falling into ruin panel by panel. It would’ve been easy to stick to gags, but Gibson always went one step extra, if not ten.
Dredd work notwithstanding, Gibson's 2000 AD glory days began in 1978 with Robo-Hunter, a strip tailor-made for him given writer John Wagner's appreciation of his fine design work on the “Robot Wars” storyline - though it actually launched with a different artist, José Ferrer. The powers that be ended up regretting this choice. Recalling the events for Thrill-Power Overload, Gibson said, “2000 AD editorial gave it to José Ferrer to start, they wanted to rush it out.... They sent his first pages to me and asked if I could do something with these, they’re not quite right.” Soon Gibson had taken over the art duties entirely. He would draw Robo-Hunter strips until 1985, and while there have been other artists after him, it would be forever tied to his name - just as Strontium Dog is always Carlos Ezquerra’s baby, no matter who follows. In particular, the early stories “Verdus” and “Day of the Droids” featured something new—a crazy machine, a wild new weapon, a breathtaking design—in seemingly every panel.
Riding high, Gibson wanted to try something different (at least for 2000 AD): a woman-led strip. He pitched an adaptation of Robert Heinlein’s novel Friday to editor Steve MacManus; an earlier adaptation of Harry Harrison's The Stainless Steel Rat series by Ezquerra & Kelvin Gosnell had been a success, and though the Heinlein idea didn’t pass muster, Gibson was asked to work on an original science fiction strip with the rising star writer Alan Moore. Serialized from 1984-86, The Ballad of Halo Jones is among the quintessential 2000 AD stories, though it initially caused a stir amongst the more traditionally-minded fans who were aghast at a story featuring a girl and distinctly lacking in straightforward action. Oft-reprinted, it has most recently undergone a colorization treatment by Barbara Nosenzo (yours truly will always prefer Gibson’s work in black & white) and an appearance in the Best of 2000 AD series. Gibson always maintained that much of what made the strip a classic came from his early suggestions. “I told Alan that that I wanted a ‘realistic’ story without ‘thought bubbles’ or panel explanations,” he told Steve Bull in ComicScene's The History of Comics 1984. “Let the reader figure out what is going on from the action. As I’ve often said: I never see a street sign with a message 'Ian is in for a big surprise!' So let’s keep it real.”
Always an independent-minded artist, which got him into hot water with more than one publisher, Gibson treated Moore’s scripts with much less reverence than one is used to see, as detailed in Thrill-Power Overload: “I had already got into the habit of deconstructing a script and putting it back together in a way that would be visually more effective. I tended to take Alan’s verbose ramblings with a pinch of salt and do it my own way!” Originally planned for nine ‘books,’ only three were completed before Moore cut ties with 2000 AD over royalty and ownership disputes, never to return. It is a testimony to the sheer quality of these stories that the magazine, even when bought out by video game company Rebellion, resisted the temptation to continue Halo Jones with other creators. Not that Gibson didn’t try on his own; he pitched a solo version of books four and five, but none came to fruition.
In the late 1980s, like many of his brethren, Gibson heeded the siren's call of the American market (and the almighty dollar) and went to DC for a spell. The results were less than successful. Millennium, a weekly 1987 superhero crossover that saw Gibson finishing layouts by Joe Staton, was not ideal for his particular style. A 1989 Mister Miracle revival with writer J. M. DeMatteis played more to Gibson's strengths, plunking Kirby's New Gods characters into Americana-tinged normality with a strong comedic hook. I really like Gibson’s work on that series; playing with the title character's gadgetry called upon his creative side, though he clashed horribly with DeMatteis and the publisher. To Tripwire: “I hated the corny scripts which I thought were an insult to the memory of King Jack [Kirby]. I was constantly changing the scripts and erasing speech bubbles that I thought were a waste of space. So eventually they lost patience with me.” Gibson departed the project after issue #5. Another DC project, an adaptation of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Galaxy, could not seem more fitting for Gibson’s aesthetic, but it also ended in sturm und drang, this time before publication: “I called the editorial team a bunch of wankers and quit.... I had a lot of fun drawing some 50 or so pages with wonderful characters like the cricket commentators we all knew and loved.... It wasn’t till I’d done all the pages of pencils that they decided to tell me that they didn’t have permission to use likenesses of the TV characters. I was not impressed!”
Gibson’s humorous sensibility and sense of design often seemed lost on an American audience, though not all of this work came to naught; he did a good number of Star Wars comics for Dark Horse in the 1990s, several of them with John Wagner, whose straightforward scripts could leave an artist a lot of room to improvise. Star Wars: Droids may not be a brilliant comic, but letting Gibson draw those famous robots is as close to a gimme as American assignments would get for him; it’s certainly good-looking work, bringing the franchise back to its shaggier roots. Also worth a mention is a short stint with Eclipse Comics, 1990-91, on Steed and Mrs. Peel (otherwise known as The Avengers, before the Yanks took over the name), notably with the writer Grant Morrison.
Still, Gibson always kept one foot on the British side of the ocean. In 1990, he teamed with Wagner and Alan Grant in Marvel UK's mature readers magazine Strip! for The Chronicles of Genghis Grimtoad, a lavish, short-lived fantasy serial later collected into a graphic novel. Back at 2000 AD, the '90s brought the oddball creator-owned I Was a Teenage Tax Consultant (with Wagner), while the '00s saw Gibson on the war story parody Banzai Battalion (also with Wagner) and a Robo-Hunter revival starring the original character's granddaughter, Samantha Slade, Robo Hunter (with Grant). Though none of these have attained the classic status of his early work, I find much to love, particularly in Banzai Battalion - a story about tiny robot soldiers playing superbly to Gibson’s command of scale. Sadly, friction between Gibson and his collaborators kept growing worse; he didn’t mince words about his dislike for the Robo-Hunter strip under Grant in Thrill-Power Overload: “I eventually ran out of patience for lame jokes about a Scarf called Garf.” Gibson dropped out of Samantha Slade halfway through an ongoing story in 2007. His final contribution to 2000 AD was a Judge Dredd story titled “Nuked!” (written by Robbie Morrison, Prog #1576) in 2008. To Tripwire, he would express dissatisfaction with 2000 AD under its current owners: “Rebellion, who bought 2000 AD for pennies but refused to give the rights back to the creators as had been stipulated in the contract, only bought the company with the intent of making a profit from games based on the characters. As a result they have no real interest in producing quality. Hence the shitshow that is now 2000 AD. Happily they have stopped sending me copies.”
Not that a lack of work for 2000 AD prevented him from getting into hot water. In 2013, Gibson produced a limited charity print of a bare-breasted woman for the Bristol Comic Expo, referring to it as a "topless Halo," later claiming "it doesn't even really look very much like Halo," and insisting it had been drawn for a friend as a joke. Rebellion wasn't happy with this use of a character they owned in an unauthorized risqué situation, while Alan Moore, with whom Gibson hadn’t spoken in ages, declared the whole thing against the spirit of the strip: "I fail to see how my original intentions for the character are served by a long-lens shot of her with her 50th-century tits out." Gibson’s response, deeming the episode "a storm in a D-cup," perhaps wasn’t the best writing of his career.
In his final decade, Gibson was visible mainly in the online space, particularly through his Facebook fan page. Many of the commissions and pin-ups of that time give the same sensation as Carl Barks' work from the winter of his career: glamorous and technically efficient, if lacking the animated comedic spirit that made him a great cartoonist. Still, Gibson never stopped working - not so long he could hold a pencil. His most recent comic was published earlier this year: Lifeboat, a crowdfunded graphic novel released through The77, a company named for the year 2000 AD was founded and dedicated to precisely the kind of old-school science fiction comics that he always wanted to draw.
This final work, like his whole life, was made on his own terms. Ian Gibson lived and died an artist.
