If you can use XPM, here's a solution that doesn't require any external packages:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
# reads a 2-color XPM; outputs space for white, asterisk for black
my @lines = map { tr/",//d; $_ }
 grep {!m{^/\*|[{}]}} <>;
my ($header, @c) = splice(@lines, 0, 3);
my @dims = $header =~ m{(\d+)}g;
die "has too many colors or is in wrong format\n" if $dims[2] > 2 || $
+dims[3] > 1;
my $text = join('', @lines);
# process colormap
my ($w, $b);
foreach (@c)
{
 m{^\s*(\S).*#(\S+)\s*$};
 hex($2) ? $w = $1 : $b = $1 
}
eval "\$text =~ tr/$w$b/ */";
print $text;
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And, in case the prior was too readable, here's a regex-based version of the above...

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# reads a 2-color XPM; outputs space for white, asterisk for black
use strict;
$/ = undef; my $text = <>;
$text =~ s{^[^"]*\n}{}gm; # remove noise lines
$text =~ s{^\s*"\s*([^"]*\S)\s*"\s*,\s*$}{$1}gm; # unquote others
$text =~ s{^\d+\s+\d+\s+(\d+)\s+(\d+)\n # dimensions
 (.)\s+c\s+\#([0-9a-fA-F]+)\n # colormap 0
 (.)\s+c\s+\#([0-9a-fA-F]+)\n }{}mx; # colormap 1
die "has too many colors or is in wrong format\n" if $1 > 2 || $2 > 1;
my ($w, $b) = hex($4) > hex($6) ? ( $3,$5 ) : ( $5,$3 );
eval "\$text =~ tr/$w$b/ */";
print $text;
[download]

update: shortened code a bit, added second version

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