In Kindred, a present-day African American woman in California, Dana, keeps getting drawn back in time to the antebellum South. She saves the white plantation owner, Rufus, from drowning, but every time Dana travels back in time her stays grow longer and more arduous.

Beacon, which has been publishing editions of Kindred since 2004, is seeking an artist to put images to Butler's ideas: contact Alison Trzop by March 16. [Tor.com, Racialicious and SF Scope]

When it comes to the Robots And Monsters graphic novel, Alterio says he won't give away too many plot details, "but suffice to say, it has a lot of robots and monsters." That's pretty much all he has to say, as far as I'm concerned.

Meanwhile, the EFF says Alterio has relaunched his site, Robots And Monsters: A Charitable Menagerie, as a fundraiser for the electronic civil liberties organization. Here's how it works: You give Joe $50 along with three words or phrases to work from, and he creates an original robot/monser illustration for you. He sends you the original piece of art and posts it in his gallery. And the money goes to the EFF to help stop electronic wiretapping and other abuses. Last year, Alterio did something similar for the SF AIDS Foundation, along with other artists, and managed to raise over $10,000. So let's hope his EFF fundraiser is just as successful this year.

[Alterio and EFF]

Archie Goodwin adapted the film to a graphic novel for Marvel in 1982:

The magazine Crazy, a competitor of Mad and Cracked even created a parody:

More of the comics here:

Images from Moebius, Long Tomorrow [Sci-Fi-O-Rama]

Blade Runner: A Marvel Super Special [BRMovie.com]

In Part One, Moore discusses the shift from the public perception of comic books as a childish diversion to the acceptance of comics as a culturally relevant artform, and his own attempt to portray the struggle between mankind and nature through Swamp Thing. Incidentally, the line "television, movies, comics," which is said towards the end of the video, is sampled in the Pop Will Eat Itself song "Shortwave Transmission":

In Part Two, which features Moore's ornithophobic tune "March of the Sinister Ducks," Moore admits to a Messiah Complex and laments that more children from his hometown didn't grow up to be artists:

In Part Three, Moore addresses criticisms about the inclusion of political content in comic books:

And in the final segment, he discusses the inspiration behind Watchmen:

[via Mikl-em]

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]

Here's the plot synopsis of the original graphic novel written by Robert Vendetti, which appears to be out of print:

The fusing of virtual reality and cybernetics has ushered in the era of the surrogate, a new technology that lets users interact with the world without ever leaving their homes. It's a perfect world, and it's up to Detectives Harvey Greer and Pete Ford of the Metro Police Department to keep it that way. But, to do so, they'll need to stop a techno-terrorist bent on returning society to a time when people lived their lives instead of merely experiencing them.