Now, 2000 AD has had some nutty strips over the years, but they don't come much nuttier than this... Ace Trucking Co. appeared in the comic a little too late to jump on the C.B. Radio bandwagon (younger readers won't know what a C.B. Radio is... Think of it like Twitter crossed with Skype, only less comprehensible).

Ace Trucking Co. (often called simply Ace Trucking by the sort of fans who, equally annoyingly, refer to the comic as 2000 and omit the last part of the name) featured the adventures of the space-trucking crew of the starship Speedo Ghost. Filled with bizarre aliens and some very odd lingo, it was sometimes as hard to understand as it was to dislike. That is: I didn't always know what was going on, but I always enjoyed it.

The series was chiefly drawn by the great Massimo Belardinelli at, in my opinion, the very height of his career. I can't think of any other artist who was as skilled at creating such odd-looking beasties... The three depicted here are easily among the least weird of the cast of the strip!

The vain, irreverant and quite barmy owner of Ace Trucking Co.. I had a lot of fun with this model and really put the time in: his uniform features its own bump and specularity maps - a first for me (a "specularity map" is a way of specifying how shiny an object is: you'll notice that the badge on Ace's chest is more shiny than the leather parts).

Ace Garp's right-hand man, the lumbering, solemn and somewhat funereal GBH, who believes himself to be dead. The development of this model turned out to be a lot different than I'd expected: GBH's hands were by far the hardest part, but his head came together very quickly.

In the comics, GBH is always depicted as above, with his facial features in deep shadow. One can get away with that in a comic because the lighting and shading is as fluid as the artist requires, so his face can be heavily shadowed while the rest of him is more evenly lit. That's not so easy in CGI without resorting to multiple light sources that are masked from each other, so I didn't bother because I was eager to get working on...

Feek is the engineer the Speedo Ghost. In the comics his skin is generally a flat, pale yellow, but I decided I wanted to give him a more unsettling texture: it's adapted from a photograph of an old half-decayed human skull.