[2] Soon, family outings to Skegness became an excuse for the future artist to "trawl... round some of the more remote backstreet newsagents" for comics to store on an overflowing wooden bookcase he'd built in school.

"[2] He would later cite Kane and Alex Toth as "pinnacle[s] of excellence,"[1] alongside Curt Swan, Murphy Anderson, Sid Greene, Joe Kubert, Ross Andru, Mike Esposito, Nick Cardy, and Bruno Premiani, whose influences showed in his "early crude stabs at drawing comics.

[2] He did however enjoy UK comics, including newspaper strips such as Jeff Hawke by Syd Jordan and Carol Day by David Wright,[4] and Valiant which featured Mytek the Mighty by Eric Bradbury and Steel Claw by Jesus Blasco.

I found the American greats, Foster, Herriman, Alex Raymond and Winsor McCay... Noel Sickles, Milt Caniff, Roy Crane, had all, I discovered, put down the basic building blocks of our "Art form".

"[13][15] Even so, he "was always struggling to get the last eight or ten pages finished," and was occasionally helped by friends, both from his "Norwich School of Art days," Gibbons and future-2000 AD and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen artist Kevin O'Neill.

"[19] Soon, though, the writers began to craft serials, and Bolland's distinct abilities with subtle facial expressions, dramatic lighting and the dynamic composition of page layout made him the perfect choice to draw the ongoing sagas, starting with "The Lunar Olympics".

As the Dredd stories rose in popularity, they "were moved so they started on the middle pages" with a colour double-page spread, which Bolland "always struggled with"[20] finding it "very difficult... [trying] to fill that space most effectively.

"[14][15] Bolland therefore states that he "aped Mike's genius... and then reinterpreted [Dredd] in a style which actually borrowed a lot from the work of the American artists,"[14] retaining McMahon's "granite-jawed" look but bringing a level of realism and fine detail to the character, which Mark Salisbury says "finally cemented the iconic image.

Created for comedic relief, Bolland notes that "[t]he great thing about the Judge Dredd strip was it's [sic] ability to slide seamlessly between gritty sci fi adventure, nasty gothic horror, spoofery, all the way to daft comedy.

He continued to produce work for fanzines, including for Nick Landau's Comic Media News,[31] and Arkensword and even "drew the hazard cards" for a board game called Maneater.

"[37] By this point, "although the Express owned the rights to the strip, they were not printing it," but since it had a strong European following, these new episodes (Bolland believes) "got collected in anthologies in French and Spanish," but not in the UK except briefly in "the fanzine Eureka.

[40] This page was later reprinted in the Outrageous Tales From the Old Testament volume, which included works from Moore, Hunt Emerson, Gaiman, Gibbons, and Dave McKean, although Bolland's name was left off the cover.

[51][52] The story, dealing with the return of King Arthur to save England from an alien invasion in the year 3000, not only the largest body of work in a single series by Bolland – and his only attempt to draw a monthly title – but was also the first maxi-series from DC or any other publisher.

[54] Bolland was uncomfortable with having a third party ink his pencils, and later admitted that he put a high level of detail into his art for the series to leave as little room as possible for the inker to creatively reinterpret his work.

[62] After watching the 1928 film The Man Who Laughs, which features a character named Gwynplaine (played by Conrad Veidt) whose rictus grin inspired the visual design of the Joker,[63] Bolland conceived of the 1988 graphic novel Batman: The Killing Joke.

[75] In 1996, Bolland wrote and drew the story "An Innocent Guy" for the anthology Batman: Black and White, in which an otherwise normal inhabitant of Gotham City documents his plan to carry out the ultimate perfect crime and assassinate the Dark Knight Detective.

[80][81] Starting in 1997, Bolland bought a lot of software and spent ten frustrated months learning the ropes and ultimately finding the liberating ability to adapt his now-solely-onscreen artwork.

[78]Coincidentally, when a time travel story arc saw Bolland's work coincide with the plot in such a way that he was able to produce a recreated cover from an alternate angle to shed new light on an initially inconsequential image.

With this title, the artist remarks the complicated subject matter necessitated his "working a lot of strange symbolism and subliminal messages into the cover designs" to create "an image that puzzles to a degree and is layered with elements of surrealism.

[87] For the third series, we [Bolland and Morrison] talked about trying to make the covers look different in some way, and when DC decided to number the issues backwards [from 12 to 1; to count down to the Millennium], that set me thinking.

For the trade paperback covers, Bolland "was determined to make each one weirder than the last," and so created a Francis Bacon inspired "fleshy mass [dubbed "The Blobby Man"] with a typewriter" for Entropy in the UK.

Having convinced Karen Berger (Editor in chief of Vertigo) and Roeberg that it was a good idea, the artist recalls that "Shelly rang up and, rather than telling me how wonderful I was, said that when she saw it she nearly lost her lunch!

"[80] Bolland also contributed a large number of covers to Wonder Woman, beginning with William Messner Loebs's first issue (#63, June 1992[90]) after that author took over writer (and artist) George Pérez's 1987 post-Crisis relaunch.

Particularly, for the first Eagle Judge Dredd comic issue – which repackaged 2000 AD stories for the American market – on which the positioning of the figures echoed similar covers Bolland had drawn "two or three times for different companies with different characters.

For Dark Horse Comics, Bolland has produced several diverse covers, including a couple for Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist at the behest of editor Diana Schutz.

"[99] In 2006's The Art of Brian Bolland, he does suggest that "I trace my mild bondage fetish back to a book of Bible stories that must have been given to my father as a Sunday school gift when he was a child," wherein "was a picture of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednigo [sic]."

Such Biblical imagery was bolstered in 1971 by a book bought in Paris "called Les Filles de Papier... [a] large part of [which] was taken up with comic strips about women tied up in fiendish and excruciating positions by mad robots... it was just jaw-droppingly bonkers... and yet... there was something rather appealing about it.

[102] Among Bolland's other works is the Robert Crumb-esque semi-autobiographical stream of consciousness humour strip Mr. Mamoulian,[103] which was first printed in Paul Gravett's UK pro-zine Escape and later brought to the US in issues of the Dark Horse title Cheval Noir and the Caliber Comics anthology Negative Burn.

[108] Actively seeking to write a story that wouldn't be classified as any particular genre, Bolland found the description 'Whimsy' reached by Leach and Elliot to be very apt, and "rooted in the Englishness" of the artists life.

[108] Written in rhyming couplets, the pair "look like the punchline of a smutty joke," but their creator instead "wanted the reader to see them in a benign and non-judgemental light" – the antithesis of "Benny Hill, Frankie Howerd "Oo er, Mrs!"...