When I started researching my recent BBC essay , one question in the back of my mind was, how am I going to draw a black hole? There aren't exactly a wealth of images of the real thing - just a handful of blurry telescope images to go by: orange doughnuts floating in darkness . But once I got onto the drawing phase of the project I realised this situation actually gave me a great deal of artistic freedom not available in my last illustrated essay (in which I felt a significa

1948 reconstruction of Louis Slotin’s 1946 criticality accident (with physicist Chris Wright posing as Slotin) Last week, after literally months of research and development, my graphic essay ‘The Blue Flash’ was published by BBC Future . Sitting somewhere between web-comic and illustrated essay, I developed the piece after seeing photographs of a reconstruction of Slotin's accident commissioned in 1948 by Los Alamos National Laboratories (formerly the 'Project Y' bomb develop

Today I have two offerings on the Manhattan Project. The first is my graphic essay, The Blue Flash for BBC Future. The result of many months of research, it's a study of a fatal accident that happened at Los Alamos National Laboratories in May 1946. Louis Slotin was manually demonstrating a test procedure for plutonium cores when something went wrong. The essay draws on ideas about causality, human perception of hazard, and quantum mechanical theory to ask how and why the