Kevin's Watch

So, last night I read volume 1 of Wormwood, Gentleman Corpse, a series by Ben Templesmith, who is also known for 30 Days of Night. I'm not much of a comic reader, though I've been getting into them more often recently; this is one I picked up because I'd seen it mentioned several times by author Jeff VanderMeer on his blog.
The main character of this series is Wormwood, a sentient worm living in the empty eyesocket of a rotting corpse, which it controls telepathically. He hangs out with his clockwork drinking buddy Mr Pendulum in a bar staffed by immortal strippers charged with guarding a dimensional portal. Wormwood isn't a monster hunter--"only a moron would actually go looking for the bloody things"--but he tends to attract "a certain kind of people", so he and Mr P spend a lot of time fighting them, usually involving tentacles.

Volume 1 collects the first four issues of the comic, along with the "issue 0" teaser, altogether forming the storyline for "Birds, Bees, Blood & Beer". I really love Templesmith's artwork in this comic, the style of the drawings and the way he uses extensive layering to give colour and texture in every panel. This comic's full of weird, twisted stuff, and the writing is brilliant--adult themes, very cleverly written and funny as hell in parts (the way the story ends in particular is great).
In all, I enjoyed this a lot, and will soon be purchasing volume 2, "It Only Hurts When I Pee". Highly recommended.

i may have to pick this one up!!

thanks Murrin. i love 30 days, and the art is a huge reason. i look forward to finding this!

Bought and read volume two, It Only Hurts When I Pee, today. Didn't really get any laugh-out-loud moments in this one, and I think the pacing may have been a bit off (not to mention that an important part of the story turned out to be mostly set-up for volume three, Calamari Rising). The one-shot story included at the end, Segue to Destruction (featuring the four horsemen of the apocalypse, who, having run out of hookers and blow, are starting to get bored and threaten to do their jobs instead), was better than the main story of this volume. It was still worth the read, even if I didn't get quite as into it as I did volume one.

found an issue - enjoyed t very much. thanks for the posting!

Nice. Glad you liked it, Sarge.

Synchronicity: Went out today because it felt like I hadn't been shopping in ages, and look what I found:



According to Amazon, it doesn't come out until tomorrow!

hoping to get to bedrock comics and find some more issues today. cool that you found an issue early.

It's the collected volume 3--four issues, IIRC, being the whole Calamari Rising storyline. I prefer to get these trade paperbacks to the individual issues.
That image, by the way, does not do justice to the beautiful piece of artwork that is this volume's cover.

i mostly prefer the individual issues myself. but if the trade has additional stuff i like that.