Let's take a closer look at that tentacle squeezing this creature's face into bulbous proportions. Whoa.

Templesmith lent his hand to 30 Days of Night, making some of the most memorably horrifying and bloody illustrations I've ever seen in a horror comic. Wormwood: Gentleman Corpse is a solo comic for him, and is a slapsticky horror tale of a worm who drives around inside a rotting corpse, steering from its eyesocket. He and his Scooby gang - a deadly lady with wings and a mental android - fight crime together in a steampunky, tentacular universe of weirdness. This cover is for the French edition of the second collection of the comic series.

There are three collections of the comic available in English, and you can get the first one here via Amazon. If you like gore and monsters, you'll also love another series Templesmith is working on, about werewolves who run an insane asylum. It's called Welcome to Hoxford.

Welcome to Hoxford is about an asylum where all the most violent inmates wind up, but never leave. When a psychiatrist investigates, she discovers the asylum has been privatized by a mysterious corporation and won't give up any information about its wards - even to their former doctors. Gradually, we discover that the asylum is being run by a pack of werewolves, whose lust for carnage matches the inmates'.

1492, the company that bought the rights to the comic from IDW, is run by Chris Colombus, director of two Harry Potter movies as well as producer of other kid-friendly fare like Night at the Museum and Fantastic Four. It's hard to imagine the author of Goonies digging into the entrails of Templesmith's sick imagination, so let's hope he hands this one off to a director who can deliver the gore. Because when it comes to gore, Templesmith is my personal god. Or demon. Whatever.

via Variety

And yes, that's Alan "Watchmen" Moore's daughter. To be honest, her comics work hasn't blown me away so far, but the art is amazing enough (and lifelike enough) that I almost don't care.

According to Comic Book Resources:

"The Whispering Gallery” takes place during the tenth Doctor’s travels with companion Martha Jones, on a planet where showing emotions has been outlawed. “It’s not based on Earth, so we get to do some aliens and monsters which is always fun,” Moore said. Though the inhabitants of the planet have good reason for playing things close to the vest, the good doctor is not about to let that suppression stand. “The story kind of picks up on the consequences that the Doctor's actions have on the universe, and the people he touches, and then we get to see how it pans out eventually."

This may be one you'll want to pre-order. Says Templesmith:

A one-shot comic from IDW Publishing. Would make a cool tv episode if it weren't a comic.

Since it's damn hard to get things from the smaller publishers, if you want the book you may have to get your retailer to order it in specifically for you. If you still want one, it may not magically appear on the shelf, especially not in these tougher times. So you have to go tell your retailer you actually *do* want a copy and to make sure they get one for you.

Tell em it's Previews catalog order number is: DEC084084 and tell them you know some Daleks with abnormally sized genocidal plunger weapons...

[Ben Templesmith via Ben Moore Reppion]

The Whispering Gallery - a one-shot written by Reppion and writing partner (and daughter of Watchmen's Alan Moore) Leah Moore, and illustrated by Ben Templesmith that teams David Tennant's Doctor with Martha Jones as they investigate a planet that's outlawed emotion - may look very impressive right now, but it didn't necessarily start that way, as Reppion explained,

Ben actually approached Leah via the modern miracle of Twitter and asked her if we'd be interested in pitching for a Doctor Who one-shot with him as the artist. Naturally, we were thrilled and said yes immediately. Ben is a fantastic artist and we both really admire his work, so it's great to be able to work with him on such a brilliant little project.

Not that the entire process was without stress - or nocturnal inspiration, for that matter, according to Moore:

We were trying to come up with a pitch to send in to IDW and having a really hard time thinking of anything... Everything we could think up had already been done, or was not the right kind of story. We went off to bed one night after brainstorming fruitlessly for hours, and I went to sleep worrying that we'd not be able to think of anything and miss out on writing it altogether. [That night] I woke up and said loudly, ‘I know what we are doing for Doctor Who!’ which woke John up. We got it turned round in a week or so after that. Pretty fast for us.

Doctor Who: The Whispering Gallery hits stores at the end of February next year.

Moore & Reppion on "Doctor Who: Whispering Gallery [Comic Book Resources]

No Templesmith-illustrated Doctor Who comic has been officially scheduled yet, but if it looks this good all the way through, we're willing to call it the most beautifully-illustrated Who comic ever.

The Good Doctor And Martha [Ben Templesmith]

If you're anything like us, then Eisner Award finalist Templesmith's art will bring out the hidden Decadent in you — the one who likes to snort powdered absinthe and scream out Rimbaud poems on New Orleans street corners just for a lark.

Templesmith also names Ronald Searle and Ralph Steadman as influences, and it's this mix of comic and horrific influences that gives Templesmith's images such vigor, along with a cheery inability to censor himself. His latest book is Wormwood, Gentleman Corpse: It Only Hurts When I Pee, and it features the continuing adventures of the aforementioned gentleman corpse.

Wormwood is, as they say, "defiantly weird," in the way people use "weird" when they're at a loss for words. Templesmith's black sense of humor, his uniquely delicate yet muscular style, his nuanced but bold use of color, and his knack for finding just the right detail to make a panel or page come to life—these traits in combination make the art and words work so well for readers.

Templesmith told us:

Wormwood is really just me having fun and trying to through in as many disgusting perversions of my old childhood influences. [And I do] call it my riff on Doctor Who, if it were more demonologically oriented and written for very juvenile adults with a sick sense of humor.

I am afraid of it. Always reluctant to dive in and embrace it, but once I do, I pretty much fall in love with it. (The latest being "Twitter," which I'm addicted to). I [also] try to keep my computer work fairly simple. I don't want to swap completely to the computer to do all my art. I still value the personal meat-world touch and only use technology for the bits I can't replicate physically myself. Some people think I do it all on computer, but I think I've just worked out a system that plays to the strengths of all the mediums, rather than overly rely on just one.

I literally have no constraints from the publisher, they just let me do as I wish. Well, so far anyway. I've yet to be sued or told 'no, you can't put Paris Hilton in the book and have her decapitated corpse used as a play thing by a band of sexually depraved redneck zombies, Ben.' Wormwood is really my personal project, so just the fact I get to do it at all is the fun bit.

Despite the commercial success of 30 Days of Night, including getting the major motion picture treatment and winning a Spike TV award, Templesmith is refreshingly oblivious to the idea of following up by adhering to any one formula for success. In addition to continuing to work on Fell with Warren Ellis, he's starting a new series called Welcome to Hoxford that looks like it's going to be a no-holds-barred psychiatric hospital creep-fest. Our guess is that Doctor Who won't figure into this one, unless he shows up as a patient . . .

Ben Templesmith [gallery]