John McCrea
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John McCrea ( Born 1966 –) is an Northern Irish comic book artist. In addition to working on famous UK comic [[wikipedia:{{#if:|:}}2000 AD (comic)|{{#if:2000 AD|2000 AD|2000 AD (comic)}}]] and its lead character [[wikipedia:{{#if:|:}}Judge Dredd|{{#if:||Judge Dredd}}]] and IDW's Mars Attacks!, he is most famous for his collaborations with fellow potty-mouthed Irishman [[wikipedia:{{#if:|:}}Garth Ennis|{{#if:||Garth Ennis}}]], including the creation of Troubled Souls, its spinoff Dicks, and DC's [[wikipedia:{{#if:|:}}Hitman (comics)|{{#if:Hitman|Hitman|Hitman (comics)}}]].
So we weren't expecting McCrea to draw four issues of Titan Magazines' Transformers Animated strips! (Two ran in Transformers Universe). He didn't quite get to grips with how the Animated the design aesthetic worked, giving us strips that look very different to what any other Animated material did.
McCrea also illustrated "How to Draw" features for the UK's Transformers comic published by Titan, teaching kids how to render the complicated forms of the movie 'bots. Except... rather than actually, y'know, cover basic stuff like geometric shapes, proportion, structure, or anything that would help you build an original drawing from the ground up, he just shows you how to copy a line-drawing over four pages. Ah well.
He appeared at the 2008 Auto Assembly convention while working on the comic.<ref>"Auto Assembly 2008: Even More Guests!"</ref>; he was going to appear at the TF Nation convention in 2019 but had to bow out due to illness.<ref>Anime Independent: "TF Nation 2019"</ref>
Trivia
[edit]- McCrea first met Will Simpson, who he'd go on to help spotting blacks on backgrounds as an early art job, at a Transformers signing in Banbridge.<ref>"Good Vibrations, Dark Horizons" in Mighty World of McCrea</ref>
- Outside of drawing, McCrea is famous for opening Northern Ireland's first comic shop, Dark Horizons, originally working from out the back of the even more famous [[wikipedia:{{#if:|:}}Good Vibrations (record label)|{{#if:Good Vibrations record shop|Good Vibrations record shop|Good Vibrations (record label)}}]].
References
[edit]External Links
[edit]- [[wikipedia:{{#if:|:}}John McCrea|{{#if:McCrea at Wikipedia|McCrea at Wikipedia|John McCrea}}]]
- Official site
- Cartoon & Animation Style portfolio (including several unlettered pages of Animated)