Making it look easy...

Just to demonstrate that it doesn't always happen as rapidly or easily as it did with Anthony Hayes I thought I'd share the process that went into the creation of Rachel Myers, one of the other characters in our team. I apologise for the very poor quality of some of these scans, but they're ancient and I cant currently find the originals to make better copies.

1.) This image shows what I think is Myers' first ever appearance. Bang in the centre of the page you can see her, tattoo on the wrong side of her face wearing a very poor Alan Davies hairdo and a very baggy space suit.

2.) More of the baggy suit and the horrific hairstyle. I seriously have no idea what I was thinking. I know I was trying to make Earth technology look a little bit backwards and unadvanced (as indeed was the concept for Deadend) but the hair... really don't know what I was aiming for there.

3.) Getting closer... The horrible hair is finally gone, replaced with pretty much what has come to be Myers' trademark style, but she's lost her clan tattoo and gained some piercings... starting to get a little alternative, but the bulky spacesuit is still there.

4.) Final version. We have the hair, the tattoo and the piercings- perfect! She's even smoking a cigarette (cos she's got attitude, see?). Plus I've disposed of that nasty spacesuit and replaced it with something better looking. The new suit is not, as you might expect, an excuse to slip a female character into something skintight and superherolike- it's a 'squeezesuit'- an actual scientific concept for a pressuresuit. The idea is that instead of wearing a suit that contains a pressure of one atmosphere you could instead wear a suit that exerts a pressure of one atmosphere on its wearer to hold them in shape. Such a suit would be much more compact and would restrict movement to a much lesser degree. Also it looks much sexier!

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!