comics- Wormwood: Gentleman Corpse

OH. OH. OHGOD.

Ben Templesmith is a comics writer/illustrator. He does horror. He does zombies. I want to do his zombies, and I'm not actually channeling Theron at the moment. Templesmith does the art for Fell, which is amazing and you really, really ought to be reading it because it's pulp noir detective fiction by Warren Ellis, and the least you can do is shell out two bucks for the first issue.

Anyway Ben Templesmith. He's done a few series of his own, and illustrated a few others. His latest solo project just put out its zeroth issue- and now I have have Wormwood: Gentleman Corpse in my hot little hands. It is so amazing I just put it down and felt the need to babble incoherently on my blog about it.

Interdimensional strip clubs filled with zombies(patrons and employees) and tentacular plant monsters, women wearing thongs and dragon tattoos and little else, interdimensional cell phone (easy minutes plan), robot sidekicks with shotguns and beards and reflective sunglasses, and Ben Templesmith's dirty, gorgeous, disgusting, luminous art. I am in love. (And I want some of these prints so very badly. So. Fucking. Pretty.) The main character is a zombie- a tentacle monster sprouts out of his eye sockets so his sidekick has to blast his head off with a shotgun, and afterwards, the bits of his head that are still intact on the floor ask if anyone has a stapler. Next panel, Wormwood is back on his feet, with the caption, "Minutes and 54 staples later-" and it is amazing.

I'm not at all certain where this love of detective stories came from (the zombies are easy- entirely Trina and Gina's faults, and I do mean entirely)- I mean, I'm not feeling any particular urge to start reading Doyle or Chandler (maybe Chandler), but then, I don't feel many urges to read books these days. Comics seem uniquely suited to noir- it works well as a visual genre. And I love it. I may have always loved it, and just not realized it until I picked up Fell. And now I've got Wormwood to keep me entertained, too, and I think I may need to find more noir comics to feed this gaping black void in my soul.

Comics: like cake, only better. (And after yesterday, I have so many of them. I haven't even counted them, because they are so multitudinous, and almost all of them were free. The only things I bought were Wormwood, Blackgas #2 (zombie survivial by Warren Ellis), The Apparat Singles Collection (self contained SF by Warren Ellis), and Samurai Champloo volume 2.)

God, I'm such a whore for Warren Ellis and all things related to him. I really need to finish reading Transmet.

Life is so good right now. :)