John Higgins

John Higgins is one of the most quietly influential figures in British comics — the colorist who gave Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen its famously flat, European-tinged palette, and the artist who has drawn Judge Dredd for over twenty years. Born in Liverpool in 1949, he went freelance in 1978 and carved out a career that spans 2000 AD, DC, Marvel, and Vertigo, always returning to the war comics and creator-owned worlds he loves most. Perfect for fans of Watchmen, Batman: The Killing Joke, British war comics, and the work of Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, and Garth Ennis.

Higgins’s journey began at Wallasey College of Art, where he trained as an illustrator before landing his first published strip in Brainstorm Comix in 1975 and drawing the cover for 2000 AD No. 43 in 1977. From 1981 he worked steadily at the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic, illustrating Tharg’s Future Shocks — including early collaborations with Alan Moore — and spending decades drawing the character he calls his favorite: Judge Dredd, from “The Exploding Man” and the epic “Oz” in the 1980s through to modern-era work on the Judge Dredd Megazine. He rode the British Invasion into the American market in the mid-eighties, and his full bibliography is catalogued on his Wikipedia biography.

That journey reached its peak with Watchmen, where Higgins’s coloring became as essential to the book as Moore’s words and Gibbons’s pencils. Moore and Gibbons deliberately wanted Watchmen to look unlike any American superhero comic of its time, steering toward the secondary colors of European comics — the purples, oranges, and greens that Gibbons says sometimes “almost frightened me” — and Higgins ran with it, building the palette to get colder as the book progressed. He colored the story’s covers and interiors from 1986 to 1987, then did the same for the celebrated Batman: The Killing Joke with artist Brian Bolland in 1988, and was brought back to clean up and remaster the color for the Absolute Edition in 2005. Vulture called him the “forgotten hero” of Watchmen, the man whose colors — in the words of Watchmen showrunner Damon Lindelof — “reinvented the genre every bit as much as Alan’s words and Dave’s pencils.” He later drew and co-wrote the “Curse of the Crimson Corsair” backup strip for the Before Watchmen line alongside Dave Gibbons, the artist he first worked with in the pages of 2000 AD.

Higgins’s pencil work found its most powerful showcase in the war comics of Garth Ennis. For the opening volume of War Stories — the anthology Ennis built at Vertigo and Avatar Press around soldiers’ real experiences — Higgins drew “D-Day Dodgers,” a story of an under-supplied British squadron fighting through Italy in the shadow of a forgotten campaign. Slings & Arrows called it “the most powerful piece in the collection,” a leader’s crisis of faith amid men pushed to the limit on impossible missions. The two Brits also teamed on the four-issue Vertigo limited series Pride & Joy and on the Judge Dredd story “Monkey on My Back,” while Higgins’s earlier work on Ennis’s Hellblazer run “Son of Man” proved he could bring grit and dread to the supernatural as easily as the battlefield.

Higgins is equally a creator in his own right. Frustrated at being pigeonholed as “just a colorist,” he wrote, drew, and self-published Razorjack in 1999 through his own Jack Publishing, unleashing a horror-noir nightmare about a death-dealing entity from an alternate dimension called the Twist. The series was collected by Com.X and finally remastered for Titan Books in 2013 with new material and stories, cementing it as the purest expression of his singular voice. He received the Inkpot Award in 2011, a retrospective of his work — “Beyond Dredd & Watchmen” — opened at Liverpool’s Victoria Gallery & Museum in 2017, and his ongoing Judge Dredd prequel series Dreadnoughts keeps him in the pages of 2000 AD to this day. Browse his art, prints, and career highlights at artofjohnhiggins.com.