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San Diego, CA — The long awaited “Michael Golden: Heroes & Villains Sketchbook” from award-winning creator and artist Michael Golden will indeed be debuting at this year’s San Diego Comic Con!  AND  Golden will be on hand at the West Coast show to sign ‘em all!

The new sketchbook features an array of Golden pencils, preliminaries and finished compositions, serving as a must have package for collectors of his trendsetting heroic pieces, while also sneaking in some of his favorite machinery-heavy works, army characters, action shots, and yes, of course, a few villains to boot.

Known as one of the masters of sequential art storytelling, Golden is the co-creator of X-Men’s Rogue character, as well as “Spartan X”–due out in a trade next year, and “Bucky O’Hare”–which has just been optioned for a movie via Neal Adam’s Continuity Studios. 

A plethera of retrospectives on Golden have recently hit the shelves with the  “Modern Masters: Michael Golden” tradepaperback; the “Modern Masters In the Studio with Michael Golden” DVD; the upcoming “Creator Chronicles: Michael Golden” DVD and tutorial from Woodcrest Productions; and the best-selling “Excess: The Art of Michael Golden” from Vanguard Productions, which has sold out! The Second printing, in fact, will debut at SDCC as well, at the Vanguard Booth, featuring a new eye-popping, sexy Vampirella cover!

To commemorate all of this activity, Golden will be on the TwoMorrows panel Thursday, and will also be signing at the Vanguard booth on Sunday. Check your SDCC schedule, the NFR booth #4601, or the Vanguard Booth for times and details.

So get in on the excitement! The new sketchbook, “Heroes & Villains,” will be signed by the popular creator while supplies last. Hardcover, Color, 48 pages, introduction by Michael Eury and bio text by Renee Witterstaetter,  the book is limited to 1,000 copies. It’s also available in two versions: Signed and Numbered for $40; Or the Sketch Version for $100.

Golden will be located at the Naked Fat Rave booth, #4601, to sign his new sketchbook as well as the NFR 2008 Group Portfolio ($65), and copies of the new comic book “Demon’s Regret” from Digital Webbing. He will be appearing all days fo the convention  along with other stellar comic talents Matt Wagner, Dave Johnson, Art Adams, Joyce Chin, Renee Witterstaetter, J. Scott Campbell, Jim Lee (at the annex), Bruce Timm, Tim Sale,  and Amanda Conner, making NFR a true must-go-to SDCC destination!

PIGEONS FROM HELL
Issues 2 & 3
Dark horse Publishing
by Joe R.Lansdale(Writer),Nathan Fox(Artist)
36 ppgs Colour $2.99

I remember thumbing through the first issue of this in my local comic store a few months back, and then recommending to our erstwhile CBO Chief Uncle Terry that this might be worth him spending some cash on, instead of the usual reams of stupor-heroic rubbish he invests his illicit erotic-comic royalties in ! Suffice to say it was with some suprise to have found that he actually took my advice, subsequently purchasing and reviewing issue 1 ! Obviously, wishing to repay the favour, he’s decided to allow me the opportunity of casting a critical eye over parts two and three of the four-parter, to see if my initial hunch was right, or not? Is this a lovey-dovey doozy, or a manky old bird of  a book?

Well, the first thing to state is that it’s based on an old Robert E.Howard story, which I admit i’ve never read, so I’ve no idea how faithful Joe R.Lansdale’s adaptation is. What I do  find interesting is that the story we have here seemingly ticks an awful lot of typical 80’s-type horror movie cliche boxes.We’ve got our typical group of American teens camped overnight, miles from anywhere in a creepy old house in the woods(or Louisiana Swamplands in this case), and hey, whaddya know, the creepy old house has got some strange,creepy feel to it that’s making our kids feel a bit uncomfortable here, and it’s got a really sinister ol’ back story of death and supernatural creepiness going on, and you can bet some creepy kind of old guy is gonna turn up and warn ‘em about the strange, unnatural fate that befalls anyone who enters the house, plus I bet there’s a somewhat ambiguous,cynical lawman that’ll just happen to turn up when we need him. And what’s that? He’s on the trail of some deranged axe-murdering madman on the loose nearby ? Surely not !

Well, you may think I’ve got my cynical tongue planted firmly in my cheek, but actually, it’s the cliches playing through this story that makes it so enjoyable. Lansdale’s adaptation hits all the right notes at the right times in terms of plotting and pacing, there are some neat touches in small moments that hint at where the action is going without immediately giving things away(the broken circle for instance), and some good laconic exchanges of dialogue back n forth between the protagonists.I would agree with Terry’s assertion in his review of Issue 1, that it reads very much like a script for a film.I’d suggest that’s as much to do with the content and subject matter as the writing, but that doesn’t detract from the excellent job Lansdale has done here.

Nathan Fox is someone I was aware of initially as a very talented illustrator whose work i’d come across in the American Illustration Annuals.I always thought his style suited comic-strip work, and here he does a superb job.His work has a similar stylistic feel to that of Paul Pope, all strong, fluid brushlines, and a kenetic energy that helps move the story along within the panels.There’s also a wonderful attention to detail within each panel, yet which also contains nothing superfluous to the story itself, which is the skill of a very good storyteller.There’s a terrific sequence in issue 3, in which  the gruesome history of the house is revealed, where he makes a stylistic shift to a thinner brushline, which allows a completely different visual feel, though is no less crammed with some wonderful visual detail.There are a really good number of quality visual sequences by Fox throughout these two issues: the hideously gory pages in issue 2, the strange spirits in the trees in 2 & 3, and the aforementioned back-story, for instance.

Fox’s artwork is wonderfully aided and abetted by a truly terrific colouring job by Dave Stewart, that shifts brilliantly from sober and atmospheric, to lurid and gruesome in all the right places.Initially, I thought Fox had coloured his own work, as it followed the visual sensibility i’d seen in his illustration work, which only goes to show what a sensitive and thoughtful job Stewart has done.

 So,in conclusion, I really enjoyed this comic strip. I can only recommend you go and hunt down this series if you haven’t yet, and I’m looking forward to seeing how the story concludes with issue 4. My only slight gripe with this was a definite lack of Pigeons in issues 2 &3, considering the title’s promise.Who knows, perhaps they’ll come home to roost in the finale !

Illustration House is pleased to present “Sequential Art: The Universal Language” a special exhibition of Flemish Cartoon and Comic art, which will run from July 19 to August 20, 2008. The exhibition will present over 100 paintings, illustrations, comic strips and book art by the five selected artists debuting in the United States: Jan Bosschaert, “NIX”, Ilah, Judith Van Istendael, and Olivier Schrauwen.

The show is curated by Carl Wyckaert and organized by his company Graphic Novel Art. In 2006, he invited five American artists to have their works shown at a premiere exhibit in two cities in Belgium–including renowned comics creators Michael Golden and Joe Jusko, booked via cooperation with Eva Ink Artist Group. Graphic Novel Art was born as a result of this show, and “Sequential Art: The Universal Language” is Wyckaert’s reciprocal event showcasing Belgian artists in the United States.

Belgium is the historic cradle of European comics, and it still generates talented artists. The show provides an introduction to the wide variety of contemporary Flemish illustration and comic culture. The current selection of artists, who have all been published overseas, range from paintings by Jan Bosschaert to the highly sarcastic comic strips of “NIX”. Ilah’s character Cordelia would blend in nicely with the women of “Sex and the City”. Van Istendael’s psychological narratives blend the illustration and comic book genres, and Schrauwen’s work for “My Boy” shows that Europeans also find inspiration in American classics like Winsor McCay, but with their own peculiar view point.

The opening will be held on Wednesday, July 16, 2008 at Illustration House from 4:00-8:00 pm, and the artists will be present. Illustration House is located at 110 West 25th Street in the Chelsea district of Manhattan. For further information, contact Zaddick Longenback at 212-96-9444 or info@illustrationhouse.com