Welcome to StarWarp Concepts’…er, 26th Anniversary!

2018: Well, there was a year that could have gone better for us. Just ask Goth Eeyore over there.

It was supposed to be a celebration of our twenty-fifth anniversary (from when we officially launched in 1993), but an unexpected crop of business and personal obstacles sprung out of the weeds early in the year that completely screwed up our birthday plans, resulting in the release of just two titles in all of 2018: the SWC Horror Bite White Fell—The Werewolf and the Illustrated Classic King Kong. The SWC and Pan blogs, along with our Facebook pages, also suffered to the point where I started to worry that people might have thought we’d quietly gone out of business. Hell, I started to worry that we’d quietly gone out of business and nobody had told me yet—and I’m the owner!

But no, ’Warp fans, we’re still here, hoping that 2019 will be a kinder year both personally and professionally as we regain our balance. And although we lost the opportunity to celebrate our quarter-century mark, that doesn’t mean we still don’t have a special occasion coming up this year—in this case, it’s the 30th anniversary of SWC’s first lady of horror: the succubus named Lorelei!

That’s right: Although SWC officially launched as a publishing house in 1993, Lori made her comics debut in SWC’s first-ever release in 1989, in the pages of the Lorelei One-Shot Special. A digest-size, b&w small-press comic written and drawn by yours truly, it was my first attempt at doing my own comic book, with all the mistakes and lessons learned that come with being a first-time self-publisher. Sure, the final result was kinda rough, with my hand lettering and an art style that fell somewhere between Archie comics and Frank Thorne’s Red Sonja (are you familiar with the story of the one-day art class he taught at a comic con that I attended?), but when I saw the final, printed results I was proud as hell of what I’d accomplished. And thirty years later, I’m still proud of it.

So, yes, we’ll be celebrating Lori’s anniversary—with a couple of comic releases, in fact—but we also have some other great projects in the pipeline, and I’ll tell you about those in the days ahead. But for now, welcome back to the rejuvenated StarWarp Concepts!

No sittin’ down on your butt
The world don’t owe you
No sittin’ down in a rut
I wanna show you
Don’t waste your energy
On makin’ enemies
Just take a deep breath
And work your way up
—Mick Jagger,“Let’s Work”