New World Man.

This is Anthony Hayes. Anthony Hayes is very special, in more ways than one.

Hayes is the only character Simon and I created for Deadend who has remained pretty much unchanged from his inception. He's always been a well built, tall human male in his mid twenties called Anthony Hayes. Unlike Sam Campbell (name change), Martin Baxter (race change) or Rachel Myers (random changes in height, hairstyle, facial piercings, tattoos...), nothing has changed in his designs from my earliest sketches.

Hayes is something of a genius. A wunderkind perennial underachiever he works in the R&D department of the United Industries Security Force (UISF) and fulfils the role of support for our illustrious squad of heroes.

Hayes is a 'G-man'- a genetically engineered superhuman- that is to say physically fit, super intelligent and disease resistant. This kind of modification does not come cheap however and Hayes is not from a rich background. In fact he is an orphan, though through no tragic circumstance. Three generations of his ancestors voluntarily entered into indentured service and worked their entire adult lives to fund his geneering and upon the completion of their contract Hayes was produced in a biowomb and raised to adulthood at the expense of his parent company- UI.

Sadly it would appear that Hayes is somewhat afraid of failure or at least unwilling to live up to his full potential and as such sought employment in the security force, where he spends his time hacking criminal networks, developing new technologies and field testing new weapons systems, the geneering program apparently having no ability to influence the human nature to rebel.
Hayes wears spectacles although he has no need for them and in fact has better than perfect eyesight and constantly smokes, because his advanced biology suffers absolutely no negative effects from doing so.

What 'bout my star?

Years ago my best friend and I shared a dream. That dream was to be discovered by a major publishing company and to produce a serialised multi-arc comicbook series called Deadend.

Set a couple of hundred years in the future Deadend would have initially focused on the activities of a unit of security operatives on humanity's most far flung colony. Deadend was a inhospitable mineral rich world positioned at the terminal end of a vast network of interstellar beaming points, hence it's name.

Deadend would be set in a heavily populated universe in which mankind is at the bottom of the pecking order, mysteriously rescued at the last moment from extinction by an apparently benevolent race and cast into a massively varied xenoc culture in which humans are seen as backwards at best and lunch at worst.
Intrigue would abound and of course, as with all great epics everyone would have an ulterior motive.

So why aren't you all reading this every month and salivating at the prospect of the much anticipated movie adaptation?

Fucked if I know. Ask my best mate Simon; he's been writing it for the past decade.

The picture above is of our main cast, from l-r: Martin Baxter (squad leader), Sam Campbell (previously McKnight- named after a random shuffling of a deck of Star Trek: The Next Generation CCG cards, then hastily renamed after a trip to Boots revealed, to our horror that Sam McKnight is apparently a successful hair stylist with his or her own line of haircare products), Rachel Myers (merchant navy pilot and secret heir to a vast shipping fortune) and Anthony Hayes (perpetually smoking genetically modified super genius and all round nerd with a fetish for big guns).

I'm going to go into a lot more detail about each of these guys, there's a LOT of material spread across a dozen sketchbooks after all. I've been drawing these guys literally for years, and occasionally still do- the degree of rendering of one of my doodles is generally an indicator of how long I've been on hold on any given call.

See ya's tomorrow!