Sweet Calabash! Stemming in part from my recent trip to Bethesda, Maryland for the Small Press Expo, I’m delighted to announce that Matt Kindt and Roger Langridge will be making their very first trips to HeroesCon next June to be part of Indie Island! We’ve also just added Brian Hurtt, the super-talented artist behind The Damned and Queen & Country: Declassified–I was all excited about adding his name to the list, but then I noticed it was already there, which I don’t think he or I noticed when we were talking on the phone last week. Either way, he’s coming–Brian made his first HeroesCon appearance, where he was immediately inundated by commissions. Once you check his blog out, you’ll be considering getting a commission yourself this year–they’re pretty awesome.

Matt Kindt is a St. Louis buddy of Brian’s, but has plenty of cred himself–not only is he the creator of Super Spy, The Yellow Menace, and co-creator of the Pistolwhip series, but he just won a Harvey Award for co-designing the giant Lost Girls slipcase edition, along with Top Shelf co-founder Brett Warnock. You may congratulate him in person at next year’s Indie Island! And while you’re congratulating him, make sure to check out the ton of cool little, um, things he sells at shows, like Super Spy cyanide capsules (I think it’s actually some sort of breath mint), paintings on the actual torn-out pages of classics, of the scene on that page, etc. You’ll see.

Roger Langridge is not yet a buddy of Brian Hurtt’s, but I’m sure it’s just a matter of time. Possibly the nicest guy I met at SPX, he’s the creator of the Fred the Clown series, not to mention the man behind those Fin Fang Foom stories in the recent Marvel Monsters; and a ton of shorts and strips which you can find here. Not shown are his recent Muppet Show strips, done for the now-defunct Disney Adventures magazine. He had some of the originals for sale at SPX, and I barely was able to restrain myself from buying them–his originals are outrageously under-priced, usually under $100 apiece. I bought a copy of two different Disney Adventures issues I found at the grocery store over the weekend, but at four bucks a pop for a little digest-sized thing, it’s not hard to figure out what the problem was. But I digress! Roger will be coming all the way from New Zealand, by way of London, so make sure you make this hard-travellin’ dude feel welcome on his first trip to Charlotte!