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.

Grossman says he's received a notice from the publisher with this catalog copy about the book:

Since childhood, Raz has lived behind the walls of a 3,400-year-old monastery, a sanctuary for scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians—sealed off from the illiterate, irrational, unpredictable "saecular" world that is plagued by recurring cycles of booms and busts, world wars and climate change. Until the day that a higher power, driven by fear, decides that only these cloistered scholars have the abilities to avert an impending catastrophe. And, one by one, Raz and his cohorts are summoned forth without warning into the Unknown.

The Return of Stephenson [Nerdworld]

Methods: We compiled a complete list of cyberpunk novels and movies, by date, from a variety of sources including Wikipedia, the Cyberpunk Review, Amazon.com's cyberpunk lists and various other sites. Then we tallied the number of novels (red line) and movies (blue line) per year. We were hoping for a nice smooth curve, but it didn't happen. We're sorry the chart turned out so zig-zag, we were as surprised as anybody.

Results: Cyberpunk has gone in waves, judging from our data. Novels in the genre have had a few high points. The biggest peaks for novels were the late 80s (eight novels in 1988), and then the mid-90s (an average of 6 novels per year from 1993-1996). Cyberpunk films had a peak in the late 80s-early 90s, followed by a brief lull. There were ten cyberpunk movies each in 1993 and 1995, and then another lull. The genre had a resurgence at the movies from 2002-2004, and then quieted down again.

How do we define cyberpunk? We tried not to. We pulled our list from as many reliable-looking sources as possible, and only left out things that seemed like obvious outliers. (On the Cyberpunk Review site, some of the movies on the cyberpunk list were listed as having a "low" level of cyberpunk themes, and seemed to be obviously reaching. So we left those movies out.)

So what does this tell us? Maybe cyberpunk is less of a fad than it used to be. Or maybe because we're now living in a cyberpunk era with virtual worlds, nonstop cybersex and evil corporations, we no longer view those things as elements of science fiction. What do you think?

Lensmen begins two billion years in the past, when a race of noble philosophers, the Arisians, have developed awesome mental powers. Invaders from another universe, the Eddorians, come to our universe because they detect that our galaxy is passing through another one. This galactic do-si-do will lead to the creation of countless new inhabited worlds for the Eddorians to conquer.

So the Arisians breed a new super-race of humans to defend the galaxy. And they give the Lens, which focuses thought the way a lens focuses light, to our heroes. (It's sort of like the Guardians giving a super ring to Green Lantern.) Only the Lens' proper owner can wear it without dying. The Arisians only give Lenses to worthy individuals, and if you try to get a Lens but aren't worthy, you just disappear.

In the end, the heroic Kimball Kinnison marries the ultimate product of the Arisians' billion-year breeding program, Clarissa MacDougall. She's the first female to receive the coveted Lens. Their genetically perfect offspring have amazing powers and become the Children of the Lens.

Not only is Lensmen the sort of sprawling saga that does badly in the movies (not unlike Dune), but its themes of eugenics and oddball sexism are obviously a product of the 1930s, when the series began. Can Howard and Universal make a non-sucky version? Probably only by changing it beyond recognition. Luckily, there's some precedent: fans complain that the anime version of Lensmen has nothing in common with the novels except the title and a few character names. Image from cover of Second Stage Lensmen. [SciFi Wire]

These books have inspired at least three generations. The first Tom Swift book hit the shelves in 1910, and since then more than 20 million books have been sold in the series. Swift started out as a "science hero" and inventor, and later his adventures took him into outer space. Some of the more recent books have titles like Tom Swift and the Mutant Beach or Tom Swift and the Rocket Racers.

Tom Swift books inspired Alan Moore's own Tom Strong character, who is a science hero himself, and the word 'taser' is an acronym for Thomas A. Swift Electric Rifle.

Although Hollywood has produced television versions of many other early twentieth century adventure franchises like The Hardy Boys, we've never seen a Tom Swift series before. Luckily Albie Hecht saw potential in the books. His film Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, which later became a successful animated series, is clearly an homage to the 1910s boy science hero. Will Tom Swift be another Jimmy Neutron? I'd rather see him in live action, so here's hoping that the Cartoon Network's recent hit with the live action Ben 10 movie will let them explore that route. If not, maybe we can wait another hundred years.