Tube Surfing: 29 June 2008

• Tim Perkins and other comics creators and web sites includng The Beat report the sad news that US artist Michael Turner (Witchblade, Fathom and many superb covers for Marvel) has died aged just 37 after a long battle with cancer. Our sympathies to his family and friends. Tim's post inlcudes some of Michael's outstanding art. Anyone wishing to make a charitable donation to please send to Michael Turner's requested charities: The American Cancer Society or The Make-A-Wish Foundation.

• To celebrate the release of the over-sized hardcover Dan Dare collection, MySpaceTV is airing an exclusive trailer of Virigin Comics take on the doughty pilot of the future. To view the bold, new trailer journey here. The over-sized hardcover edition collects issues 1 through 3 of Dan Dare, written by Garth Ennis with art by Gary Erskine.
• Preorder the collection (out in October) from amazon.com or amazon.co.uk

• Comic artist Al Davison (Spiral Cage, Sprial Dreams and many more great works) is hosting a five week life drawing class which begins on Wednesday, 9 July. For more information contact Al via his Astral Gypsy website

• The July 2008 issue of scifi webmag SFcrowsnest.com is now online. There are lots of goodies to read, including interviews with SF/F writers Robert J. Sawyer, Jacqueline Carey, Steven Erikson, Paul Kearney, Conrad Williams and Nancy Kress, articles in memory of Stan Winston and Algis Budrys, a movie review of the The Incredible Hulk, while author Philip Palmer reports back from the Cannes Film Festival with a fan's eye on events.
US author L.E. Modesitt also asks what's likely to last in the genre, and there's more news and reviews of books, dvds, comics and magazines than you can shake a lightsabre at. Point your ordinance at www.SFcrowsnest.com

• Talking of SF, Steve Holland's Bear Alley is proving avtreasure trobve for fans of SF book cover art of late. One of his latest postings is devoted to John Harris, another illustrator being covered (albeit briefly) in Steve's upcoming Sci-Fi Art book so I won't say much here. A very good book of his work came out in 200, Mass, with text written by Ron Tiner, which offers a lot of insight into his thinking and techniques.

• The Beat has published several new photos from Batman: Dark Knight, which has been dedicated to Heath Legder, who completed his role as The Joke shortly before his untimely death.

• Talk about memorable reading. Over on blog London Loves Comics there's a plug for the 1981 2000AD annual, which features the Mekon's "10 ways to destroy the world". One of them, which operhaps stuck in the mind of Garth Ennis when it came to the new Virgin Dan Dare series, is to introduce a black hole to the solar system and watch it such all the energy from the Earth...

• Neil Gaiman offers a disturbing post, The New Paranoia, on the tricks authorities might get up to when you enter a country with your laptop. "I have friends who practice ultra-safe computing when crossing borders: examine their computers and you'll find yourself on something almost data-free, so you'd not be looking at encrypted files, you'd simply not be looking at files -- the same kinds of things that Cory Doctorow describes in Little Brother. And I've always thought they were being, well, silly." Then Neil read an article in the LA Times which reported that US Courts have ruled, as recently as this spring in a case stemming from a search at LAX, that there's no need for warrants or suspicions when a person is seeking to enter the country because any "routine search" is reasonable under the Fourth Amendmentm and started to worry... . In effect, it's like luggage: anything and everything in your laptop, cellphone, BlackBerry or digital camera can be examined and copied by US Customs and Border Protection agents. Read Neil's full post

• Finally for this TubeSurf, a quick reminder about the excellent Alan Moore interview published earlier this month on the Forbidden Planet International blog (part 1, part 2) and a plug for writer Pádraig Ó Méalóid’s Glycon live journal. It’s a fascinating repository of all things Alan Moore, including a lot of completely unavailable and extremely rare work, such as these incredible examples of Moore’s artwork for the From Hell series (thanks to Joe Gordon for the link).