Exclusive: HUGE Shock Festival News & Exclusive Posters!
Great news, gorehounds! Stephen Romano’s latest work Shock Festival has just been officially picked up by IDW Publishing, and you can pre-order yourselves a copy right now!
Shock Festival represents something of a departure for IDW, but company president Ted Adams and publisher/executive editor Chris Ryall are very excited about this bold new frontier, citing Stephen Romano’s innovative and unprecedented work as stunning. “Nothing like this has ever been attempted before,” says Romano. “Ted knew the second he saw the book that he had to at least meet me, just to find out what kind of mind had manufactured all this nutty shit. They quickly realized that Shock Festival was something that comic fans would love. And we knew there could be a real crossover market, too, if the promotion was handled correctly. We’ve been able to get the book out for pre-order at a really low retail price without compromising the integrity of what I want to do. In fact, there will be even more stuff than originally planned. That’s mostly Tim Bradstreet’s fault. He’s been pushing for something bigger, classier, and he’s doing some new art for the book, too.”
The book is co-branded by the infamous Raw Entertainment, a film and publishing moniker owned and operated by comics legend Tim Bradstreet and awesome actor/director/Punisher Thomas Jane. RAW brought you the super-cool comic Bad Planet, along with hard-hitting films such as David Arquette’s The Tripper and Tom Jane’s directorial debut Dark Country, filmed in 3-D! “Tim and I have been trying to work together for years,” says Romano. “I bugged him all throughout 2007 when I was getting Shock Festival going, and now that it’s become a reality, I’ve managed to drag him into this mess. I believe Tom Jane is even going to appear on Tim’s poster for the book. I think that’s so awesome. We have Ashley Laurence from Hellraiser in there, and now we’ve got the fucking Punisher, too!”
Shock Festival will be released on October 25th in bookstores everywhere. It is now currently available for pre-order through our Amazon.com EVILShop at the insanely low price of 26 bucks! At 350 glossy pages, oversized 9X12 hardback coffee table format, and in FULL COLOR from cover to cover, that’s a steal for any self-respecting film fan!
The book features hundreds of exclusive, never-before-seen movie original posters championing a bygone era of exploitation films and an underground Hollywood Babylon you’ve never dreamed of. In addition to posters, there are newspaper clippings, lobby cards, still photos, soundtrack album sleeves, movie novelization tie-in covers and a wealth of text, explaining the bizarre origins of each film. “I wanted to do Grindhouse meets Spinal Tap,” says Romano.
“It’s a big thick coffee table book filled with amusing anecdotes about the making of B-string exploitation flicks and a bunch or rare memorabilia. You see a lot of books like that, especially now that the Internet has taken over the world. Everyone wants to be Johnny Legend now. Everybody has become a learned authority on horror films or whatever. Shock Festival is a sort of parody of that type of book, of that type of self-appointed expert. But it’s done totally straight, with no obvious winks or nods to the audience. It reads like a sincere and passionate exploration of these films. But the films are all fictional. The idea is that they’ve been lost for thirty years and I have devoted myself to unearthing them. So the posters all look like they were saved from dumpsters, or maybe they’ve been sitting in some grandma’s basement for years, or they’ve been tacked up on some fanboy’s wall. Most of the memorabilia items are supposed to have come from my own ‘personal collection,’ so I’ve been collecting this stuff for years, right? But that’s’ all a fictional framework I use to present some really outrageous ideas. It’s also a very truthful, informative book about how movies like this are really made. A lot of the stories are inspired by real events I have either lived through or heard tell of.”
The best part? You can also hire Stephen to do a poster for your film or as a private commission. “It’s funny,” he says, “but since I went public with the whole Shock Festival thing, people have been asking me to do posters for them. It’s almost like I started this fictional thing, and it’s become a reality in a really strange way. I actually have a side career as a fucking movie poster artist! The first one I did was for my buddies the Lewis Brothers and their film Black Devil Doll. Everyone was amazed I got the art so spot-on for that, and it’s because I’ve spent the better part of two years learning how it all works!”
For more on the book and to contact Stephen, check out the official Shock Festival MySpace page and Shock Festival‘s official site.
Pretty cool shit, huh? Enough talking! Dig on these exclusive posters below and order yourself a copy ASAP! Click on each teaser image to see the whole thing!
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