BALTIMORE COMIC-CON 2024 Adds Chu, Kitson, Saviuk and more

from the official BALTIMORE COMIC-CON press release

Baumann, Chu, Epting, Kitson, Martinbrough, and Saviuk Come to Baltimore in '24

BALTIMORE, MARYLAND - March 6, 2024 - Join us in celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the Baltimore Comic-Con on September 20-22, 2024 at the Inner Harbor's Baltimore Convention Center. The Baltimore Comic-Con is glad to announce comics guests including Marty Baumann, Amy Chu, Steve Epting, Barry Kitson, Shawn Martinbrough, and Alex Saviuk as guests for our 25th Anniversary event! Tickets for the show are available now.

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Marty Baumann is an illustrator, graphic artist, and production designer. He has contributed to some of the most popular, Oscar-winning animated films of all time. Marty has worked as an artist at Walt Disney Pictures and Pixar Animation Studios as an illustrator, graphic artist, and production designer on such films as Toy Story 3, Big Hero 6, Zootopia, Cars 2, Planes, Wreck-It Ralph 2, and many others. He also helped develop theme park installations, toy packaging, and Pixar corporate branding. Marty has rendered illustrations and developed characters for toy manufacturers, magazines, and newspapers, and illustrated children's books, created logos, info-graphics, broadcast promotions, and presentation art for Hasbro, Universal Studios, National Geographic, Scholastic Books, Nickelodeon, and many others. Recent projects include his role as concept artist for the new Mystery Science Theater 3000 and the visual development of Sir Paul McCartney's feature film, High in the Clouds.

Amy Chu is a comics and animation writer, currently working on the upcoming Borderlands mini-series and Carmilla: The First Vampire through the Dark Horse Berger Books imprint. Her most recent work is the Netflix anime series DOTA: Dragon’s Blood, Rick & Morty, and Archie. For DC and Marvel, she has written popular characters such as Wonder Woman, Poison Ivy, Deadpool, Ant-Man, and Iron Man. She is also known for her run on Red Sonja, and is the first woman to write the KISS and Green Hornet series. For children, she has written the graphic novels Sea Sirens and Sky Island(Penguin Random House) and Ana & the Cosmic Race(Papercutz). Amy is a member of the faculty at the Kubert School and the School of Visual Arts and a board member of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. She holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a double bachelor’s degree in Architectural Design from MIT and East Asian Studies from Wellesley College. You can follow her on Twitter @amychu, Instagram @amy_chu and on Facebook/iwritecomics.

With a career stretching back to First Comics, Steve Epting made his name with Marvel fans everywhere with an eminent fifty issue run drawing The Avengers in the 90s. He has contributed art for multiple titles at Marvel and DC, including X-Factor, X-Men, Superman, Aquaman, Fantastic Four, and New Avengers.  Steve is probably best known for an award-winning collaboration with Ed Brubaker on Captain America, during which he co-created The Winter Solider, the main character from the smash hit Captain America: The Winter Soldier.   He later re-teamed with Brubaker on the smash hit Velvetfor Image Comics, illustrated the relaunch of Batwoman for DC Comics, partnered with Garth Ennis on Sara for the launch of TKO Studios, and co-created Telepaths with J. Michael Straczynski at AWA. This year will see the release of Partisan, Ennis and Epting’s WWII graphic novel follow up to Sara from TKO Studios.

Barry Kitson began drawing comics professionally in 1983 and has been an extraordinarily prolific artist since then. His first published work was as the artist on Spider-Man for Marvel UK. He went on to draw The Transformersand various other titles for the company before moving on to 2000AD where he drew multiple Judge Dredd and Judge Anderson stories. At the end of the eighties, he was invited to work for DC Comics in America, becoming a staple artist on many of their flagship titles including Superman, Batman, The Justice League of America, The Legion of Superheroes, The Teen Titans, and Azrael. He also went on to work for Marvel Comics, illustrating Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, The Avengers, The Incredible Hulk, Doctor Strange, and Iron Man, amongst others. Together with writer Mark Waid, Barry co-created the series Empire, currently optioned for production by Paramount + and published in French by Delcourt as Golgoth. Barry is currently working on new Empire material to see print in 2023. Barry continues to illustrate the successful independent publication The Liberty Brigade, which features many of the Golden Age superhero characters and is set in the 1940s. He is began work on a second volume last year.

Shawn Martinbrough is the author of How to Draw Noir Comics: The Art and Technique of Visual Storytelling by Penguin Random House and an Eisner Award-nominated artist whose comic book projects include Batman: Detective Comics, Luke Cage Noir, The Black Panther: Man Without Fear, and Hellboy. Shawn illustrated Thief of Thieves, the graphic novel series co-created with Robert Kirkman (The Walking Dead, Invincible) and the Eisner-nominated Prométhée 13:13, published by Éditions Delcourt-Soleil and ABLAZE. He is a co-author of Judge Kim and the Kids’ Court by Simon & Schuster and the artist of Like Lava in My Veins, the 2024 NAACP Image Award-nominated, best-selling kid's book written by Derrick D. Barnes and published by Nancy Paulsen Books/Penguin Kids. Shawn is a Vanity Fair contributor, the writer of Red Hood: The Hill for DC Comics, and is currently writing and illustrating The HEAVY, an original graphic novel for Megascope/Abrams Books.

Alex Saviuk started his professional career at DC Comics in 1977 after studying sequential art with Will Eisner at The School of Visual Arts in NYC. Within a few short months, he became the regular artist on Green Lantern and The Flash. He also drew Superman, Hawkman, Aquaman, The Atom, and Air Wave, among others. In 1986, Alex moved over to Marvel Comics, filling in on Iron Man 211 and various covers before eventually becoming the penciler on Defenders of the Earth, featuring The Phantom, Flash Gordon, and Mandrake. Then, after successfully filling in on Amazing Spider-Man for 3 issues, he started a 7+ year run on Web of Spider-Man followed by over 2 more years on Spider-Man Adventures. From 1997-1998, Alex penciled the last 12 issues of The X-Files for Topps Comics (#30-41). In 2003, he joined the ranks of a Swedish and an Australian publisher chronicling the adventures of Lee Falk's The Phantom. In 2004, he also assisted his mentor Will Eisner (legendary creator of The Spirit) on The Spirit Meets The Escapist published by Dark Horse, which unfortunately was Will Eisner’s last completed work before his passing in January 2005. Alex also worked on the graphic novel Feast of the Seven Fishes, glowingly reviewed by Stan Lee; it was nominated for an Eisner Award in 2006, and that same year, the Spider-Man newspaper strip, on which Alex worked, also received a Harvey nomination. In 2012, Alex worked with Stan Lee on a mainstream superhero book called Stan Lee and The Mighty Seven published by Archie Comics. Besides comics, Alex also does storyboards and conceptual art for advertising agencies and the occasional feature film (Never Back Down, The Reaping, Hoot, and Lonely Hearts). Currently and recently, besides drawing The Phantom, Alex contributed pencils and inks for 11 variant covers for Marvel's Symbiote Spider-Man mini-series. Alex's co-creation with writer Gerry Conway, Tombstone, appeared in the academy-Award winning hit movie Into the Spider-Verse! Also, the Eisner Award-nominated graphic novel Feast of the Seven Fishes by Robert Tinnell and Alex Saviuk is now a major motion picture directed and produced by writer Robert Tinnell and opened in mid-November 2019 to glowing reviews as a top ten holiday movie to watch! The book itself is still available online on Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble, among others!

"What an amazing group of artists and writers," said Marc Nathan, show promoter for the Baltimore Comic-Con. "These guests have worked on such a wide array of properties, from self-published creations to work on properties owned by large comics companies to major motion pictures and more. Fans of any kind are sure to be excited to meet these creators, and we're thrilled to have them join us this year."