Broken Frontier

Dark lord of the night or unbearable poseur?* Explore the gloom- and drama-laden world of Lord Byron, as SLG/Eyemelt's Byron: Mad, Bad and Dangerous slouches to gothic life this August in comic stores everywhere.

Both celebrating and skewering the subculture that keeps eyeliner production profitable, Byron is a 136-page graphic novel collecting the razor-witted SLG Publishing series, previously available in individual issues on the SLG affiliate site Eyemelt.com.

"How can you not laugh at the darkity dark-clad goths? They are so serious. It's a brilliant vehicle for satire," says series creator Karl Christian Krumpholz. "I've done the club scene and still own a complete set of Nick Cave and Bauhaus CDs. I've seen how certain people in the scene take themselves way to seriously and like to think of themselves as a dark shadow cut from an even darker swash of black velvet. The idea of Byron started with wondering what would happen when they encountered the face of real evil. Would they run screaming? Or want to be one of the villains?"

Buoyed by a dynamic art style somewhere between the controlled lines of Marc Hempel and the wild expression of Evan Dorkin, Krumpholz's Byron follows a young Goth scenester through the wildest night of his life, as "Lord Byron" (blissfully unaware of his namesake's poetic legacy) and his similarly-named cohorts run afoul of hallucinogens, the police, an ancient vampire conspiracy and Byron's two-headed jar-baby brother.

But Byron persists -- not through grit or determination, but by clinging to the frantic, feeble hope that maybe, someday, somebody will think he's cool. It's an affectionate swipe at the subculture that will make some people shake their heads -- and others shudder in recognition.

The book will be released on antique vellum, with a cover printed using squid ink on taffeta, exquisitely stretched across razor-thin sheets of marble, each with a unique bookmark sewn from the fabric of the puffy blouse Tom Cruise wore as Lestat in Interview with the Vampire.

Okay, not really. But Byron wishes it would be.

Byron: Mad, Bad and Dangerous will be available in August 2007 and will retail for $10.95. It's available for pre-order now from comic book stores everywhere, and will soon be available at SLG Publishing's website, www.slgcomic.com, where a preview is available for viewing.

*Poseur. Don't tell anyone we told you.