The first 100 people to swing by the Avatar Press booth and buy a copy of Neonomicon #1 will discover it’s been signed by artist Jacen Burrows!

So make sure when your buying your other Avatar titles that you ask for a copy of Neonomicon#1.

Don’t delay, they’ll go fast.

The Bad News first? OK.

Don Kramer will not be attending PROJECT:Comic Con 2 this year due to professional and personal commitments.

He is very regretful that he cannot attend and hopes that he can attend next year’s show.

BUT Good News! We’ve found some awesome replacements!

Writer of Wonder Woman, Secret Six, Birds of Prey, The All New Atom, Agent X, Action Comics, Deadpool.

Colorist of  Green Lantern, GL Corps, Metal Men, Transformers and X-Men Forever.

We are pleased with these two joining our already excellent Guest List. So dig out those books, we’ll have plenty of pens for autographs.

Howard Chaykin, artist & creator of American Flagg! & Black Kiss, writer of Die Hard: Year One, and artist of Marvel’s Star Wars and Heavy Metal, and coincidently  one of our featured guests, has done an amazing print for us. Take a look:

Sponsored by our good friends over at Heroic Adventures in Edwardsville, IL , this print will be available only at the convention and limited to 100 copies. All proceeds will be donated to our two charities, Equality Now and Susan G. Komen. Make sure to pick one up and get Howard to sign it.

Kenneth asked us “What do you want me to draw?”

We simply replied “Whatever you want. Just have fun with it.”

Kenneth replied back, “I want to draw Spider-Man.”

and then he sent us this picture:

Is that not absolutely amazing???

This amazing piece of art will be available in two different ways. A signed and numbered print and a t-shirt

The print and t-shirt are free with a donation to our two charities, Equality Now and Susan G. Komen Foundation. A $12 donation gets you the print. A $20 donation gets you the t-shirt. Or, get both with a $30 donation. They will be available at the Newcastle Comics and Games Booth.

AND THAT’S NOT ALL!!!!

You could own this Amazing Kenneth Rocafort piece.  The original art for this print will be sold via silent auction at the show!

There will only be 100 prints and 100 shirts available so make sure you get yours before they’re gone!!

Room 4
1:00-2:15: After the Pencils: The Art of Inking with Ande Parks - Ande Parks conducts a workshop for all of you aspiring inkers. This 75 minute workshop will feature Ande providing direct access to his knowledge and skills from his many years in the comic book industry. He will provide high quality blueline prints to be inked at the workshop. They will be inked live with Ande moving around the room giving pointers. Those of you interested in attending will need to bring your own inking supplies. Ande has recommended the following supplies for the workshop:
1 Faber Castell Pitt Artist Pen, Black, Fine Nib Pen
1 Faber Castell Pitt Artist Pen, Black, Brush Nib

Because this workshop will be so hands-on it will be limited to only 12 participants.
We also ask that because this is a hands on workshop that only those with a true interest in developing their own artistic skills or have an interest in a profession in the field of comic book art ask to attend.

Activity Room 1
1:00-2:00: 60 minutes with Gail Simone - Darin Schneider moderates 60 minutes with the writer of Secret Six, Wonder Woman and Birds of Prey as she answers your questions about her career in comic books.

2:30-3:30: Focus on Dennis Calero - Darin Schneider moderates 60 minutes with the artist of Doctor Solar, X-Men Noir, X-Factor, Supergirl & the Legion of Super Heroes and scores of variant covers as he discusses his new web comic Devil Inside and answers your questions.

Patrick Gleason is known for being the artist on some great books like Green Lantern Corps and Aquaman, handling the cover duties on Robin, and recently announced to be the penciler of Batman and Robin.

We are very excited that Pat has agreed to come down for the convention.

10:00-11:00: Heroes Ain’t Superheroes: Patrolling the Borders of the Superhero Genre - Spend 60 minutes with Peter Coogan of the Institute for Comics Studies as he discusses why the NBC show Heroes, despite appearances to the contrary, is not a superhero show and how it fundamentally misses the essence of the superhero genre. Arguments welcome!

11:30-12:45: Focus on Fred VanLente and Joshua Dysart - David Olsen of Saint Louis University moderates 75 minutes with two of the top writers in comics today.

1:15-2:15: Sequential Art and Storytelling - Daniel F. Yezbick of St. Louis Community College – Forest Park explores George Carlson’s surreal mixture of visual and rhetorical puns in his comics, puzzles, and games. Kristy Boney of University of Central Missouri discusses the fine lines between the sensational, the vulgar, and the true in comics that represent painful cultural and historical memories like the Holocaust.

2:45-4:00: Focus on Howard Chaykin - Alex Boney of the University of Central Missouri moderates a 75 minute focus on the work of this comic book legend. After an overview of his amazing career, Mr. Chaykin will then answer any questions you might have on his past, present and future projects.

4:30-5:30: Comics and Literature - Pam Garvey of St. Louis Community College – Meramec suggests how the superhero can be a salient figure in contemporary poetry. Anita Hagerman of Washington University examines the use of Shakespeare and his plays in comics, and how the presence of the Bard both interrogates and reinforces the idea of the literary canon.

Seating for all of the above events will be extremely limited so if you would like to attend one or all of them, there are two ways to sign up. To register online simply send an email to jay.schimel@epicconventions.com with your name and the panels you would like to attend. If there are seats remaining the day of the show we will post sign up sheets outside Activity Room 1 when the convention opens at 9am on Saturday. So make sure you either email or get there early and sign up if you would like to attend!
*Please note that times are subject to change.

They are giving us an Exclusive PROJECT:Comic Con edition

of Alan Moore’s new book Neonomicon #1.

Make sure to swing by the Avatar Press booth during the convention to pick up this,

and all of Avatar’s other great comic books!

Alan Moore’s NEONOMICON #1 Project Comic Con ed.
$3.99
Cover: Jacen Burrows
Writer: Alan Moore
Art: Jacen Burrows
Readership: Mature Readers
Format: Full Color, 32 pages, 1 of 4

PRODUCT DESCRIPTION: The all-new, all Alan Moore, horror series spoken of only in hushed whispers for years is finally here! From the award-winning master of comics, Alan Moore, comes a brand new tale of Lovecraftian horror that will leave you too afraid to close your eyes, but more afraid to open them! NEONOMICON, the sequel to THE COURTYARD Graphic Novel, is slithering its way onto shelves to take its place as a Great Old One of comics terror! Illustrated by Moore’s favorite demented artist, Jacen Burrows, NEONOMICON pulls no punches as every full-colored page is covered in nightmares brought to gruesome life! The story begins some years after the chilling events of THE COURTYARD, in a world where two young and cocky FBI agents are investigating strange… and familiar murders. They think they’ve seen the worst monsters in America, but as they pull up to the maximum security asylum where one Aldo Sax speaks in strange tongues, Agents Brears and Lamper may be beginning to suspect that they’re about to see something so much worse. But they cannot begin to imagine the creeping insanity that has already begun to pull them under…  Project Comic Con variant limited to only 1000 copies, and only available at the Avatar Press booth!

Both Robert and his Eye Witness Series, have been featured in such diverse media outlets as: Fox News, the L.A Times, The Washington Post, Family Net TV, CBS news, ABC news, The Harvest Show, The Christian Examiner, Christianity Today, Publishers Weekly, Wizard Magazine, Comic Buyers Guide, World Magazine and the USA radio network.

He has been labeled, “One of the leading lights in evangelical comic circles,” by religious writer, David Crumm, (Detroit Free Press & Readthespirit.com). And it seems the world is beginning to take note! The second book in the series, (Acts of the Spirit), was a winner at the 2007 Hollywood Book Festival (in the category of comics), took a silver medal at the 2007 Independent Publisher Awards and was a finalist in the 2007 FOREWORD Magazine book of the year awards. The third book in the series (Rise of the Apostle) was the winning graphic novel in the 2008 USA Book News, Book of the Year Awards and also a finalist for the 2009 FOREWORD Magazine Book of the Year Awards.

Were you an avid reader of comics as a child?
If memory serves me right, I bought my first comics at the age of six (A Fantasy Masterpiece-with the original Puppet Master verses FF story, and a Wonder Woman). But what’s funny is, I was always drawn to the visual nature of the medium from the beginning and read them by just looking at the pictures for the first couple years. I don’t think I actually got around to reading them cover to cover till I was about 9 years old!

How’d you get started in comics and graphic novels?
My dad was a lithographer, so he always brought my brother and I boxes of blank pads of all sizes for us to draw on. We created a whole universe of characters…many of which were extremely derivative of Marvel characters of the day. Instead of Spiderman, we had Spider; instead of Iron Man, we had Shell and so forth.

In high school I began a habit which I carried on into my college years…drawing a weekly comic strip for the school newspaper. I always held on to my love of comics and even turned on a bunch of friends to the medium right up to my college years. But back at that time there was no colleges or trade school anywhere near where I lived (Milwaukee, Wisconsin) who offered courses in drawing for comics, so I just kept drawing on my own and learning things from talking to artists who I met locally or at conventions and studied a lot of original art pages.

My first published work in comics didn’t appear till 1995, when I finally decided it was time to take the plunge into self-publishing my own sci-fi creation, Template (which I had been developing for a couple years previously). So, I sold my two comic shops around the Dallas area and used my profits as seed money to launch Head Press Publishing.

Self publishing has to be a tough road. You handle most of the duties yourself (writing, drawing, coloring, etc.) What advice would you have for folks self-publishing their own works or thinking about starting?
Given the state of the economy and the way the comic industry seems to be evolving, I’d say if I was a young man (or women) just starting off I’d utilize the web comic format for sure. It saves you from having to spend the large amounts of cash you’d need to print, allows you to start building an audience for your work immediately, and gives you an online platform to begin selling your creations and associated products, as well as marketing your talents. Also, working with companies to get your stories up on portable applications seems to be the wave of the future (like for iPod or iPad).

What was Template about?
Template was about people with advanced powers of the mind…but set in a world without super-heroes. The main character, Jason 4, was the “template” or model for the next step in human evolution, the Psycho-sapien. The series was partially inspired by Jim Shooter’s work on Harbinger (for Valient) and I had a lot of fun with playing with how people in the real world would react to someone using metal abilities like telekinesis or image projection.

The series featured a lot of action and political intrigue and oddly enough many of the characters and situations that popped up in the Heroes TV show, got their start over a decade earlier in Template (but not to say, that anyone borrowed them of course…heh,heh). Though it was recognized as one of the Ten Best Indy Comics of 1998, by the now defunct Combo Magazine, I could never build sales high enough to make it profitable and eventually had to shut it down after 8 total issues and a couple spinoffs.

Sounds cool. Will you have copies for sale at the show?
Yes. I always sell complete Template sets at my shows. It always amazes me, that no matter what part of the country I’m at, I’ll always meet a former fan of the series that wondered what the heck happened to it.

The same things goes for the anthology I also published during the late 90’s, No Justice/No Piece (which was a fundraising vehicle I created to benefit the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund). Each and every show I’ll sell a set or two..especially to fans of Warren Ellis, since it has the only story he ever wrote where he’s a character.

What your probably best known for now is your Christian Graphic Novel series, Eye Witness. That won some awards as well right?
Yes…the second book in the series, Eye Witness: Acts of the Spirit, was a winner in the category of Comics at the 2007 Hollywood Book Festival, took a silver medal for graphic novels at the 2007 Independent Publisher Awards, and was a graphic novel finalist in the 2007 FOREWORD Magazine Book of the Year Awards.

The third book in the series, Eye Witness: Rise of the Apostle, was a winner in the category of comics/graphic novels in the 2008 USA Book News, Best Books Awards and was a finalist in the 2009 FOREWORD Magazine Book of the Year Awards.

Tell me about Eye Witness. What’s the premise for it?
Eye Witness is a very unusual concept, since it combines a modern day action-thriller, which centers around a forensic archeologist (who also happens to be a skeptic) with a Bible adaptation that spans from the last week of Jesus’ life through the events chronicled in the Book of Acts. Journalist David Crumm summed it up best when he said, “Think of a marriage of Indiana Jones and Eugene Peterson’s Message Bible translation.”

Ok…as a Christian Graphic Novel, it’s obviously going to appeal to folks with sturdy religious beliefs. But does it have something for everyone? What does Eye Witness have that would interest your average agnostic?
That’s just the point of the series…I didn’t write it necessarily for people who were already believers, but rather “your average agnostic,” who might be a lover of comics and graphic novels. You see that’s what I was for the first 39 years of my life and a year or so after my accepting faith I was inspired to share this story as a way of reaching others who might have been in a similar place as me.

I crafted this series deliberately for who I was as a teen…a skeptic, who didn’t attend church and never really picked up a Bible. I feel the Book of Acts is one of the greatest action-adventure stories of all time, as well as being one of the most undersold. So my goal was to really highlight the action, adventure, emotion and supernatural qualities of the story to really make it come alive for those not familiar with the source material.

OK. You have me interested. Have anything else planned for the near future?
This fall I plan to release a slip-cased set of the entire Eye Witness series. I’m currently developing an omnibus edition also, that will include about 40 pages of material that never saw print in the individual graphic novels, but at this point I’m not sure who will publish it, since we are in discussions with a couple of other larger publishers about it.

From that point, I’ve got a file full of ideas in various stages of development. Once the dust settles on the Unknown God tour, I’ve just got to sit down and figure out which direction I want to go next.

It all sounds great Bob, looking forward to getting my hands on some copies. But now we come to the “nothing to do with this interview” questions. Ready?

What are your favorite movies?
The Great Race, My Favorite Year, Gangs of New York and almost anything by the Coen Brothers.

Besides your own, what are your favorite comics?
Since I’ve been locking in my studio full-time the better part of the last 8 years I haven’t got to read a lot, but I’m kind of a comics nostalgia buff anyway. The silver-age work of Lee/Kirby on FF and Thor is unmatched. I was also a huge X-Men fan before it was cool…going all the way back to when Neal Adams made his imprint on the series, through the Byrne/Claremont teamup. And lastly, Frank Miller’s original Daredevil run was a favorite of mine back in the day…since it was an extended opportunity to watch him develop both as an artist and storyteller.

Hot Fudge Sundae or Banana Split?
Hot Fudge any day!

What’s the last thing you assembled?
The Avengers?

And finally…you’ve just won Millions of dollars in the Lottery, what’s the first thing that Bob Luedke buys that’s 100% just for himself & because he’s always wanted one?
A candy apple red, 1966 Corvette Stingray.