Steve Dillon, R.I.P.

Sorry to hear about the passing of Steve Dillon. A very enjoyable comic book artist, a lot of his major work wasn't really to my taste (his most frequent collaborator, Garth Ennis, is pretty uneven to me), but his artwork on those books was always top notch and worth reading.

Here's a hodgepodge of Dillon artwork over his decades in the business.

Let's see what we have there.

First up is a recent DOCTOR WHO cover. The ABC WARRIORS page is an Alan Moore scripted short from 2000 AD in the 1980s. The PUNISHER WAR ZONE cover is a character he frequently worked on over at Marvel. The next trio are images from his DC/Vertigo work, with John Constantine's sometimes girlfriend Kit, a major part of Dillon's run on HELLBLAZER, a pin-up from his best known series, PREACHER, and a nicely designed HELLBLAZER page with Constantine himself. The Queen Bee pin-up is from DC's first WHO'S WHO, and maybe one of Dillon's earliest works for American comics. Of course he was long established in British comics by that point, as you can see from the Laser Eraser & Pressbutton splash from WARRIOR #1 and his cover to WARRIOR #4. The opening page from a great history of the electric chair is from THE BIG BOOK OF DEATH. Two more Alan Moore stories from 2000 AD to close, one from the first Abelard Snazz story, and another a Ro-Busters tale ("'Bax the Burner', on which I was lucky enough to have the services of sickeningly talented boy-genius Steve Dillon, remains another firm favourite", to quote Moore).

For some bizarre reason, Dillon rarely did covers for his own comics (so watch out for obituaries of him containing art by Glenn Fabry or Tim Bradstreet). Here are some actual Dillon covers:

And in his own words, from WARRIOR #1, 1982, Steve Dillon age 20