Artist Guest of Honor Jon Sloan is the creator of Sa-Bom Jim and The Do-jahng webcomics, who also does other cartoons/comics as well as other freelance illustration in the Twin Cities area. He’s a member of The International Cartoonist Conspiracy, and has appeared at many conventions and shows in the Minneapolis area.
Twitter: @JonDSloan
Instagram: @SabomJon
Also see the MarsCon 2021 T-shirt art and the Emojis of DOOM on our Discord.
Author Guest of Honor Catherine Lundoff is an award-winning queer writer, editor and publisher from Minneapolis where she lives with her wife, artist Jana Pullman, and the cats who own them. By day, she is a professional computer geek, and by night, she does…a lot of other things. She is the author of over 100 published short stories and essays which have appeared in such venues as Fireside Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, the SFWA Blog, Dream Foundry, Sherlock Holmes and the Occult Detectives, American Monsters Part 2, World of Darkness: Ghost Hunters, Haunting Shadows (Wraith the Oblivion 20th Anniversary Anthology) and The Cainite Conspiracies (Vampire the Masquerade 20th Anniversary Anthology) and is the winner of a 2021 writer’s grant from Ladies of Horror Fiction.
Her books include the Wolves of Wolf’s Point Series: Silver Moon and Blood Moon, Unfinished Business: Tales of the Dark Fantastic, Out of This World: Queer Speculative Fiction Stories and A Day at the Inn, A Night at the Palace and Other Stories. She is also the editor of the anthologies Scourge of the Seas of Time (and Space) and Haunted Hearths and Sapphic Shades: Lesbian Ghost Stories and co-editor (with JoSelle Vanderhooft) of Hellebore and Rue: Tales of Queer Women and Magic. In addition, she has written erotica and erotic romance as Emily L. Byrne, including the novel Medusa’s Touch and the short story collections Desire and Knife’s Edge.
She is also the publisher at Queen of Swords Press, a genre fiction publisher specializing in fiction from out of this world. Queen of Swords Press publishes work by Jennie Goloboy, Rem Wigmore, A.J. Fitzwater, Heather Rose Jones, Alex Acks and Catherine’s own books, as well as work by other authors, including author Michael Merriam. She also teaches writing and editing workshops at the Rambo Academy, Springboard for the Arts, Clarion West (online) and other venues. Sometimes, she also sleeps, reads, goes to cons and performs in online amateur theatrical productions.
Queen of Swords Press: https://queenofswordspress.com
Author website: https://catherinelundoff.net
Media Guest of Honor Michael Moore:
“Hi I'm Michael Moore -
“I’ve worked in the film and entertainment industry for over 35 years,
specializing in prop fabrication and Product development prototyping. I’ve
worked on multiple blockbusters including the Star Trek Franchise, and The
Hobbit Trilogy, as well as cult classics such as Beetlejuice, Gremlins 2,
and Re-Animator.
“Working in the entertainment industry has its ups and downs, it’s a feast
or famine type of life but, one that I've enjoyed being apart of. I’ve
been fortunate enough to have worked on a multitude of great shows, While
working on many mainstream shows that have had no science fiction themes,
SciFi/Fantasy-based shows are my favorite genre to work on to this day. My
longest run on any single franchise has been on Star Trek. I started
working on Star Trek The Next Generation about half-way through the
first season.
“From that point on, I have worked on all of the different incarnations of
Star Trek. For some seasons it was a large majority of the props but in
other cases it was a few pieces here and there. I have worked with many
amazing people throughout the years, from artists to producers. Star Trek
continues to be a big part of my life, whether it be working on the
current incarnation of the show or working with a licensee on new Star
Trek product. I now run my own Prop Shop HMS Creative Productions inc.
with my wife and a group of extremely talented artists.”
Join us in welcoming Michael Moore to MarsCon 2022.
Music Guests of Honor TV’s Kyle & Lindzilla
Kyle A. Carrozza, aka “TV’s Kyle” created an awesome hilarious animated program for Cartoon Network, Mighty MagiSwords, as well voicing the male lead Prohyas and MANY other characters on the show. Since then he has been pitching new cartoon shows to various networks and streaming services, and worked as a Storyboard Artist on Hulu’s revival of Animaniacs and Apple TV’s The Snoopy Show. Kyle also co-hosts the fortnightly animation podcast Kyle & Luke Talk About Toons with Luke Ski and is one half of the duo Scooter Picnic with Insane Ian, which he describes as “bloopcore quirkhop” as if those words have meaning. Silly cartoon man.
Lindsay Smith, also known as “Lindzilla” (Kyle’s dinosaur-lifemate) also worked on Mighty Magiswords as a character designer and voice actor, and is currently the Co-Art Director on the popular Hulu animated series Solar Opposites. She also blows a mean baritone sax!
When the most adorable couple in Burbank aren’t making cartoons, they make excellent catchy fun comedy music together! They have had dozens of songs played on The Dr. Demento Show with many making the monthly Top Ten countdowns, and have been nominated for multiple Logan Awards over the past decade. In 2011, after they attended MarsCon for the first time, they vowed never to miss one ever, and they haven’t. Their live shows at MarsCon are always a highlight, bringing us their welcoming presence, big smiles and epic poses, and whenever necessary they will scream “Shut up, Ian!!!”
Authors, etc.
T. Aaron Cisco
T. Aaron Cisco is a multiple Amazon Top Five author whose works include Teleportality, Black Nerd Blue Box: The Wibbly Wobbly Memoirs of a Lonely Whovian, and Rod String Nail Cloth: An Afrofuturist Mixtape. The award-winning author/essayist, TV producer, musician, is a cosplaying, chess-obsessed, amateur cinephile, who was born and raised in Chicago, but his endeavors as a writer, producer, and musician have been received internationally, and taken him all over. Accolades include the Page One Award, local Emmys, and numerous featured speaker engagements. He is an unabashed advocate of squee, and is unwaveringly devoted to his lifelong mission to replace gatekeeping and discrimination with appreciation and inclusion, and eradicate fandom toxicity. Visit him at www.BLKINTL.com
Debbie David
1999 Guest of Honor
Debbie David is known for her work on Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987), Catchfire (1990) and Star Trek: Voyager (1995). Debbie was our very first Media Guest Honor for MarsCon.
Terry Faust
Terry Faust is a Minnesota freelance photographer and writer. Writing is his way of paring down his word count because, let's face it, with one picture being worth a thousand words and a camera that shoots seven frames per second he can turn out more words in a day than Dickens generated in a lifetime. He is currently finishing Y is for Wiseguy, the sequel to Z is for Xenophobe, while working on the third novella in his young adult urban fantasy series about a small group of kids who call themselves the River Rangers. In his copious spare time he breaks his knuckles inventing self propelled electric trailers for bicycles. Recent published work includes short stories in Tales of the Unanticipated #29 and #30 and work in the Minnesota Speculative Fiction Writers anthology, Northern Lights.
Eric M. Heideman
2020 Guest of Honor
Eric M. Heideman is a Minneapolis Roving Librarian. He founded Krushenko’s, a speculative fiction conversational space, in 1983, and continues to run it at several Minnesota/Wisconsin cons, including MarsCon. For many years he was the science fiction/fantasy reviewer for the Minneapolis Star Tribune. He founded the small press publication Tales of the Unanticipated (TOTU) for the Minnesota Science Fiction Society in 1986.
G. David Nordley
2013 Guest of Honor
G. David Nordley was born and raised in Minneapolis and Golden Valley, Minnesota. His main interest as a writer is the future of human exploration and settlement of space, and his stories typically focus on the dramatic aspects of individual lives within the broad sweep of a plausible human future. His novella Kremer’s Limit, written with C. Sanford Lowe, appeared in the July/August 2006 issue of Analog. A collection of linked Mars-related stories was published as an electronic book by Scorpius Digital in September 2001, with a print version appearing in 2003 (sold out). His novel To Climb a Flat Mountain (first appearing as a serial in Analog) was published (ebook and print-on-demand) by Variations on a Theme Publishing. He is a four-time winner of the AnLab, the Analog reader’s award for best story or article of the year, and has also been a Hugo and Nebula award nominee.
Website: http://www.gdnordley.com
Kathryn Sullivan
2020 Guest of Honor
Kathryn Sullivan has been writing science fiction and fantasy since she was 14 years old. Having read her father’s collection of sf and fantasy, she started writing her own. The world set up in The Crystal Throne has been developing since then. Some of the short stories escaped into fan zines, print zines and ezines, but those were collected into Agents & Adepts. And now even more have been added to the expanded Agents, Adepts & Apprentices. She has an essay in the Hugo winning Chicks Dig Time Lords and reviews in Outside In and Outside In Boldly Goes: 117 New Perspectives on 117 Classic Star Trek Stories. “Search and Rescue” and “The Oracle of Cilens” are just a couple of her short stories. Any birdlike beings in her books only slightly resemble her cockatoo owner.
Website: http://kathrynsullivan.com
Tyler Tork
Tyler Tork lives in the Minneapolis area with a sweet and strongly opinionated wife, no pets, and several computers. He’s a techie guy to pay for groceries, books, and toys, since writing doesn’t quite cover expenses currently*. Tyler believes in the Oxford comma, as do all right-thinking people. His recent book, Doctor Dead, is just out from Rampant Loon Media. His work has also appeared in Tales of the Unanticipated, Stupefying Stories, and the MinnSpec anthology Sky-Tinted Waters, among others.
Joan Marie Verba
2001 Featured Guest
Joan Marie Verba earned a bachelor of physics degree from the University of Minnesota and attended the graduate school of astronomy at Indiana University, where she was an associate instructor of astronomy for one year. She has worked as a computer programmer, and health-weight loss coach. She currently works as a writer, an editor/publisher and a social media manager and mobile marketing consultant. An experienced writer, Joan is the author of the nonfiction books Voyager: Exploring the Outer Planets, Boldly Writing, and Weight Loss Success!, as well as the novels Countdown to Action!, Action Alert!, Deadly Danger!, Situation: Critical!, Extreme Hazard!, and Danger Zone! plus numerous short stories and articles…
Jason D. Wittman
Jason lives and works in Minneapolis. His story, "Femme Fatale," was published in the hardcover anthology The Best of Baen Books, and his story "A Game of Knight Court" got an Honorable Mention in the 19th Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. He's had fiction published on SciFi.com, The Best of Baen's Universe, and recently in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine and in Bruce Bethke's Stupefying Stories, as well as a game, Tile Chess, published by Steve Jackson Games. He can recite Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" from memory.
Additional Musical Guests:
Ross Childs
Ross Childs has been honing his comedically musical abilities for the better part of a decade. Since moving to Chicago in 2013, he has studied at Second City, iO Chicago, The Annoyance, and the Old Town School of Folk Music. He has had the privilege of performing his music to laugh-infected audiences all over the country, including Detroit, Dallas, and Hartford, Connecticut in 2019 alone. Evidence of his work can be found all over the webz, like on youtube, instagram, soundcloud, spotify, iTunes, as well as several blogs! He has a TikTok account with over 350,000 followers where he makes hilarious short travel-logues (BENCHES!). His ultimate goal (besides playing one of his songs on Conan) is to create a catalogue of Tall Tales and ComedicFolk Ballads for the Modern Age. New Legends that deserve to have their stories told. If you have any ideas for strange creatures, daring feats, or larger-than-life individuals, please send him a message and a dialogue WILL BE CREATED! Ross enjoys the occasional rare steak, dachshund puppies, and hates pears. Like HATES hates them. Thinks they’re chalky.
Bad Beth and Beyond
Nobody knows where New Orleans-based Bad Beth and Beyond came from, but she first began offending people in 2011 with her lecherous songs and refusal to play a proper guitar. She is best known for her love song “Show Me On the Doll,” which was mentioned in the novel Robert Asprin’s Dragons Run by Jody Lynn Nye (in which an entire chapter takes place at one of her shows). The late eccentric producer Kim Fowley also featured her in his music video “Supernatural Bar-B-Q.” Her album 2-Deep has been known to get hundreds of listeners in trouble at work. Hobbies include setting things on fire and taunting a fellow musician who bears a striking resemblance to her.
Power Salad
By day, Chris is a professional voice-over artist whose voice can be heard in commercials for Kaopectate and Menards. He also is a huge part of sketch comedy / music groups Cirque du So What?, BS de Resistance, The Suffolk & Goode Players, and the Tambourine People. But when the moon is full, he gets out the vacuum cleaner and scares his cat into submission! He has won 2 Logan Awards for his songs “Letter From A Cruise Ship” and “Amazon Drone”, however it’s his 30 plus years of making sketch audio and comedy music make him the wise elder of the scene, but mostly he just yells about tile and honey mustard.
Insane Ian
Insane Ian is a comedian/writer who has been in several bands and loves video games. He plays them, he reviews them, he collects them, he even writes comedy songs about video games. He’s gone so far as to combine reviews and comedy songs into his video game “Reviewsicals” on YouTube. Just one look at Ian’s Bandcamp page makes it obvious that Insane Ian is a comedy music juggernaut that cannot be stopped. Ian hit a milestone in his career a long time in coming, as he had the #1 most requested song of 2015 on The Dr. Demento Show, the name-mangling Brit-tribute, “Benedict Cumberbatch”, sitting firmly atop the Doctor’s year-end Funny 25. With a sharp wit, sarcastic smirk, and a bit of self-deprecation, he’s here to bring his unique sound to anyone who won’t tell him to shut up… and even a few that will.
Devo Spice
2019 Guest of Honor
Devo Spice is a nerdcore and comedy rapper from New Jersey who calls himself “the red-headed stepson of Weird Al Yankovic and Eminem” and is one of the most popular artists on The Dr. Demento Show, having had the #1 most requested song of the year three times, and is also a FOUR-TIME Logan Award winner spanning all 3 categories. He is the webmaster of the comedy music collective website “The Funny Music Project”, aka The FuMP .com. Of his many albums, one of note would be his Doctor Who concept album I Am The Doctor, which has has 11 tracks about each of the first 11 Doctors (there’s a new Capaldi song on his latest album, Whittaker song coming in the future, fam).
Steve Goodie
Steve Goodie is, in all modesty and candor, the genius of our age. Comedian, writer, singer, director and producer, Steve was a founding member of Monty Python and has written scripts for Sid Caesar, Woody Allen, Mahatma Gandhi, Matt Groening, and Queen Elizabeth (for which he was knighted in 1972 at the unprecedented age of six). The Beatles credit much of their fame to his early studio work, during which he developed their recording sound with his apprentice, George Martin. His film scores and theatre work need no introduction, and he became a household word with his ground-breaking recording of The Biggest Belch In The History Of Man. It is a tribute to his humility that, on the suggestion of his long-time fan and sometime paramour Liz Taylor, he entered the Federal Witness Protection Program and began a new career, “to level the playing field,” as he put it, “for the other idiots trying to make it in Show Business.”
MeowMeme
MeowMeme is the comedy music alter ego of Alexandria Rasey, age 10, daughter of comedy musician Carrie Dahlby, and has attended the MarsCon Comedy Music Track every year following her birth year. She has performed during the FuMP Jukebox and at the Comedy Music Smackdown in years past, and this year she and her new persona are getting a 15 minute concert of her own to perform her own comedy music to kick off our Sunday concert block. Her first song, done with Carrie Dahlby and darkNES of the Gothsicles, “Woodland Creatures”, can be heard at the FuMP dot com.
Versitile Fluff
Elizabeth Thompson and Sharla Stemski are “Versatile Fluff”! They have performed during the FuMP Jukebox and at the Comedy Music Smackdown in years past, and they have returned to perform their own concert this year! Their bio says: We are an Internet Meme Cover Band. We harmonize about nerdy things over acoustic guitar or funky Bass VI. We convert memes and video game music into song. We drag pop music and Disney tunes kicking and screaming into the baritone range.
The Great Luke Ski
2005 & 2016 & 2019 Guest of Honor
At Dragon*Con 2004, Dr. Demento declared “the great Luke Ski” (a former MarsCon Music Guest Of Honor) to be his radio program’s “Most Requested Artist of the 21st Century”. Since then, Luke held onto that title by having his nerdy comedy tracks on The Dr. Demento Show’s annual year-end “Funny 25” countdown of his most requested songs of the year for 18 years in a row, with a whopping FIVE of them reaching the #1 spot, including his 2018 hit “Candybars”, which earned him his 3rd Logan Award for Outstanding Parody Song. Luke has been the Chair of the MarsCon Comedy Music Track since it’s inception, now in its 19th year. Luke Ski is currently looking for his next full-time job in the animation industry in the Burbank / L.A. area, paying the bills by being a cannabis product delivery boy, and trying to make more new comedy songs when he has the time and money to do so.
Brett Glass
Brett Glass travels all across the U.S. and even into international waters via the Jonathan Coulton Cruise, a.k.a. JoCo Cruise Crazy, to listen to all his favorite comedy musicians, and occasionally, he joins in the fun with some tunes of his own! He’s our only performer who has created his own karaoke system from which he plays his backing tracks while singing along with the lyrics on his laptop screen. He has performed individual songs in the MarsCon Dementia Track over the past several years, and a 30-minute concert in 2019!
“The future ain’t what it used to be”
March 11 - 13, 2022
In Person
Hilton Minneapolis/St. Paul Airport Mall of America
3800 American Blvd E
Bloomington, Minnesota
March 11 - 13, 2022
MarsCon has ongoing expenses but zero registration revenue for 2021 - if you were registered for MarsCon 2021 your membership has been rolled over to 2022. If you are able, please consider a Donation to MarsCon.
More about MarsCon may be found at...
• Discord: https://discord.gg/CfQQDk4fS7
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/MarsconMpls
• FaceBook: www.facebook.com/Marscon
• Comedy Music: marsconcomedy.wordpress.com
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