Absolutely!

Friends,
It's a while since my last post...
From the day I got back from the NYCC, I've been in a deadline tunnel. A place where many of us in this biz sadly spend much of our time. It's the kind of tunnel in which all that matters is getting to the end of it, and where paying the slightest attention to the walls around you may lead to the danger of climbing them. Though this particular version of the tube was not so frightful as many can be, and was, in fact, quite pleasant, it needed to be entered with resolve. The mission? Coloring all the ' bridging ' pages from the original ten-issue run of V For Vendetta for the Absolute V For Vendetta edition to be released in August.
For those of you who are only familiar with V in it's collected form as a paperback or hardback, or in the various versions of it which have been published around the world, the bridging pages were full-page illustrations which I created for the original issues in order to link together the separate chapters of the story, and sometimes lead into and out of the issues. For the purpose of printing economics, all of the individual issues had to have a specific page-count, but the interiors of the issues couldn't be completely filled with reprint story material without breaking the chapters up. Blank pages were not an option of course, and we didn't want any advertising filling these blanks and marring the atmosphere of the story - so the concept of using bridging pages arose. My intention with them was never to use them to add meaning that wasn't intended to the end of a chapter if they followed one, or to it's beginning if the pages preceded a chapter. My purpose at all times was for them to complement the action and not distort it. Within those boundaries I had a very enjoyable and creative time, and produced some illustration work I'm proud of.

At the time this work was done, there was no budget available to pay for these illustrations to be fully colored and little time to do it anyway, so they were all simply tinted with an overall tone of any color I considered appropriate for the atmosphere of the chapters they were attached to. But for the Absolute edition, I was offered the opportunity to fully color all these pages, and I gladly took it. Over 50 of these full-page illustrations are now in full color, and have been colored using the same palette that V's colorists - Siobhan Dodds and Steve Whitaker - used in the individual chapters they worked on, to homage their contribution and join theirs in it's tone. Siobhan and Steve used watercolor and colored inks respectively for their work, but I used colored pencils, manipulated in Photoshop, in a repetition of the technique I applied to the color of my graphic novel, Kickback. It worked well in maintaining the look of the original color work of Steve and Siobhan.

This new color is part of a great package in the Absolute Vendetta, which will look very much like a perfect binder of all the original issues of the serial, reprinting for the first time absolutely all of the art they contained, and more of the preparatory art that went into all the issues.
Here's a sneak preview. A couple more - but just a couple more - to come later. Just for you..
Be back quicker next time, folks. And that's a promise.