If you live in a big city, you know how dangerous trick-or-treating can sometimes be, with dodging speeding cars and trucks while you’re trying to make the rounds of your favorite candy-giving haunts—even in the daytime!
In 2022, New York City took steps to try and make trick-or-treating a much safer event, by instituting “Trick or Streets,” an expansion of its “Open Streets” initiative that closes certain streets to vehicular traffic so that NYC residents can walk and bike on them without fear of injury. (It’s a popular program that started in May 2021 as a result of the pandemic lockdown, so that people could finally get out of their homes and apartments to enjoy fresh air.) And now it returns for Year Three—starting tomorrow!
During October, a number of streets will be closed off in Queens, Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn, allowing you and yours to hit the pavement and fill those goody bags. (Keep an eye on local weather forecasts, so you and yours can dress accordingly.)
For more information on the city’s Halloween plans and a list of family-friendly events being held, head over to the Trick or Streets website.
The first weekend of October is about to arrive, but on cable TV the countdown to Halloween has already begun! And if you’re a fan of horror movies, here’s a sampling of what will be available for your viewing terror!
Cable station AMC FearFeast is underway, and Friday’s festivities begin at 1:20 a.m. (on the East Coast) with the Michael Meyers-less (but still entertaining!) Halloween III: Season of the Witch, followed by 1957’s Voodoo Woman, 1958’s Corridors of Blood (starring Boris Karloff), and 1962’s The Creation of the Humanoids before hosting a trio of marathons. Friday is dedicated to “A Nightmare of Freddy,” starring the legendary Robert Englund as razor-clawed dream-monster (and pop culture icon!) Freddy Krueger, and it kicks off at 9:30 a.m. (on the East Coast) with Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, then continues through the day in ascending order with A Nightmare on Elm Street 5–2 before reaching the original NoES, followed by the 2010 remake starring Jackie Earle Haley.
Then on Saturday, it’s the hockey-masked, machete-wielding Jason Voorhees’s turn to rule AMC in an all-day Friday the 13th marathon, starting at 8:00 a.m. (EST) with Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, followed by A New Beginning, Part VI: Jason Lives, Part VII: The New Blood, Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan, and Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, before looping around to Friday the 13th I–III. And for Sunday, after showings of Jason X, Freddy vs. Jason, and I Know What You Did Last Summer, it’s a marathon of Final Destination 1, 2, 3, and 5, leading up to the broadcast of the latest episode of their popular zombie series The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon.
On Max (formerly HBO Max), it’s the start of “No Sleep October,” a monthlong Halloween celebration that launches with the premiere of writer/director Gary Dauberman’s ’Salem’s Lot, the latest movie adaptation of the awesome Stephen King novel about a vampiric outbreak in the small Maine town of Jerusalem’s Lot.
Over at MeTV, movie host Svengoolie kicks off his annual Halloween BOO-Nanza on Saturday with a double feature. Up first is Son of Frankenstein, the 1939 monster classic starring Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, and Basil Rathbone. Following it is 1957’s The Monster That Challenged the World, a creature feature about a giant, murderous mollusk(!) on a rampage.
The Movies! Channel leans heavily on old-school horror (mostly black-and-white flicks). They welcome Spooky Season by expanding their Friday Night Frights schedule, beginning early with 1960’s The Lost World—starring Michael Rennie (The Day the Earth Stood Still) and Jill St. John—at 6:15 a.m., followed by 1943’s The Leopard Man, 1957’s Curse of the Demon, the George Romero classics Night of the Living Dead and Day of the Dead, David Cronenberg’s Rabid, Neil Marshall’s soldiers-versus-werewolves action horror Dog Soldiers, and the Peter Cushing–starring anthologies From Beyond the Grave, Asylum (written by Robert Bloch), and The House That Dripped Blood (costarring Christopher Lee).
And Turner Classic Movies—which has named Bela (Dracula) Lugosi as their Star of the Month for October and has already started celebrating Halloween—gets a jump on everyone’s weekend with their Friday midnight-to-morning overnight schedule, with the Vincent Price 1953 classic House of Wax at 12:15 a.m., followed by 1932’s Frederic March–starring Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1935’s Mad Love (starring Peter Lorre), and greeting the dawn with 1945’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. No horror movies on Saturday, but the chills return Sunday morning with a pair of Roger Corman classics, The Little Shop of Horrors and Bucket of Blood, along with 1962’s The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, and the creepy Bette Davis and Joan Crawford thriller What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
So, if you’re looking for a spooky feature to watch this weekend, or to just have something playing in the background while you’re putting your Halloween plans together, catch a movie (or ten!) and get into the Horror Mood!
Got a favorite book? Well, odds are good there’s someone out there in the United States who’d like to see it censored, removed from libraries and bookstores, or pulped—especially these days. According to the American Library Association, “The number of titles targeted for censorship at public libraries increased by 92% over the previous year, accounting for about 46% of all book challenges in 2023.”
That’s where Banned Books Week comes in. Launched in 1982, it’s an annual celebration of literacy in which the spotlight is shone on the problem of censorship in U.S. libraries and bookstores. This year’s theme is “Freed Between the Lines,” which celebrates “the right to read, and find freedom in the pages of a book.” The event’s final day, September 28, has been proclaimed Let Freedom Read Day.
Welcome back to Horror Street, my ongoing journey in search of awesome yet spooky graffiti art on the streets and little-traveled corners of New York City!
Our latest entry goes waaay back, to the early 1990s, during one of my wanders through Long Island City, the eastern area of Queens, NY, that’s become all the rage for real estate developers in the last decade or so, with high-rise apartment buildings springing up in what used to be an industrialized neighborhood (which explains how Queens recently became listed as one of the most expensive “cities” in America, rent-wise!).
But before the area was transformed into a place to be, it was a place to avoid…because it was roamed by graffiti demons!
I don’t recognize the characters, but they look inspired by either Japanese anime, or video games (or maybe a ’90s animated series?); looks really good, though. (I apologize for the quality of the photo, but back then I was using disposable cameras loaded with actual film, which was processed by a local pharmacy. Stone Age photography!) And, as often happens with street art, the next time I passed through that area, maybe a year later, the mural was gone, replaced by someone else’s art.
Stay tuned for further installments of Horror Street—there’s plenty of macabre graffiti art to be found on the streets of New York, if you look in the right creepy places! And be sure to check out my previous HS entries, like the Brooklyn Vampire, the demonic D-Rod, and the Spooky Forest!
Today is the launch day for San Diego Comic-Con 2024: four days in which hordes of comic and pop-culture fans descend on the San Diego Convention Center to meet their idols, hunt down collectibles, pose in their best costumes, and crowd the aisles. Or is that meet the crowds in their best collectible costumes—and hunt down their idols…? (Somebody call Security!)
StarWarp Concepts won’t be part of the festivities—in fact, we haven’t attended Comic-Con since 2005 (it’s just too expensive to exhibit there, what with cross-country travel and shipping, not to mention exhibitor and hotel fees)—but that doesn’t mean you can’t experience SWC’s sort of scaled-down version of the big show right here!
You want vendors? Our webstore is open 24/7, so at any time you can order our amazing titles that range from comics and graphic novels to fantasy and dark fantasy novels, and from Illustrated Classics to nonfiction books about gaming and comics history. And while our webstore is currently offline (sorry about that; we’re working on the problem), our product pages have links to traditional book retailers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble for print editions, and Smashwords and DriveThru for e-books and digital comics.
Speaking of e-titles, a good number of our digital titles are currently available at discounted prices, as part of our annual involvement with Smashwords’ Winter/Summer E-book Sale and the Christmas in July Sale at DriveThru Comics and DriveThru Fiction. Both sales run until the end of the month, so click the links to check out the bargains!
Convention giveaways? Our Downloads page has Pandora Zwieback wallpapers for your smartphone and computer, and book samples. Plus, we have free digital comic books you can download:
Heroines & Heroes is a collection of comic stories and pinups all drawn by Steven A. Roman (that’s me!), dating back to my days in the early 1990s small-press movement—that age of dinosaurs in which creators like me used to make our comics by printing them out on photocopiers and then stapling them by hand. In H&H you’ll find mainstream heroes and small-press heroines, and even a couple of anthropomorphic bikers. Leading off is “V-A-C-A-T-I-O-N (in the Summertime),” a three-page Wonder Woman vs. Harley Quinn story that I wrote and drew in the late ’90s as a sample for a DC Comics editor who thought I’d be a good fit for their Batman: The Animated Series comic (it didn’t work out). The WW/Harley matchup is followed by an adventure of small-presser Jeff Wood’s rabbit-eared superspy, Snowbuni; three pages from the long-canceled indie comic Motorbike Puppies; and an adventure of the indie superheroine The Blonde Avenger.
The Saga of Pandora Zwieback #0is a full-color introduction to the young adult novel series of the same name, hosted by Pan herself. Pan is a 16-year-old New York City Goth who’s not only a horror fangirl but someone with the rare ability to see the for-real monsters that regular humans can’t (she calls it her “monstervision”), and with the help of a 400-year-old, shape-shifting monster hunter named Sebastienne “Annie” Mazarin, she’s learning how to protect her family, her friends, and the world from the supernatural dangers out there—and maybe even have some fun while doing it. This 16-page comic features a seven-page story written by me, with art and color by Eliseu Gouveia (The Saga of Pandora Zwieback Annual #1, Carmilla, A Princess of Mars, Lorelei: Sects and the City), and includes two sample chapters from Blood Feud, the first Pan novel.
Artists Alley? Our Gallery area—think of it as an online artists’ alley—features two sections, The 13 Days of Pan-demonium and Visions of Lorelei, both containing original renderings of our two best-known characters by a host of artists from indie and mainstream comics, including such notables as Mike Mignola (Hellboy), Elizabeth Watasin (Charm School), Teri S. Wood (Wandering Star), Neil Vokes (Tom Holland’s Fright Night), Frank Thorne (Red Sonja), Louis Small Jr. (Vampirella), Dave Simon (Ghost Rider), Bill Ward (Torchy), and Joseph Michael Linsner (Red Sonja)!
So even though the StarWarp Concepts crew—and possibly you, as well—isn’t in sunny San Diego, at least you can have an SWC con-like experience from the comforts of your home!
“You may not know the name off the top of your head but if you’ve been reading Marvel comics, or SF and fantasy paperbacks, for any length of time at all then you’ve seen Bob Larkin’s work…. Once I learned to recognize the style it seemed as though I saw it everywhere. At some point Bob Larkin was doing covers for everything cool I liked.”—Greg Hatcher, Comic Book Resources
If you’re a fan of comic books, or movies, or pulp fiction heroes, Bob Larkin is a painter whose work you recognize immediately; he’s provided covers and movie posters for just about every publishing house and film studio for more than five decades.
Cover art for Star Wars, Star Trek, Vampirella, Famous Monsters of Filmland, and Tomb of Dracula, and movie posters for Piranha, Night of the Creeps, and The Toxic Avenger II are just some of the painted images you’re already familiar with, even if you didn’t know they were Larkin’s work.
He’s also been an inspiration to artists like Joe Jusko and Alex Ross. He’s worked behind the scenes on such movies as Star Trek V, providing concept artwork (that planet where “God” was hanging out, in need of a starship? That was Bob’s). If you’re a fan of StarWarp Concepts’ projects, then you know him as the cover artist of the Saga of Pandora Zwieback novels Blood Feud and Blood Reign.
And today is his 75th birthday!
“Throughout the’ 70s and ’80s, if you saw Bob Larkin’s name on the cover to a magazine or comic, you simply had to have it. This is a guy that’s never truly received the credit for being one of the best all-time cover artists.”—Shotgun Reviews
I’ve known Bob since 1998, when as a fiction editor I hired him to paint the covers for the novels X-Men: Law of the Jungle and Gen 13: Version 2.0 (the latter written by another friend of mine, Sholly Fisch), then again when I needed covers for my own X-Men: The Chaos Engine Trilogy. But long before that I was a fan of his work, most of which I saw on the covers of 1970s magazines like Haunt of Horror, Tomb of Dracula, The Rook, Vampirella, and Crazy, among many others. And then when I learned he also did T-shirt art for World Wrestling Entertainment (Drew Barrymore wore his Stone Cold Steve Austin T-shirt in Charlie’s Angels), not to mention designed the meat-hook tattoos for wrestler (later MMA fighter) Brock Lesner…well, could he be any cooler?
It didn’t take long before my fandom turned into a friendship that’s still going on to this day!
“A prolific and accomplished painter, Bob Larkin ‘owned’ the Marvel magazine format. If you’ve ever seen a circa Bronze/Modern large-sized Marvel painted cover that just took your breath away, you were probably admiring the work of Bob Larkin.”—Gotham City Art
When I relaunched StarWarp Concepts in 2010, Bob was the first artist I approached to get involved. I wanted painted covers for the Pandora Zwieback novels, and Bob was the artist I wanted for them. And not only did he create three cover paintings for the series, he also painted the flames and woodcut reproduction that adorn the real-world Pan Zwieback leather jacket, created sculptures of the bat ornament and demon-faced belt buckle Pan wears, and provided the final artwork for the demon-girl T-shirt that we sell in the SWC Store! And if you attend a convention that StarWarp Concepts is at, that’s Bob’s art on full display on the Pan banner that hangs in the back of our booth.
“With his vibrant, movie-poster style, Larkin was one of the most sought-after artists of his time.”—Science Fiction Book Club
If you’re unfamiliar with Bob’s stunning work, pay a visit to his art blog, Bob Larkin: The Illustrated Man. Yes, it hasn’t been updated in quite a while, but you’ll still find a wealth of imagery on display—and a lot of what he’s done will probably surprise you!
So, happy birthday, Bob! You’re a legend and an inspiration and a good friend, and all the best wishes to you on this special occasion!
Hey, folks! I know it’s been a while since my last post, so here’s just a brief update on what’s going on around ’Warp Central. It’s a good news/bad news situation—but mostly good!
We’ll start off with the bad news: For the moment, the SWC Store is off-line due to software problems that are preventing us from taking orders on our print and e-book titles. We’re currently working on finding a replacement program that will restore in-house ordering. In the meantime, you can still follow the links we have on the product pages to outside vendors like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, and DriveThru Comics, among others. Sorry about the complications!
Now for the good news:
Item 1: Last week, e-book distributor Draft2Digital made our original e-titles (in other words, the books by Richard C. White and myself) available through Fable, “the social app for bookworms” (according to the company’s press material) in which readers can join virtual book clubs or start their own, in addition to purchasing e-books directly from their store. So, that’s a whole new venue in which to pick up new readers!
Item 2: In a couple of weeks, StarWarp Concepts will be participating once again in e-book store Smashwords’ annual Summer/Winter Sale, running throughout July, where you can purchase our titles at 25% off (not to mention choose from the thousands of titles available at similar discounts from a world of indie publishers large and small).
Item 3: SWC will also be participating in another e-book event next month: DriveThru Comics and DriveThru Fiction’s annual Christmas in July Sale, which is held the last two weeks of the month (usually in time to coincide with the San Diego Comic-Con), so that will give you an opportunity to save on our books, comics, and graphic novels!
And hey, all you librarians looking for quality e-books for your patrons: Through our association with Draft2Digital, our titles can be ordered through OverDrive, Baker & Taylor, Odilo, Bibliotheca, BorrowBox, Palace Marketplace, and hoopla. Please keep that in mind while you’re attending the 2024 American Library Association Annual Conference at the end of this month, when you’re in search of books to add to your virtual shelves.
After all, summertime’s the perfect time for reading, isn’t it?
It’s that time of year again! World Goth Day (always held on May 22) puts a spotlight on Goth culture and all its perks (it’s not all about black clothes and clichéd dour attitudes, you know). To quote the official website:
Goth Day is exactly what it says on the wrapper—a day where the Goth scene gets to celebrate its own being, and an opportunity to make its presence known to the rest of the world. It all started off as “Goth Day” just in the UK back in 2009—originating as a musical subculture weekend on the BBC 6 music station which focused on punk, Brit-pop and Goth (the Goth feature was on May 22)—but the following year we decided to push the idea across the globe.
For more information on World Goth Day, including links to the many events being held to celebrate the occasion, visit the WGDwebsite.
(Above: The Scooby Gang goes stylishly dark in the “American Goth” episode of Be Cool, Scooby-Doo, first broadcast in 2017.)
Here’s a pleasant surprise: Just in time for Memorial Day Weekend (in the U.S.) this Friday—the start of summer beach-reading—and the celebration of World Dracula Day on May 26 (the date when Bram Stoker’s seminal novel went on sale in 1897), e-book distributors DriveThru Comics and DriveThru Fiction are currently running a Dracula Sale, during which you can purchase digital books and comics involving the Lord of Vampires at special prices! It runs until May 31—and yes, you’ll need to set up an account (it’s free) to take advantage of this promotion.
So why is it a “pleasant surprise”? Because included among the participating publishers is StarWarp Concepts (which I didn’t know about in advance), and selected for the sale is SWC’s most popular Illustrated Classic:
Before Edward and Bella, before Lestat and Louis, even before Dracula and Mina, there was the tale of Carmilla and Laura.
Living with her widowed father in a dreary old castle in the woods of Styria, Laura has longed to have a friend with whom she can confide; a friend to bring some excitement to her pastoral lifestyle. And then Carmilla enters her life.
Left by her mother in the care of Laura’s father, Carmilla is young, beautiful, playful—everything Laura had hoped to find in a companion. In fact, the lonely girl is so thrilled to have a new friend that she is willing to overlook the dark-haired beauty’s strange actions…which include a disturbing, growing obsession for her lovely hostess.
Carmilla, it seems, desires more than just friendship from Laura….
The blood-drenched temptress of a 19th-century vampiric “romance” by author J. Sheridan Le Fanu (Uncle Silas, In a Glass Darkly), Carmilla is a vampiress who desires not just blood but love from her victims, and when she enters the life of a young woman named Laura, Carmilla decides that her new friend will become her next great love—and won’t take no for an answer.
Carmilla was an influence on Bram Stoker in the creation of the vampire brides in Dracula, and she remains a popular character in fiction to this day. The novella has also influenced generations of writers, and has been adapted for the screen many times, including Hammer’s The Vampire Lovers and director Roger Vadim’s Blood and Roses.
The StarWarp Concepts edition features exclusive illustrations by Eliseu Gouveia (A Princess of Mars, The Saga of Pandora Zwieback Annual #1, Lorelei: Sects and the City).
Fans of gothic literature have certainly enjoyed it:
“The way Le Fanu blends together desire and predation is spellbinding. A true Gothic story, Carmilla is great fun.”—Gothic Beauty Magazine
“Carmilla is a must-read for any true fan of vampire fiction.”—LoveVampires.com
“Like many vampire romances, Carmilla and Laura’s love is doomed and unhealthy, but glorious.”—io9
“Carmilla is an enthralling wonderland ripe with blood and death. Curl up with this little sleeper if you like your creatures of the night with just a little dash of pixie dust and wolfsbane.”—ClassicHorror.com
Again, the Dracula Sale runs through May 31, so head over to the StarWarp Concepts publisher page at DriveThru Fiction and start shopping!
