P J Holden

P J Holden is an artist who is steadily making more and more of a name for himself within the world of comics. Having started out illustrating scripts for 2000AD (producing a fair few pages for Judge Dredd as well as Future Shocks and the ‘86ers’) he is now working on the ‘Fearless’ mini-series for Image Comics.

I came to work with P J when I was scripting strips for Warhammer Monthly. I had written a three-page, one-trick story set in Games Workshop’s Necromunda setting (a futuristic industrial wasteland off-shoot of the Warhammer 40,000 universe) called ‘Slavebreak’.

A little while later I actually received an email from P J, letting me know that he was going to be the artist on the strip. No other comic artist I had worked with before had done this (and they haven’t since either). Apart from his friendly approach, what impressed me the most about P J was his enthusiasm. It seems he went to a great deal of trouble for such a short strip, sending me character sketches of some of the hard-bitten pit-slaves who feature in the tale, before setting to work on the strip pages themselves.

I would love to show you some of these, but this was a long time ago and (a fair few computers later) unfortunately I don’t have them anymore. However, I have included a scan here of the first page of the script to give you an idea of what it was like.

You can read more about what P J is up to at the moment, and browse his portfolio at his official website ‘Notes from the Drawing Board’.