Days of X-Men Novels Past

Posted on October 14, 2014 by Steven

x-men-days-of-future-pastToday is the DVD and Blu-Ray release date for X-Men: Days of Future Past, the blockbuster summer film that united the casts of 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand and 2011’s X-Men: First Class, in an exciting adaptation of a classic X-story by Chris Claremont, John Byrne, and Terry Austin. If you haven’t seen it already, wait until you meet the super-speedy Quicksilver, who practically steals the movie! (Or, if you prefer, you can wait until 2015 to purchase the Director’s Cut, which reportedly will include all of Anna Paquin’s scenes as Rogue that are missing in the theatrical version.)

All this reminds me of this post I wrote back on May 23rd, when the film originally hit theaters. Give it a read, and learn all about my own work with Marvel Comics’ Merry Mutants, in a set of bestselling novels that I wrote titled X-Men: The Chaos Engine Trilogy. In it, the X-Men battled Dr. Doom, Magneto, and the Red Skull for possession of the Cosmic Cube—a device that can alter reality with the merest thought. (You Marvel movie fans might better recognize it as the Tesseract, seen in Thor, Captain America: The First Avenger, The Avengers, and Guardians of the Galaxy.) And the star of this three-volume epic wasn’t Wolverine or Phoenix or Cyclops or Storm, but the X-Men’s resident ninja and psychic assassin, Psylocke. So click that link and give it a read!

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Pirouette #1 Review at Comics for Sinners

Posted on October 13, 2014 by Steven

Pirouette01Over at the news site Comics for Sinners, you can read my review of Pirouette #1, currently available from Black Mask Studios. Written by Mark L. Miller and illustrated by Carlos Granda—the creative team behind Grimm Fairy Tales Presents: The Jungle Book—it’s the first in a four-issue horror miniseries about a teenaged female clown who dreams of running away from the circus because of the physical and psychological abuses heaped on her by her fellow carnies. For those expecting a bad girl–style comic, considering the duo’s past work for T&A publisher Zenescope Entertainment, Pirouette should come as something of a surprise—at least in this first issue—given its lack of seminude females and its tonal similarity to Ray Bradbury’s classic novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes. Head over to C4S to see what I’m talking about!

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Happy Teen Read Week!

Posted on October 12, 2014 by Steven

TeensReadWeek14Teen Read Week 2014 is happening right now, October 12–18. What is it? Well, to quote the event’s Web site:

Teen Read Week is a national literacy initiative of the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), a division of the American Library Association. It’s aimed at teens, their parents, librarians, educators, booksellers and other concerned adults.

Teen Read Week’s theme is Read For The Fun Of It. Each year, YALSA offers a new sub-theme to serve as a basis for developing programs in schools, public libraries, and bookstores. The 2014 sub-theme is Turn Dreams into Reality @ your library, which encourages teens to read for the fun of it. The event offers librarians and educators a chance to encourage teens to read for pleasure and to visit their libraries for free reading materials.

For more information on this annual event, visit the Teen Read Week site.

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Welcome, Collingswood Book Festival Attendees!

Posted on October 11, 2014 by Steven

CarmillaThanks for stopping by our booth today (it was our first time exhibiting at Collingswood), and for coming here to check things out at a more leisurely pace. We’re always thrilled to meet potential new readers intrigued by our range of dark-fantasy titles, and hope we can add you to our growing fan base.

StarWarp Concepts specializes in tales of horror and dark urban fantasy, and our titles range from illustrated classics (J. Sheridan’s Le Fanu’s vampire romance, Carmilla; Edgar Rice Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars; The Brothers Grimm’s Snow White) to graphic novels for superhero fans (Troubleshooters, Incorporated: Night Stalkings) and adult horror aficionados (Lorelei: Sects and the City); from digital and print comic books (The Saga of Pandora Zwieback Annual #1, The Chronicles of the Sea Dragon Special, Heartstopper: The Legend of La Bella Tenebrosa); to artist sketch collections (The Bob Larkin Sketchbook). And we’ve got even more exciting projects in the works!

Blood FeudCurrently, our most popular title is Blood Feud: The Saga of Pandora Zwieback, Book 1, a young adult, dark urban fantasy novel. It’s the story of a 16-year-old Goth girl who’s spent the last decade being treated for mental health problems because she can see monsters. It’s only after she meets a shape-shifting monster hunter named Sebastienne “Annie” Mazarin that Pan discovers she’s never been ill—her so-called “monstervision” is actually a supernatural gift that allows her to see into Gothopolis, the not-so-mythical shadow world that exists right alongside the human world. But before Pan can learn more about what she can do, she and her parents are drawn into a conflict between warring vampire clans that are searching for the key to an ultimate weapon (or so the legend goes)—a key that just so happens to have been delivered to the horror-themed museum owned by Pan’s father.

(If you’d like more information on Pan, just download the free Saga of Pandora Zwieback #0 digital comic, and get the lowdown straight from Pan herself!)

When you’re done touring the StarWarp site (be sure to visit the Downloads page for the freebies), don’t forget to Like StarWarp Concepts’ Facebook page, so you can keep up-to-date with all the latest SWC news.

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Collingswood Book Festival 2014 Is Tomorrow!

Posted on October 10, 2014 by Steven

Sorry, Dark Shadows fans, Collingswood isn’t the fictional mansion where vampire Barnabas Collins hung his cloak in the classic TV series (and that terrible Tim Burton movie)—that would be Collinwood—but rather a town in southern New Jersey, close to the Pennsylvania border. It’s also the location of one of the northeast’s most popular, and continually growing, book festivals—so of course The ’Warp has to be on hand for it. But don’t worry—we’ll have enough vampire fiction on sale to sate the reading appetites of any Barnabas fans who stop by.

Collingswood-2014-Map

The 2014 Collingswood Book Festival is being held tomorrow, Saturday, October 11, and StarWarp Concepts will be making its debut appearance at Booth #18; as always, just look for the Pandora Zwieback banner. On sale will be the Pandora Zwieback novel Blood Feud; the comic The Saga of Pandora Zwieback Annual #1; the illustrated classics A Princess of Mars and Carmilla; the graphic novels Lorelei: Sects and the City and Troubleshooters, Incorporated: Night Stalkings; and the Official Pandora Zwieback T-shirt. I’ll even be selling copies of my non-SWC projects—the X-Men: The Chaos Engine Trilogy novels, the Untold Tales of Spider-Man anthology, and the young adult superhero graphic novel, Sunn—so get ’em while supplies last.

The Collingswood Book Festival is open on Saturday, October 11, from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM. The event is free, but for more information—including the festival’s alternate setting of Collingswood High School, in case rain forces it indoors—head over to the festival website.

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Bob Larkin at New York Comic Con 2014

Posted on October 9, 2014 by Steven

The Bob Larkin SketchbookNew York Comic Con 2014 starts today, October 9th, and runs through Sunday, October 12th. And although the StarWarp Concepts crew won’t be attending (we’ll be at the Collingswood Book Festival on Saturday), Bob Larkin—cover painter of my Saga of Pandora Zwieback novel Blood Feud, and featured artist of his own Bob Larkin Sketchbook—will be tucked behind Table C4 in Artists Alley, signing autographs, taking commissions, and selling prints of his well-known cover paintings for Marvel Comics, Bantam Books, and other publishers. If you can’t remember the number, you’ll probably have to look no farther than the growing line of Doc Savage and Dazzler fans at his table.

New York Comic Con is being held at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, on Manhattan’s West Side. For more information, head over to the NYCC site.

By the way, have you purchased a copy of The Bob Larkin Sketchbook yet? If not, you’re missing out on spectacular pencil drawings of Doc Savage, Spider-Man, Batman, the X-Men, and SWC’s resident succubus, Lorelei. It’s 24 pages of artistic goodness, available exclusively from the StarWarp Concepts webstore. Visit the Bob Larkin Sketchbook product page for all the ordering information, as well as sample pages.

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Vampirella #4 Review at Comics for Sinners

Posted on October 8, 2014 by Steven

VampiVol2-04-CovNow at the news site Comics for Sinners, you can read my review of Vampirella, Vol. 2 #4, which is currently available from Dynamite Entertainment. Written by Nancy A. Collins (Sunglasses After Dark, Red Sonja) and illustrated by Patrick Berkenkotter (Dynamite’s Project: Superpowers) and Dennis Crisostomo (Marvel’s Emma Frost), it involves Vampirella continuing her journey around the world to feast on the blood of legendary vampires, in order to prevent being possessed by the spirit of Lady Umbra, sister/lover of the mad god, Chaos. Vampi’s latest stop: Greece and its half-woman/half-snake resident, the Lamia. And dishes aren’t the only things that’ll get broken when these two lethal ladies clash. Opa!

Lorelei: Sects and the CitySpeaking of lethal ladies, perhaps you might like to read Lorelei: Sects and the City, the StarWarp Concepts graphic novel that stars a soul-stealing succubus in battle with a cult of Elder God worshipers attempting to unleash hell on Earth. This critically acclaimed adventure is, at its core, a love letter to 1970s horror comics, written by Steven A. Roman (that’s me), and illustrated by Eliseu Gouveia (Vengeance of the Mummy), Steve Geiger (Web of Spider-Man), and Neil Vokes (Johnny Demon), with a cover by legendary Vampirella artist Esteban Maroto. Visit the Lorelei: Sects and the City product page for all the ordering information, as well as sample pages.

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Vampire Weekend (No, Not the Band)

Posted on October 8, 2014 by Steven

This coming Friday, October 10th, is the release date for Dracula Untold, the new origin film for the world’s most famous vampire, and—according to recent reports—the starting point for Universal Studios’ planned reboot of their cinematic monsters universe (next up: The Mummy, in June 2016). Planning to check it out? Well, if you’re into vampires, then allow me to introduce you to a couple of StarWarp Concepts titles you might be interested in:

carmilla_cover_smallCarmilla: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s 19th-century paranormal romance has served as inspiration for generations of horror and dark fantasy writers, from Bram Stoker (the vampire brides of Dracula) to Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter author Laurel K. Hamilton (who has described Carmilla as her all-time favorite vampire novel that she didn’t write). The tale of Carmilla and her intended victim/lover Laura is still a powerful one, even 123 years after its first publication. The SWC edition features six fantastic black-and-white illustrations by Eliseu Gouevia, the talented artist of the graphic novel Lorelei: Sects and the City, the full-color comic The Saga of Pandora Zwieback Annual #1, and another illustrated classic, A Princess of Mars.

blood_feud_medBlood Feud: The Saga of Pandora Zwieback, Book 1: Teenaged Goth Pandora Zwieback, as well as her family and friends, get caught in the middle of a war among rival vampire clans seeking an ancient weapon—that just so happens to have been delivered to her dad’s horror museum. The battling houses are more Underworld than Anne Rice in terms of action, and the gun-toting, ravenous undead are as far from cute or romantic as one can get. Blood Feud is the critically acclaimed novel by Steven A. Roman (that’s me), and features cover art by Bob Larkin, the fan-favorite cover painter of Doc Savage, Dazzler, X-Men, and a host of other well-known characters.

Visit each of the book’s product pages to place an order, and get started reading while you’re standing on line for Dracula Untold this weekend!

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Visions of Lorelei: Jim Gillespie

Posted on October 7, 2014 by Steven

Talk about blasts from the past! While cleaning up my studio the other day, I came across a stack of small-press minicomics I’d collected over the years. And who did I find posing on the back cover of one of them? Lorelei—not only in her iconic blouse-and-tights costume, but in her original, 1988-era costume!

Lorelei_Goodies

Yeah, I’m not all that impressed by that original costume, either. 😀 Opera gloves and leather boots and fishnet stockings with frilly garters, combined with a minimal one-piece swimsuit? In retrospect, it’s like something the demented lovechild of Howard (Black Kiss) Chaykin and Marc (Witchblade) Silvestri would have designed! What was I thinking?

It’s a good thing, then, that the above illustration is by artist Jim Gillespie, who actually made that costume look halfway decent! Jim had written me in 1989 to ask if it was all right if he did a pinup of Lori and submitted it to Brad Foster’s Goodies, a p*rny minicomic series that had quite a successful run. When I saw the final result…wow, was I impressed!

Speaking of amazing interpretations of Lori by talented artists, have you taken a look at the Visions of Lorelei art gallery? It’s a celebration of Lorelei’s 25 years as SWC’s first leading lady of horror, and features pinups by such luminaries as Frank Thorne (Red Sonja), Gray Morrow (Zatanna), Mike Mignola (Hellboy), Joseph Michael Linsner (Dawn/Vampirella), and Jim Balent (Catwoman). Just follow the “Gallery” link and scroll down to check out the fantastic pieces! (And don’t forget to take a look at the “13 Days of Pan-demonium” gallery—a celebration of our teen Goth adventuress, Pandora Zwieback—while you’re at it.)

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Collingswood Book Festival 2014 is This Saturday!

Posted on October 6, 2014 by Steven

Collingswood-2014-logoThe 2014 Collingswood Book Festival is being held on Saturday, October 11, and StarWarp Concepts will be making its debut appearance! Never heard of CBF? Well, to quote the festival’s site:

The 12th Annual Collingswood Book Festival makes a triumphant return as bibliophiles converge in this historic South Jersey town to celebrate everything about the written word. The Collingswood Book Festival is a big literary event that exudes small-town, friendly ambience. A week of activities will culminate on Saturday, October 11, 2014 from 10am to 4pm. Festival-goers will have an opportunity to stroll more than six blocks of Haddon Avenue filled with nationally recognized authors/speakers for adults and children, as well as booksellers, storytellers, poetry readings, workshops, exhibitors and performance stages. All events are free.

Booth #18 is where you’ll find me hawking The ’Warp’s goods; as always, just look for the Pandora Zwieback banner. For more information, including travel directions, head over to the festival website.

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