Many GeekDad readers likely remember author Jeff VanderMeer; we’ve profiled Jeff and some of his work in previous posts. The pirate anthology Fast Ships, Black Sails, edited by Jeff and his wife Ann was featured during Pirate Week, 2008. And in March of 2008, GeekDad offered an exclusive download of Jeff’s novelette, The Situation. You can still go back and pick up a copy of that PDF if you missed it the first time, by the way. For those who haven’t had the opportunity to read anything of VanderMeer’s yet, do yourself a favor and pick up one of his books. My personal recommendation is City of Saints and Madmen, but I don’t think you can really go wrong with any of his work.
In a very cool bit of news, Jeff just let me know that Tor publishing has commissioned an online, graphic novel version of The Situation (in collaboration with artist Eric Orchard); what makes this even cooler is the fact that the response by GeekDad and Wired readers in downloading the Situation (in the neighborhood of 10k copies during the first week of the post) helped convince the publisher to green light the project.
Jeff has posted some of the early, conceptual artwork on his blog and it looks pretty amazing. He also sent along this preliminary Situation sketch by Eric.
This is the first time that Tor.com has taken on a comic adaption of an existing short story. Based on the source material and what I’ve seen of Orchard’s illustrations, there’s hope that the finished product makes it into print as a full graphic novel as well. Release of The Situation on Tor.com is scheduled to coincide with Comic-Con 2009 in San Diego, so that would be somewhere around mid-July (the 22nd is preview night). Expect to see a full review here when the comic goes live; maybe you can once again help to sway that decision with your clicks, towards a "go" for printing.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=3e599b4a-d78e-4e01-a14a-eac609d044a0)
