Brian Bolland (born 1951) is a British comics artist, known for his meticulous, detailed linework and eye-catching compositions. Best known in the UK as one of the definitive Judge Dredd artists for British comics anthology 2000 AD, he spearheaded the 'British Invasion' of the American comics industry, and in 1982 produced the artwork on Camelot 3000 (with author Mike W. Barr), which was DC's first 12-issue comicbook maxiseries created for the direct market.

His rare forays into interior art also include Batman: The Killing Joke, with UK-based writer Alan Moore, regularly hailed as one of the finest realised Batman stories, and a self-penned Batman: Black and White story. Bolland remains in high demand a cover artist, producing the vast majority of his work for DC Comics. Brian Bolland was born on 26 March 1951 in Butterwick, Lincolnshire to parents Albert "A.J." John, a fenland farmer, and Lillie Bolland.

He spent his "first 18 years" living "in a small village near Boston in the fens of Lincolnshire, England," but has "no memory of comics" much before the age of ten. When American comics began to be imported into England, c.1959, Bolland says that it "took a little while for me to discover them," but by 1960 he was intrigued by Dell Comics' Dinosaurus!, which fed into a childhood interest in dinosaurs of all shapes and sizes. Comics including Turok, Son of Stone and DC's Tomahawk soon followed, and it was this burgeoning comics collection that would help inspire the young Bolland to draw his own comics around the age of ten with ideas such as "Insect League." He recalls that "[s]uperheroes crept into my life by stealth," as he actively sought out covers featuring "any big creature that looked vaguelly dinosaur-like, trampling puny humans." This adolescent criteria led from Dinosaurus!and Turok via House of Mystery to "Batman and Robin [who] were [often] being harrassed by big weird things, as were Superman, Aquaman, Wonder Woman [etc]." 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 "bookcase I'd made in school woodwork especially." As early as 1962, aged 11, Bolland remembers thinking that "Carmine Infantino's work on the Flash and Gil Kane's on Green Lantern and the Atom had a sophistication about it that I hadn't [previously] seen." He would later cite Kane and Alex Toth as "pinnacle[s] of excellence," alongside "Curt Swan, Murphy Anderson, Syd Greene, Joe Kubert, Ross Andru, Mike Esposito, Nick Cardy and the under-rated Bruno Premiani," whose influences showed in his "early crude stabs at drawing comics." The young Bolland did not rate Marvel Comics as highly as DC, feeling the covers cluttered and the paper quality crude.

His appreciation of the artwork of Jack Kirby, he says, only materialised much later "through the eyes of a seasoned professional." He did however enjoy UK comics, including newspaper strips such as "Syd Jordan's Jeff Hawke [and] David Wright's Carol Day," and Valiant which featured "Eric Bradbury's Mytek the Mighty and Jesus Blasco's Steel Claw." Despite such a variety of inspirations, Bolland credits his eventual pursuance of art as a hobby and then vocation to a primary school art teacher, who "evidently said all the right things to me."

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