Broken Frontier

They come out at night: black-clad creatures on the prowl for drinking, dancing and drugs, each looking to cut a dramatic figure in the pulsing, dimly-lit world of the gothic night club. Among them is "Lord Byron," dressed to the nines and craving the attention and approval of the club crowd.

He really doesn't know anything at all about the poet Lord Byron--he just think the name sounds, you know, spooky--and he tries just a bit too hard to impress: Byron is living the unfortunate life of a poseur. But lurking in the night are real dark creatures, monsters who don't care who is club royalty and who is a poseur. They give Byron a great deal of attention, but it's not exactly the kind he's been wanting. When he's confronted with drugs, vampires, conspiracy, unnamed horrors, a three-eyed toad, and a two-headed pickled punk named "H.P.," will Byron run in terror or will he embrace the monsters as he has always claimed to embrace what is dark and frightening?

Byron: Mad, Bad, and Dangerous, the new SLG Publishing comics series by Karl Christian Krumpholz, tells a story of growing up, discovering who you are, and learning just how foolish it is to glamorize dark things that very well might be real. "I wanted to do a story where you take this sort of self-obsessed character, put him through the ringer, and see how he comes out," said Krumpholz. "He discovers that nothing is what it seems and that new rules apply. I wanted Byron to grow up and accept responsibility for his actions and the world around him."

Besides being the story of the main character's transformation, Byron has another element to its story that is popular with SLG's readers. "Byron is a sub-culture satire in the tradition of GloomCookie and Emo Boy." said SLG's editor-in-chief Jennifer de Guzman. "Byron finds out that there are perils in taking nothing but yourself seriously."

Byron will be a digital-only comic book in PDF and CBZ format, available the week of November 20 in SLG Publishing's webstore, store.slavelabor.com. It will be published as a print graphic novel in Summer 2007. Byron is SLG's second comic to be released digitally. The first was Whistles by Andrew Hussie, the first issue of which was released in October. A preview of Byron is available at www.slgpublishing.com, and a promotional trailer can be viewed at SLG's blog, slg-news.livejournal.com and at YouTube.com.