Mag readers will probably be familiar with the name Murky Depths - it's a fanzine dedicated to dark SF and fantasy short stories and comic strips that we've often raved about in our Fanzine Of The Month box. Its consistently high standard has made it one of the best genre fanzines out there right now, and now it's giving us one more thing to shout about with the announcement that it'll begin its serialization of Dead Girls – Richard Calder’s graphic novel adaptation of his acclaimed, cult cyberpunk novel of the same name – with issue #9, available early August 2009. Leonardo M Giron – the Manila-based artist fast making a name for himself who has appeared in previous issues of Murky Depths – will be illustrating.
Calder wrote Dead Girls while living in Thailand – principally Bangkok, and later, Nongkhai, a town on the Mekong River bordering Laos. The novel is largely set in Bangkok, and is heavily influenced by manga, anime, and Asian cinema.
Calder says: "Leonardo M Giron’s indigenous grasp of the ambience that Manila shares with Bangkok, and his ability to translate this into a unique, manga-like idiom, makes him perfect for delineating the cyberpunk exuberance and sheer down-and-dirty exoticism of Dead Girls."
According to The Washington Post Book World "On the evidence of his brilliant debut novel, Dead Girls, Richard Calder bids fair to make off with Alfred Bester's mantle of charmed literary omnipotence. A master of baroque pyrotechnics, rapid pacing, cosmopolitan sangfroid and knock-your-socks-off conceptualisation, Bester has left traces everywhere, but no solid progeny. Until now."
Dead Girls the graphic novel represents a substantial re-imagining of Dead Girls the novel. The characters, and the fictional universe they inhabit, remain essentially the same, but all else has been worked into something new. To order your copy, visit murkydepths.com . An interview with David Calder will also appear in issue 186 of SFX, on sale 29 July.
