To celebrate a joint appearance at the first Andercon convention in 2014, Lee and legendary TV21 comic strip artist Mike Noble created a high-quality limited edition print of Zero X.

Created after a conversation with Mike about digital art techniques, Mike supplied a traditionally drawn and coloured craft around which Lee then created a digital painted backdrop of the Orion Nebula using Photoshop.

Mike and Lee subsequently worked together on two further Captain Scarlet merchandise commissions:

box artwork for the Big Chief Studios 12" action figure

and the Network Blu-ray poster.

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Its contents are for the promotion of the artist's work. No infringement intended. Thanks to respective colourists and writers whose work is featured on this site.

Mike Noble and Lee at Mike's home in 2013. I gave him a Konami Fireball XL5 model, and after several attempts to photograph the event, Mike came up with this great pose :)

I was lucky enough to first meet Mike in 2012 and strike up a friendship with my all-time favourite comics artist. His drawings of Fireball XL5, Zero X, Captain Scarlet and Star Trek (and many, many others) were a huge part of my childhood and only get better the more one looks at them and grows to understand the technical genius of the man. I'm not alone in considering him to be one of the finest comic-strip artists this country has produced.

Although Mike was in his 80s, you'd never have known it, and he still drew occasional commissions and provided illustrations for local concerns; he designed a lychgate and stained glass windows for his local church.

We had a conversation about my own use of digital drawing and painting techniques and Mike was keen to see how it might apply to his own work, which along with a suggestion by Jamie Anderson (son of Gerry) resulted in the print of Zero X you see above.

To say I was thrilled is a pretty inadequate description, and the fact that we shared a table at Andercon signing a joint artwork was a real career highlight for me and would have been a bewildering thought to this kid back in the 1960s reading TV21.

We followed this with two final projects: box artwork for the Big Chief Studios Captain Scarlet 12-inch figure and a poster for the Network blu-ray release of the Captain Scarlet series, the latter being his final industry-commissioned artwork. It was a bitter-sweet privilege for me to speak at the Service of Celebration following Mike's death in 2018.

Many thanks to Paul Holder, who introduced me to Mike, took this photo and helped create the print.

There is a great interview with Mike and examples of his brilliant work here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpY0Y5uCGi8

here:

http://youtu.be/BjGeQvKEJSIlivepage.apple.com

and also:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8cE9yNMBLY

Mike and I at the first Andercon convention, surrounded by examples of our art. A good time was had by all :)