Oh man, this is super exciting for me, I’m such a fan:

Sammy Harkham is one of the most influential cartoonists of his generation, maybe the most influential. That’s a crazy statement to make maybe, but heckfire, I have made it. Besides his very famous editing of the seminal Kramer’s Ergot anthology, the last iteration of which was a massive 16″ x 21″, and his more recent guest-editing of Bart Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror (itself a sort of Kramer’s reunion); my very favorite of Sammy’s work is his own Crickets. Crickets is a throwback of sorts to the great 80’s one-man anthologies like Yummy Fur, Love & Rockets (okay, 3-man in that case), etc. A recent casualty of the squeeze on indie publishers due to Diamond’s change in their minimum orders for small press books, a lot of people thought Crickets was dead. BUT #3 is due this summer, and I cannot tell  you how excited I am to tell you you can buy one from Sammy right smack in the middle of Indie Island. Sweet!

But listen, Sammy’s not the only person doing 1-man anthologies (1-manthologies?)–he’ll be joined at HeroesCon this summer by cohort and friend John Pham. John is the proprietor of Sublife, which I think will see a third issue this year as well. He’s also been in another great anthology, Mome. I think I first twigged to his work when Chris Staros hand-sold me a copy of Epoxy, which maybe he was distributing for John back in 2000 or so? Chris also sold me my first copy of Kramer’s Ergot (#3). Which I hated. Hey listen, people change, I never promised you a rose garden.

Oh! But there’s more good news! Returning to HeroesCon this year will be mighty Tom Scioli, co-creator of Godland and the creator of The Myth of Opus-8. Tom is a sweet dude and extraordinarily knowledgeable about comics. Most recently he did the art for the Freedom Force comic, as well as writing and drawing the “Space Smith” stories in Image’s The Next Issue Project.

Man, those are three quality dudes. But there’s more to come this week, so stay tuned!

Whoa! Have you guys ever heard of Tim Sale? I know Shelton has; Tim’s one of Shelton’s favorite creators (he has a lot, admittedly), so I know he’s excited to be able to welcome Tim back to HeroesCon this summer. Besides extraordinarily popular books like Batman: The Long Halloween, Spider-Man: Blue, and Captain America: White, Tim also did the paintings (with Dave Stewart) for the Isaac character on a little show you might have heard of called… Heroes? I could be wrong but I think the last time Tim was here was back in 2006 or 7, so it will be interesting to see how his already-massive lines are affected by his increased fame since then. Either way, I’m pretty sure he’s still a sweet dude. Pret-ty sure, guys.

Oh! And also returning to the HeroesCon Guest List is inker Mark Morales, who has turned into one of the foremost inkers in the comics industry, most recently working on enormous event books like Siege and Secret Invasion, and over smaller but acclaimed books like Astonishing Spider-Man/Wolverine and Young Avengers. Smoooooth style he’s got, especially over smooth guys like Olivier Coipel and Jim Cheung. I love it.

And! Stepping back into the ring again this summer is Stephanie Gladden. Stephanie’s worked on pretty much every major cartoon license, including The Simpsons, Ren & Stimpy, Looney Tunes, Powerpuff Girls and more. She’s also a character artist for Cartoon Network, working on shows like Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends and Chowder (my favorite!). BUT she’s probably most excited about her new creator-owned project, Girls of Monster Paradise!

Still more to come next week, I’ve got updates stacked up, including someone who hasn’t been to HeroesCon in at least ten years, and today is one of the biggest names in the industry–no lie!

Holy moley! Returning to the HeroesCon Guest List this week are three of the best! You almost certainly know Sean “Cheeks” Galloway from his epic turn in Wednesday Comics, not to mention his Teen Titans Go! work, his bajillion sketch cards for Upper Deck and other trading card publishers, and more. He’s also a lead character designer for the Spectacular Spider-Man and Hellboy cartoons–check out that Hellboy up there, it’s GORGEOUS. I swiped it from Cheeks’ blog, which is just an embarassment of drawing riches.

Joining Cheeks is his buddy and fellow mack-daddy talent Jonboy Meyers. While Jonboy’s work has been in a bunch of comics like She-Hulk, GeNext, and JLA, he’s enormously prolific as a sketch and commission artist. His commissions are like full-on covers, they’re kind of amazing. I don’t know how much he charges but I bet his sketch list fills up lickety-split at the con, so better wear your running shoes and show up early.

Also returning this year is our buddy Mike Choi, whose pencils on Uncanny X-Men, X-Force, and Witchblade (among others) have made him a darling of the original art scene. He’s got a smooth style that’s mm-mm good like Campbell’s Soup, and that’s no lie!

That’s not all–we’ve got another big announcement set for tomorrow, and then a couple of HUGE announcements next week–we’re getting close to the show now; it’s only going to get more exciting from here on in.

Oh yes, as Phil Collins said, “Tonight, tonight tonight! Oh-ohhh!” Yes Phil, tonight will indeed be alright, as Heroes Discussion Master Andy Mansell leads another book club discussion. This time we focus on Craig Thompson’s extraordinarily successful memoir Blankets. This is a book that’s not only a critical and market success, but a big entry-point for female readers into comics, which is always great.

Andy will be kicking some knowledge tonight, March 4, at 7.00 at our store. All you need to bring is yourself, a copy of the book if you have one handy, and a good attitude. Bonus points if you bring some questions, which will save some of Andy’s breath–after all, he’s got quite a slate of discussions to do throughout the spring!

Well! a family-friendly update to the HeroesCon 2010 Guest List this week, or at least friendly to the Van Sciver family. Star artist Ethan Van Sciver, he of  Green Lantern, Flash Rebirth, and Blackest Night fame, is returning to HeroesCon this year.

But this year, Ethan will be joined for the first time by his younger brother Noah Van Sciver. Noah is the creator of the Blammo series that he self-publishes, and has recently been featured in MOME and in The Comics Journal as the cartoonist interviewer. Those are my faves, those little cartoon interviews, I love them.

Noah recently did a “redo” cover of his brother’s cover to Flash: Rebirth #3 over on Robert Goodin‘s Covered blog, which I thought was extra appropriate to feature here, as Robert will also be at HeroesCon. So yeah, sensible.

But wait, there’s more! Also also returning to the show this year is “Comics Reporter” Tom Spurgeon. Tom has informed me several times that he has something mysterious planned for his time at HeroesCon, as opposed to in 2008 when he moderated 1,000 panels. I’m not sure what it is, but today he referred to it as “very specific” which for some reason has made me a little worried. Expect to need to sign hold-harmless disclaimer agreements at the door to any panel Tom is involved in this year.

New to the HeroesCon 2010 Guest List are some old chums and brand new bros; even though I write these announcements each week I’m still a little flabbergasted at the size/quality of this list already–we’re only halfway through February, you know what I mean?

Joining up today is first time guest Marc Bernardin, writer behind hit series like The Authority, The Highwaymen, Push, and X-Men Origins: Nightcrawler. Marc’s career has taken him all over the place, with stints writing/editing for Starlog, Entertainment Weekly, Fangoria, screenwriting, you name it. And now he adds “Charlotte, NC” to his resume. Just watch the money roll in now, Marc!

Returning for his second HeroesCon this year is Clayton Henry, who has a gorgeous slick style that I could just look at all day, I tell you what. I think his most recentish work is on Adventure Comics, but Lord knows I’ve been wrong before. He’s done a ton of stuff for Marvel too, including Incredible Hercules (above), Exiles, and more.

Nathan Massengill is certainly no stranger to Charlotte–one of our favorite guys and an inker par excellence. These days you can catch nathan on JSA, Deadpool, and Deadpool Team-Up, and he’s done a ton of stuff on Bat-books in the past, like Detective and Nightwing.

Also returning to HeroesCon this year is Chris Yambar, who’s happy to work in pretty much any genre you please. His credits include Bart Simpson Comics, Popeye, Mr. Beat, I Dream Of Jeannie… well it goes on for quite a while. I believe you can get the full list from Chris himself at HeroesCon!

Five studly new names this week for HeroesCon’s already-epic Indie Island, let’s splash right in shall we?

EVAN DAHM is one of the fastest-rising stars of the webcomics community–while he’s appeared at HeroesCon before, this year marks his first appearance as an invited guest. At last year’s HeroesCon Jeff Smith brought Evan’s book Rice Boy up to Chris Pitzer and I and basically forced us to go buy it; he was freaking out about it. Having the creator of one of the best comics of all time hand-selling your book at conventions… well, there are worse problems to have. Plus we’re extra super proud of Evan, as he’s a North Carolinian, hailing from lovely Asheville!

JOSH LATTA is from some southern part of North Carolina called “Georgia,” but he’s a sweet guy so we don’t hold it against him much. No stranger to Indie Island, Josh is the creator of the Rashy Rabbit series of minicomics, and has appeared in a ton of anthologies, most notably J. Chris Campbell’s Wide Awake Press anthologies like Ancient Age and Piltdown!

MIKE MAIHACK is another making his debut as an invited guest–he’s the man behind the webcomics Cleopatra In Space and Cow & Buffalo. You may have also espied his work in the Eisner-winning Comic Book Tattoo anthology. He’s a popular sketch-destination at cons, so you sketch-hounds put him on your list and hit him quick before his list fills up at the show!

ED PISKOR is the kind of success story I like to hear about. After first working in comics under Harvey Pekar illustrating American Splendor stories, Ed hit the stratosphere after his fictional hacker-bio comic Wizzywig got mentioned on the influential Boing Boing site. I think Ed has sold upwards of a thousand copies of the first volume all by himself, which is kind of crazy for small press comics. The third volume just came out, and I’m looking forward to picking up Volume 3 at the show. Although I probably could just go ahead and buy it if I wanted to.

And lastly is “Good Ol'” JIM RUGG, who some of you met a couple of Sundays ago as part of the Afro-Tour. Jim is one of the most fascinating people I’ve talked to in comics circles, the way his brain works is pretty interesting. And don’t even get me started on his comics–the just released Afrodisiac is killing on all levels, selling a ton and garnering some incredibly positive critical praise. And with good reason, too! Check out the wraparound cover I stole off of Jim’s Flickr page:

So there have been “Best of 2009″ lists and “Best of the Decade” lists flying around the internet, pretty much since Halloween or so, maybe even earlier. I don’t have time to do a longer list, or a more comprehensive one, but I thought it would be interesting to talk about my five favorite books of 2009. This list is less a “best of,” and more a “my faves;” or rather, the five books that were most important in my comics reading, whether for sheer quality or brain-busting thought-provokitude, or other content or format choices that were impressive or influential on me.

NUMBER THREE: MOURNING STAR VOLUME 2, by Kazimir Strzepek

I’ve made no secret of my love for Kaz Strzepek’s MOURNING STAR series. It’s not hard to explain why–it’s harder to STOP explaining why; there are so many things I love about it. But chief among them is probably that Mourning Star “is what it is,” so to speak. It’s unselfconsciously genre, a sci-fi comic set in some world’s dystopian future, laced pretty liberally with humor, childishness, violence, gore, and a surprising level of subtlety.

It’s got a cast of characters that numbers in the several dozens, none of whom can be depended on to stay living for very long–which by itself creates much of the drama of the book. These are dangerous times, anything can happen, look out for yourself and not much else besides.

When I read Mourning Star Vol 1, I was immediately sort of blown away by the cartooning, by the sheer elan of it–I think when he did the first one, Kaz was like 25 or something, building this giant world with its disaster, a billion characters.. I was like, where did this guy COME from?? But Volume 2 is even better, it’s more mature; if volume 1 was by a guy who had a bunch of ideas and just WENT for it, then volume 2 is obviously by a guy who has a few hundred pages of this story already under his belt. Drawing a couple hundred pages of a comic means an extraordinary amount of time thinking about that comic, you know what I mean?

And it shows–the pacing has been firmed up over the previous book. It’s both faster where it needs to be–especially during the many scenes of violence in the book–and slower in others. On rereading it for this review I was struck at how contemplative some of the sequences are; Kaz somehow makes you care for some of the most apparently amoral characters in the book, choosing to show them in their private moments, their vulnerable moments.

The scene where “bad” guy Dent tells Bachelle the healer–or organ harvester or something, it’s hard to tell–about his worries that his newly damaged eye will keep him out of battle, is one of my favorite parts of the book. Kaz seems to take uncommon pains to keep his characters three-dimensional. It makes the overwhelming DANGER of the story–which takes place on a world half-destroyed, lawless, where anything can happen at any time and no one is going to worry much about you. Despite the cartoonish character designs, by rounding out his characters and keeping them REAL, Kaz infuses the story with real drama.

But despite all this, I’m not really sure that Mourning Star is one of the GREATEST books of 2009–not to slight the book; more that 2009 was an insane year for comics. 2009 for comics was like 1968 for music, there was a ridiculous profusion of comics wealth last year. But Mourning Star was one of the books I found myself coming back to again and again in my thoughts. The way Kaz composes his pages, the simple way his characters interact, the spare dialogue (rarely does a single speech bubble have more than ten words in it), the strange mix of violence and childish humor…

But most of all, and the thing that I think sets Kaz apart not only as a cartoonist but as a storyteller, is the way he approaches worldbuilding in The Mourning Star. As a reader you’re forced to sort of infer much of the shape of things: the only concrete information you’re given is the stark intro at the beginning of each book: “LESS THAN A YEAR AGO OUR WORLD WAS DESTROYED..” etc. Everything past that is supposition: the characters will occasionally reveal parts of the past, what happened, what the world was like before the catastrophe; but they are constantly being shown to be unreliable narrators of their own stories, as each character has their own view of events, and regularly contradicts what he have previously assumed to be the state of affairs.

And Kaz explains very little himself. When he does, it’s something mundane, a background datum, something about some animal or a remembrance of a favorite treat from someone’s childhood. The shape of the world itself is revealed slowly through the action and the often-conflicting accounts of the characters, and it’s fascinating. It’s a sophisticated way to tell a story, especially a COMIC story, where you “see” things as they’re happening (as opposed to prose, where everything is occurring in your imagination to an extent). Kaz manages to tell a story without “showing” us much–by the end of the second volume I’m only slightly more sure of what’s happening than after the first.

This macro storytelling is born out on a micro level in the character of the “Scissors Sniper,” who’s introduced in volume 1 with amnesia, and who bumbles his way through volume 2 without remembering much. In fact, most of what we learn about him is through other characters, who either bear a resemblance to him–see the hooded automaton in the fight scene in the first few images in this post–or know him from the past and are willfully deceiving him for their own gain. He’s like an empty shell of a character, all the best parts of him are on the outside, leaving the inside for the reader to inhabit, and view the rest of the story through his eyes.

The resulting experience is alternately exhilarating and confusing, perfect things for a science-fiction story to be. I wish all genre fiction were so unselfconsciously GENRE; it’s a pure pleasure to read it, and I think of it every time I sit down to draw or think about how to tell my own humble stories. If Mourning Star #2 wasn’t the BEST book of 2009, it certainly was one I thought about constantly, and for my money this is the best possible effect for a piece of art to have.

This year’s Indie Island is shaping up to be even more insane than the mammoth 2008 edition. If you don’t believe me, just check out the Guest List–and remember it’s still February, and we’ll be adding names all the way into May! Goodness gracious.

Today the ranks swell by five more, all high quality people of decent and law-abiding backgrounds, all ready to meet you and maybe shake your hand if you look clean. Alphabetically kicking things off is the redoubtable (I had to check on what that word means to make sure it’s not an insult) Evan Dorkin, he of Milk & Cheese fame. Although recently he’s almost better-knowned for the successful Beasts of Burden minseries from Dark Horse, beautifully painted by fellow-guest Jill Thompson.

Evan is coincidentally followed alphabetically by his wife Sarah Dyer, who’s known for her Action Girl Comics series in the 90’s, not to mention as an Eisner Award-nominated colorist for her work on Dave Lapham’s Amy Racecar specials, Hellboy: Weird Tales, and more. But these days she’s a writer whose worked with Evan, on the original Beasts of Burden story in Dark Horse Book of Monsters, and Superman Adventures; as well as writing English-language adaptations of manga like DNAngel and Snowdrop, and most exciting (for me) as a writer and designer for the awesome Yo Gabba Gabba TV show. I could watch that show all day, and I don’t even have kids. It’s totally hypnotic.

While I think Van Jensen made his first “official” appearance in Indie Island last year, he’s more famous this year–his book Pinocchio, Vampire Slayer was recently nominated for all kinds of YA book industry awards, and it’s sort of “blowin up,” which is to say that more and more people are liking it all the time, and also buying it. Just in case you’re not hip to that slang. Van is a super sweet dude too, he hangs with that Top Shelf crowd, and I don’t think there’s a mean one in that bunch, so they probably calmed him down from the wild wooly behavior of his youth.

Brad McGinty is no stranger to HeroesCon, he’s been exhibiting for years and is a workhorse without compare. He’s got super-curly hair too, like a young dark-haired version of–what’s that guy that played the Greatest American Hero?–that guy. Anyway, when Brad isn’t a studly animator, he is a cartoonist without compare, most recently in the pages of his Tobey McGuire Comics & Stories, Wysteria, and tons more. Welcome back to Bradwick!

Rounding out our list this week is a pretty wildly popular webcartoonist, furthering my goal of having the whole Internet as guests at HeroesCon. David Malki! first came to the show back in 2008, but we have made up and agreed to disagree and he’s coming back this summer! David, if you don’t know, is the cartoonist/designer behind the wildly popular Wondermark online strip, the fourth collection of which, Dapper Caps & Pedal-Copters, is scheduled for an April release! David’s weird blend of old-timey stuff with new-timey stuff is pretty hilarious, I think this is his most recent strip (click on it to read the whole thing on his site:

This week we welcome back three guests to HeroesCon, the Guest List of which is swelling on a twice to thrice-weekly basis–Lord knows where we’re going to seat everybody. Maybe double-decker chairs? We’ve already got our engineers working on it, never-you-mind.

While Atomic Robo‘s Scott Wegener only attended his first HeroesCon last year, he must have had a good time because here he is again, giggling like a schoolgirl. When he’s not working on the Eisner-nominated Atomic Robo, he finds time to squeeze credits like Killer of Demons and the Marvel 70th Anniversary: Human Torch special onto his resume. Clever Scott.

Also joining up this week is our old chum Bob Almond, who among being a longtime industry inker on books from the fan-favorite Black Panther up to more recently Star Trek: The Last Generation and Annihilation: Conquest, is also one of the founders of the Inkwell Awards, which spotlight some of comics best brush-wielders! The Inkwell Awards will also be set up at the convention, so you can find out more and how you can help out there!

Rounding out this update, like bananas and milk on your oatmeal, is writer Dan Johnson,  a North Carolinian who writes Herc and Thor from Antarctic Press. He’s also written comics adaptations of classics including Robinson Crusoe and Oliver Twist; plus scores of articles for magazines like Back Issue, Alter Ego, Scary Monsters, and more!

Welcome back to all three of these guys–more to come tomorrow!