2025 GUESTS
Stay Tuned for more guest announcements!
David Michelinie
DAVID MICHELINIE has been a professional writer for over 50 years. He has written more than 600 comic book stories, in which he created several characters (Venom, Carnage, Taskmaster) which have been featured in major motion pictures. His comics career has spanned genres from westerns to war to horror to super hero. In addition to his comics work, David has published two novels, has placed short stories in anthologies (WEREWOLVES: DEAD MOON RISING) and periodicals (Spider-Man Magazine), is a published poet (POETIC IMAGES: THE GREAT AMERICAN WEST) and has written scripts for the Nicktoons animated TV series, “Iron Man Armored Adventures.” His comic book biography of Mother Teresa won the Catholic Book Award for Best Children’s Book, and his prose effort, “Lord Pemberton’s Adjustment Service”, won the 2017 Pulp Factory Award for Best Short Story.
Anthony Tollin
ANTHONY TOLLIN has a 25-year history in comics, including a 15-plus year tenure with his late wife Adrienne as the regular colorists on about 85% of DC's top-selling titles: SUPERMAN, GREEN LANTERN, NEW TEEN TITANS, BATMAN, DETECTIVE COMICS, Mike Grell's WARLORD, CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS, JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA, AMBUSH BUG, etc. He started out on DC's staff back when they numbered only 33 people (including the payroll department upstairs), and his two immediate bosses had both worked on ACTION COMICS #1. He worked regularly with almost all the major Silver and Bronze Age artists including Curt Swan, George Perez, Don Newton, Gil Kane, Jim Aparo, Joe Kubert, Irv Novick, Don Heck, Jerry Ordway, Mike Grell, etc., and co-authored 1979's THE SHADOW SCRAPBOOK with Walter Gibson (creator of The Shadow).
Buddy Saunders
We are proud to welcome back BUDDY SAUNDERS from MyComicShop.com this year! Saunders started out in the world of fanzines. As part of the "Texas Trio" (with Larry Herndon and Howard Keltner) Saunders published the fanzine Star-Studded Comics from 1963–1972. It featured early work by George R. R. Martin, Grass Green, Jim Starlin, Roy Thomas, Sam Grainger, Alan Weiss, Dave Cockrum, Mike Vosburg, Biljo White, and Keltner, among others, and featured the early appearances of Dr. Weird, Xal-Kor, Wildman and The Eye. Saunders' cover for its second issue won an Alley Award in the amateur division in 1963. In addition, during this period Saunders was a regular contributor (as an artist) to the seminal comic book fanzine Rocket's Blast Comicollector.
Saunders operated his own mail order service starting in 1961. He owned and operated Lone Star Comics, a chain of seven Texas comic book stores founded in 1977. With the sale of the Lone Star comic book store chain in 2013, Mr. Saunders and his family now operate the online Lone Star Comics, www.mycomicshop.com.
As a writer, he co-authored A Voice and Bitter Weeping with Howard Waldrop, later expanded into the 1974 novel The Texas-Israeli War: 1999, as well as Time and Variance, with Waldrop and Steven Utley. Saunders' story "Back to the Stone Age'" was nominated for a Nebula Award for Best Short Storyin 1976. Saunders' recent work includes two novels based on the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Martian Legion (2014) and Tarzan and the Cannibal King (2017).
Buddy will be buying collections on the exhibit floor. We also want to thank him for sponsoring the show!
John Wooley
JOHN WOOLEY is a writer, novelist, and pop-culture historian whose work includes the graphic novels THE TWILIGHT AVENGER and THE MIRACLE SQUAD (Pulp 2.0 Press) and, with James Vance, the introductions for BOB POWELL'S COMPLETE JET POWERS and COMPLETE CAVE GIRL (Kitchen Sink Press/Dark Horse Books). In 2016, two of his story synopses were expanded into full-length ALLEY OOP comic-strip adventures by Jack and Carole Bender.
His newest work of fiction is BEAUTY AND THE BUND, a collaboration with his longtime friend Robert A. Brown, for Babylon Books. It continues the saga they began in the Cleansing series, a trio of 1930s-set horror novels that critics have compared favorably to golden-age pulp-magazine tales.
Wooley's other comic-book credits include his adaptation of Edward D. Wood Jr.'s PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE, followed by a new three-issue miniseries, PLAN NINE: THIRTY YEARS LATER, as well as his DAN TURNER: HOLLYWOOD DETECTIVE, all from Malibu Graphics. He wrote several stories for the famed horror comic DEATH RATTLE, for Kitchen Sink Press, which also hired him to do a couple of tales in GRATEFUL DEAD COMIX. Wooley also scripted Upshot Graphics’ UNCANNY MAN-FROG comics, with his MIRACLE SQUAD and TWILIGHT AVENGER artist, Terry Tidwell. He is also known for working with fellow comic-book author and film historian Michael H. Price on THE BIG BOOK OF BIKER FLICKS and the long-running FORGOTTEN HORRORS series of B-movie-history books, for which he and Price also do a regular podcast.
Winner of the 2006 Lamont Award “for outstanding effort in keeping alive the memory and the spirit of the Pulp Magazine Era,” Wooley has written dozens of pulp-magazine-oriented pieces, including a series of introductions to detective-story collections from Popular Publications.
He is the co-host, co-producer, and co-writer of RSU TV's B-MOVIE THEATRE, and the co-producer and writer of the new documentary TULSA TERRORS, which recently won an Independent Horror Movie Festival Award for Best Documentary Feature and was a finalist for a Heartland Emmy.
Wooley broke into professional writing more than 50 years ago with a script for Warren Publishing's EERIE, for which he was paid $25. He eventually worked his way up to $50 before Uncle Sam called him to active duty, which included a year-long stint on a helicopter carrier in the waters of Viet Nam. He is an inductee into the Oklahoma Cartoonists Hall of Fame (for scriptwriting), the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame (for his music writing), and the Oklahoma Historians Hall of Fame.
