Oh My Bog Gods!

I couldn't believe that I got to work on my two favourite bog-gods at the same time this week. You wait ages for one plant elemental and two turn at the same time.

The Man-Thing flats were for Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe #4 for me old mate Lee Loughridge, and the Swampie flats are for DC's Swamp Thing #0 for my new mate Matt Wilson.

The menacing Man-Thing appeared in the first series of horror comics I collected as a teenager— pocket sized Chiller – I used to buy one or two a week for 20p out of a box at a local flea market. The Secret of Swamp Thing was also the first graphic novel I bought in the last 80s. So, this has been a very rewarding week for me.

Saucer Country

I had the pleasure of flatting SAUCER COUNTRY #4 for Lee  – and he did a magic job on final colours. I've been really enjoying my old mate Paul Cornell's take on this 'The X-Files meets The West Wing' story. Check out my flats over here.

Paul's fantastic M.R. James pastiche  'The Occurrence at Slocombe Priory' appears in  StarShipSofa Stories Volume 3 – perfectly accompanied by the illustrations of Tom Crielly.

IDW Take On The Zilk

Continuing their new partnership with 2000AD, IDW Publishing announced a collection of Al Ewing and Brendan McCarthy’s THE ZAUCER OF ZILK. Len worked with McCarthy on the colours for this – and they did a fantastic job! You can check my flats over here.

Dimension-hopping onto comic stands this October, THE ZAUCER OF ZILK is a story that simply must be seen to be believed. The two oversized issues of ZAUCER are bursting at the staples with McCarthy’s brilliantly vivid art and he and Ewing’s fantastically ambitious story, taking readers on a wild, phantasmagorical journey across unique worlds with characters that are colorful to say the least.

ZAUCER OF ZILK #1 of 2 will be in stores October 2012.

IDW Publishing

Sandman Prequel Announcement

Twenty-five years after one of the most celebrated graphic novels of all-time hit shelves, award winning and critically acclaimed author and screenwriter, Neil Gaiman, announced his return to THE SANDMAN. Gaiman made the surprise announcement, via video, at DC Entertainment’s Vertigo panel at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con.

Karen Berger, Executive Editor of Vertigo, then revealed that Gaiman is paired with artist, JH Williams III, with Dave Stewart on colours for the series.

THE SANDMAN mini-series will be published by Vertigo in 2013, and I might have a bit of exciting news myself regarding this in the future – stay tuned!

Wonder Woman

Just a quick sneak peek at another project I've been working on – Wonder Woman! This is a panel from issue 12, written by Brian Azzarello, with pristine art by Cliff Chiang. I've got to say that these are some of the sweetest pages I've ever worked on! A big thank-you to Matt Wilson for letting me flat these!

Women Who See 100 Million Colours

Most of us with normal vision can perceive one million different colours, which sounds impressive. Researches now suspect however that a tiny percentage of women may be capable of seeing 100 times that amount.

The science of super-vision all boils down to cones — special neurons, located in your retinas, that convert incoming light into the electrical signals that feed your brain information pertaining to color. Your typical retina houses millions of cones, but in humans those cones usually fall into just three categories. Each category of cone, on its own, is capable of detecting around 100 different hues; but pair it with either of the remaining two classes of cones and their powers complement one another. Just like that, the number of perceivable colors jumps from just 100 to 10,000. Combine the signals from all three kinds of cones and that number leaps to one million colors.
Mutations in the genes that code for cones are responsible for color blindness in males. The fact that many of these genes reside on the X chromosome makes color blindness much more common among males than females, but it also gives rise to another possibility: a small percentage of women may actually posses four color cones.

Veronique Greenwood at Discover Magazine documents the search for women with this rare trait by newcastle University neuroscientist Gabriele Jordan. No easy task, for all kinds of complex reasons and one simple one:

[These women] might experience a range of colors invisible to the rest. It’s possible these so-called tetrachromats see a hundred million colors [1004], with each familiar hue fracturing into a hundred more subtle shades for which there are no names, no paint swatches. And because perceiving color is a personal experience, they would have no way of knowing they see far beyond what we consider the limits of human vision.

Some women may perceive millions more colors than the rest of us. Are you one of them? (io9)