Posted by author Jeff Vandermeer on his blog:

TORTURE SQUID: Zach Taylor/VanderMeer Comic to Be Completed Soonish

"Artist Zach Taylor has been working on preliminary sketches for a Torture Squid comic book/graphic novel. I'm providing him with a rough textual treatment for him to use as the basis for the storyline. We haven't sought out a publisher -we're going to finish it first. (Zach, btw, has created some great Evil Monkey for President swag, based on my EM persona, available here. Check it out.)

What're The Torture Squid? Well, they're a ruthless gang of anti-heroes who run amok through my fictional creation of Ambergris. They're described in City of Saints & Madmen, in a story called "King Squid". Below you can find Zach's sketches and also the relevant City text for context. The resulting comic will be somewhat darkly humorous with a fair amount of slapstick. Should be fun."

Check out the rest of the blog post, which includes prose excerpts, here!

Yes, that's right. I'm collaborating on my next project. (I finished "The Miner and the Cave That Ate Time" way back in April. What? I forgot to post about that? I'm a sorry excuse for a blogger!)

I'm really excited about this. If you don't know who Jeff Vandermeer is, go read The City of Saints and Madmen and/or Shriek: An Afterword. He's an incredible fantasy author in the "New Weird" school. He writes awesome books and I'm thrilled to be working with him.

Staple went awesomely. It'll give me just the right amount of motivation to finish the last twenty pages of the book (yes, twenty pages and it's done).

I'm now offering posters of the "Mine!" image (check last post), as well as these two older ones. Repost:

Wasteland

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Clowns and Lawyers

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They are 11x17. To buy, go to the Store Store Store. Um...I mean the Store.

Staple! is going on this Saturday in Austin! So if you're around you best show up. I'll be there with tons of cool posters and mini-comics. But don't be expecting me to have the completed Miner book or anything (that'll be done in a month or so, but, you know, I'll have to get it printed and all that too). The show will be fantastic.

Mine!

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Mine! Mine! He's a Miner! You get it, right? eh? I'm going to have these teaser postcards with the above image to promote the soon-to-be-done graphic novel. Come by the Austin Sketch Group table to grab one!

This is the part where I apologize for not posting lately and you ignore me. I take your momentary lapse in attention as an opportunity to slip in this page count:

Finished Page Count:......77 (of 112)

and this 'wide panel glimpse(tm):'

Fear - wide panel glimpse

and pretend I never did anything wrong. I'm clever, you see. But what you really want to know is my choice as presidential candidate. You read this blog for the politics really; I know you. Well, there's definitely something brewing with this new candidate. If the election were today, he'd get my vote.

Hand of God (nicknamed "Hando" by his friends) was recently bested in the FACA 4 Tournament with his team, The Handy Capables. They went three rounds in the West Division before falling to The Daughters of General Melee. Check the Fistacuffs Blog for the blow by blow.

He'd like to thank his tag-team partner, Magic Fingers MacDoogal, and his manager, Señor Dedo.

Released from medical care after breaking his leg in the fight, he is now considering a change of career.

You best believe Jack Kirby was a genius! Here's a tribute to his "Fourth World" material, which I've been reading a lot of lately. DC has been putting out these excellent omnibus hardcovers of all the comics in the order they were published starting in 1970. Crazily inventive, brilliant old comics...But you knew that, right?

Here we have Mister Miracle and Oberon being chased by The Black Racer, with disapproving original Mister Miracle and a foreboding Darkseid statue in the background. Tapping into my long neglected superhero fandom is fun!

Kirby's Fourth World - Miracle Race

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Everyone thinks the sticker I have on my laptop is Drinky Crow. It is, in fact, the (more or less) title character from Jamie Tanner's "The Aviary," the Quiet Bird-Man. Most normal people should never be exposed to the unfiltered insanity of this work. It may seem unbelievable, but Mr. Tanner has gone several degrees weirder than Tony Millionaire.

This is a collection of short stories. Ones with normal enough sounding names like "Always in Love" and "Amber." The content is anything but normal. You might be right that the story "Barry Pago, Crime Scene Investigator" is about a murder and criminal forensics. You might be mildly surprised at the twist that this investigator brings his kid to work with him. But you will be weirded out by the fact that Barry is a cyborg penguin. And you'll be freaked about the atrocious things he does to the female corpses.

A lot of times it may seem Tanner is reaching for just the most messed up and absurd story he can, but there is an organizing force at work here. All the stories are connected, and what starts as an exercise in absurdity turns into one of the best achievements in world-building I've seen in comics. The first handful of stories are entertaining, but a couple shades too nonsensical, weird for weirds sake. Then begins the puzzle-like process of making some semblance of sense out of the thing. It's like Tanner fully set out to produce something unabashedly strange, but his brain wouldn't let it go unexplained. And, whether intentional or not, a mad logic is slowly put in place, he retcons his nonsense into a world where it all could really happen. These stories were originally put out as mini-comics, and I fear for anyone who just read one story and didn't get this whole book to justify it.

So it's a masterwork of world-building, I say? What about the rest, then? Well, the style of it is of the cross-hatched Victorian sort and fits well. It doesn't blow you away, but it is solid and consistent. Almost every character in the book is foul-mouthed and cartoonishly angry. Either that or talks stilted Olde-Timey speak. But I guess that gets back into the world-building again.

It's definitely what they call a "love it or hate it" book. I'd call it near a genius sort of thing. It comes highly recommended for me. But, for you? I'm not as sure.

Here's the official page. It's got preview stuff.