Al's Baby - Page 12 (Original)
Medium: Watercolour on Acid-free Paper
Size: 12" x 19" (317mm x 483mm)
Date: 1991
Code: EzquerraAB12aBC
This is the unique original Watercolour painting by Carlos Ezquerra.
This stunning page of Carlos Ezquerra art was painted for a page of the comedy sci-fi gangster story Al's Baby, written by John Wagner, first published in Judge Dredd Megazine #15, released 9th December 1991.
The story Follows Al 'The Beast' Bestardi, a terrifying mob enforcer pushed into male pregnancy by his Boss, Don Luigi Sarcoma. Al's partner, Velma (the Don's daughter), refuses to bear a child as she believes it will interfere with her career as a singer (despite her being terrible), so the task falls to Al.
In this page, one of Al's rivals has discovered that Al is in the same hospital as him and he decides to seek revenge with a fire axe.
This page has been locked away in a private collection for many years and is only being made available now for the first time, over 30 years after it was first published. The colours are impeccable as the artwork has not been exposed to light, and the artwork still has it's original acetate overlay with word balloons still affixed.
- Artist BiographyCarlos Sanchez Ezquerra (born 12 November 1947; Zaragoza, Spain)
Carlos Ezquerra is a Spanish comics artist who works mainly in British comics and currently lives in Andorra. He is best known as the co-creator of Judge Dredd.
Ezquerra started his career based in Barcelona, drawing westerns and war stories for Spanish publishers. In 1973 he got work in the UK market through agent Barry Coker, drawing for girls' romance titles like Valentine and Mirabelle, as well as westerns for Pocket Western Library, and a variety of adventure strips for D. C. Thomson & Co.'s The Wizard. The UK was a popular market for Spanish artists as the exchange rate meant the work paid well, but Ezquerra moved to London to be near the work, settling in Croydon with his wife.
In 1974, on the strength of his uncredited work for The Wizard, Pat Mills and John Wagner headhunted him, through Coker, to work for the new IPC title Battle Picture Weekly. He drew "Rat Pack": inspired by the film The Dirty Dozen, the strip, written by Gerry Finley-Day, featured a gang of criminals recruited to carry out suicide missions. But his commitments elsewhere meant he couldn't draw it full time, and other artists were also used.
In 1976 Battle editor Dave Hunt convinced him to commit himself to the title, offering him the laid-back anti-hero "Major Eazy", written by Alan Hebden. Ezquerra drew nearly 100 episodes in the next two and a half years, basing the character's appearance on the actor James Coburn.
He was asked to visualise a new character, future lawman "Judge Dredd", for the science fiction weekly 2000 AD, prior to its launch in 1977. His elaborate designs displeased the strip's writer, John Wagner, but impressed editor Pat Mills, and his cityscapes persuaded Mills to set the strip further into the future than initially intended. But Wagner (temporarily) quit over ownership issues and Ezquerra followed him when the first published appearance of the character was drawn by another artist, Mike McMahon. He returned to Battle, where he once again teamed up with Alan Hebden to create "El Mestizo", a black gun-for-hire who played both sides against the middle during the American Civil War.
In 1978 he and Wagner created Strontium Dog, a sci-fi western about a bounty hunter in a future where mutants are an oppressed minority forced into doing such dirty work, for Starlord, a short-lived sister title to 2000 AD with higher production values. Starlord was later merged into 2000 AD, bringing "Strontium Dog" with it. Ezquerra was almost the only artist to draw the character, until 1988, when writer Alan Grant decided to kill him off in a storyline called "The Final Solution". Ezquerra disagreed with the decision, and refused to draw the story, which was instead illustrated by Simon Harrison and Colin MacNeil. In 2000 Wagner and Ezquerra revived "Strontium Dog" based on a treatment Wagner had written for an abortive TV pilot. Initially, stories were set before the character's death in a revised continuity, but 2010's "The Life and Death of Johnny Alpha" brought Johnny back from the dead.
Other 2000 AD strips he drew included Fiends of the Eastern Front (1980), a vampire story set in World War II, written by Gerry Finley-Day, and adaptations of Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat novels. In 1982 he returned to "Judge Dredd" to draw "The Apocalypse War", a seven-month epic which he drew in its entirety. He has continued to draw the character semi-regularly, handling the whole of "Necropolis" in 1990, "Origins" in 2006-7, and many others.
Ezquerra has also collaborated numerous times with writer Garth Ennis on Bloody Mary, Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, War Stories, a Hitman annual with artist Steve Pugh, and two Preacher specials (The Good Old Boys and The Saint of Killers miniseries) for DC Comics, and Just a Pilgrim for Black Bull Entertainment. In 2009 his son Hector inked his pencil work for Strontium Dog: Blood Moon.
Ezquerra occasionally uses the nom de plume "L John Silver" for work such as "The Riddle of the Astral Assassin!" in 2000 AD issue 118.
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