Peter Yea's concept art of 'The Great Hunting Ground'

Peter Yea’s Mortal Engines Comic-Style Concept Art

Artist Peter Yea created a run of Mortal Engines images as part of his final-year project at Teesside University, using a comic-book style to stage key scenes from Philip Reeve’s first novel.

The result is different from the film production art and the illustrated companion-book material. Yea’s work is less about polished industrial design and more about visual sequence: dramatic moments, readable action, clear silhouettes, and scenes that feel as if they could sit inside a Mortal Engines graphic novel.

Yea described the Great Hunting Ground piece as a comic-book-style scene from Mortal Engines, completed for his final-year project. That framing matters because these are not just single pin-up images. They are scene studies, built around moments of pursuit, violence, scale, and old-tech catastrophe.

The Great Hunting Ground

The Hunting Ground is where Mortal Engines announces its central idea in visual form. This is the open landscape where mobile cities like London hunt smaller towns, strip them for parts, and call the process survival.

Yea’s version works because it keeps the scene readable. The terrain feels open, the city has weight, and the composition gives the viewer a sense of movement without overloading the page.

The sketch stage shows the important bones of the image: city mass, landscape, smoke, movement, and the basic comic-panel energy of a world built around pursuit.

Peter Yea pencil sketch for Mortal Engines Great Hunting Ground scene showing early traction city composition — The early sketch establishes the basic scene structure before the digital treatment.

Peter Yea digital ink and colour version of the Mortal Engines Great Hunting Ground scene with traction city movement — The digitally treated version adds the graphic contrast and atmosphere needed for a finished comic-style moment.

The Death of Shrike

Yea also tackled the moment Tom Natsworthy and Shrike collide.

This is one of the first novel’s crucial scenes because Shrike is not just an action threat. He is Hester Shaw’s past coming back in dead flesh and metal. Tom’s intervention matters because it interrupts Shrike’s plan to turn Hester into a Stalker, but the scene is not a clean heroic victory. It is messy, sad, and loaded with history Tom barely understands.

Yea’s comic style suits the moment because the scene needs immediacy. The danger has to read fast: Tom, Shrike, impact, desperation.

Peter Yea comic-style Mortal Engines artwork of Tom Natsworthy attacking Shrike during the Death of Shrike scene — Tom Natsworthy attacking Shrike, one of the novel’s sharpest early collisions between adventure and tragedy.

MEDUSA Firing

Yea’s MEDUSA image is the most explosive of the set.

The MEDUSA weapon is not just another old-tech device. It is the buried nightmare inside London’s civic ambition, a rediscovered ancient weapon rebuilt under St Paul’s and turned into a political instrument.

The scene needs impact and moral ugliness. MEDUSA is spectacular, but the spectacle is the point. Mortal Engines keeps showing how people are seduced by old power, even when that power is obviously catastrophic.

Peter Yea comic-style Mortal Engines artwork of the MEDUSA weapon firing from London and unleashing ancient destructive power — MEDUSA firing, staged with the bright, violent clarity of a comic-book disaster panel.

London in Pencil

The final sketch returns to London itself.

This is the right place to end because London is the image that holds the whole first novel together. It is setting, villain, ideology, and machine at once.

The pencil sketch keeps attention on shape and mass. It does not need surface polish to communicate the key idea: London must feel like a city that has grown downward into engines and tracks while still pretending to be civilised above.