Well…that was some year, huh?
2020: Not a time that will ever make it onto a “Best of” list, historically speaking, with a worldwide pandemic that’s killed hundreds of thousands and sent global economies into a tailspin; forced office businesses to scramble to create work-from-home setups for their employees and crippled the restaurant industry; rocked the comics industry with stores closing, some permanently, coupled with the monopolistic Diamond Comic Distribution briefly ending shipping product to those stores, and then the abrupt departure of DC Comics from Diamond to help launch a new distribution company; and made genre conventions either cancel their 2020, shows, reschedule for next year, or close permanently. And for a big finale, 2020 ended with a U.S. presidential election that only widened the political division between parties.
And yet, despite the madness, we here at ’Warp Central managed to get some work done.
In February, we released From the Stars…a Vampiress: An Unauthorized Guide to Vampirella’s Classic Horror Adventures, by Steven A. Roman (that’s me), our second nonfiction title (preceded by Richard C. White’s popular writers and gamers guide, Terra Incognito: A Guide to Building the Worlds of Your Imagination).
An examination of the history behind one of comics’ most enduring bad girls during her original run of stories from Warren Publishing from 1969 to 1982, it ran into some problems at the start: Diamond Comic Distribution—the comics industry’s sole means of getting books into comic shops—refused to carry it because it’s an unauthorized history of a character currently published by one of their front-of-catalog clients; and once the pandemic exploded, some book reviewers who’d requested copies forgot all about reading it once everybody moved to a work-from-home environment (which, for example, cost a review in the high-profile sci-fi magazine Starburst). Still, the reviews it did get were all highly positive and old-school Vampi fans have enjoyed it.
That same month, Lorelei: Genesis—also by yours truly—was released as a digital-exclusive collection of the earliest Lorelei comic book stories that I wrote and drew in her small-press days (1989–1991). Lori’s creation was inspired by Vampirella (as well as by Marvel Comics’ Satana the Devil’s Daughter and the works of Marvel writer Bill Mantlo), so if you’re interested in checking out the first appearances of our soul-stealing succubus, give it a look.
It’s a 24-page, black-and-white comic that’s available for download for just 99¢.
But then in March the world got swept up by the coronavirus pandemic, and suddenly we all had more important things to focus on than publishing books—like surviving a real-life version of Stephen King’s The Stand. Bookstores and comic shops were forced to temporarily close for months since they weren’t considered “essential” businesses by local governments; unfortunately, some of those “temporary” closures became permanent.
The pandemic, of course, continued through the summer and into fall, and even the convention industry felt its effects as venues as large as San Diego Comic-Con and New York Comic Con and as small as Connecticut Horrorfest and Cradle Con were forced to either go online with their festivities or postpone their shows until next year. BookExpo and BookCon—two of the book industry’s biggest shows—announced their closure.
After a fairly disastrous appearance at Pow Con in January, our only other con “attendance” was at SiouxperCon’s web-based iteration, SiouxperConline, in September, but that didn’t really appear to do anything for us sales-wise. At least the showrunners tried to keep their fans happy, and appeared to succeed based on the online comments, so that was a positive takeaway.
(As for 2021 shows…we’ll probably be sitting out the year until the vaccines have had sufficient time to do their work and enough people have been immunized. Besides, there are already conventions that have canceled their shows that normally run in the first half of the year; a few have even moved to the end of 2021. So, I can wait. After all, since genre shows have for decades been notorious for the spread of “con crud”—that post-convention experience when you get hit by the cold or flu bugs that were passed along to you by ill people who should have stayed home rather than selfishly overlook common sense and common decency—why put the health of the SWC crew at risk with an even deadlier virus?)
In May, I made an appearance on the YouTube series Indy Comics Explained, hosted by friend and fellow comic creator J.D. Calderon (The Oswald Chronicles, Tall Tails), to promote From the Stars…a Vampiress and discuss my history as a publisher, writer, and professional editor. That episode, “Talking with Steve Roman,” is still available to view on the Indy Comics Explianed channel.
Facebook became a problem for us over the summer: for some unknown reason, it became impossible to sign into my accounts for both the Pan and SWC business pages from my work computer. They weren’t hacked, as far as I can tell—no unexpected entries have been posted, and I can still access the account from my iPad—but Facebook being Facebook, it’s pretty much impossible to get an answer as to what’s going on.
Turning back to publishing, we didn’t release any titles during the spring-to-early-fall period, because after From the Darkness…a Vampiress and Lorelei: Genesis came out, I made the decision to move all new titles in the pipeline to next year—it’s hard to promote the company when there are no conventions to attend and folks have other concerns on their minds.
Still, in October we popped up with the spooky classic The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, the second title in the digital-exclusive SWC Horror Bites line of chapbooks, this one a 200th-anniversary ebook edition of Washington Irving’s Halloween story about schoolteacher Ichabod Crane and his fateful encounter with the noggin-seeking Headless Horseman.
And to wrap up 2020, just this past Sunday I returned to J.D. Calderon’s Indy Comics Explained YouTube series to do the virtual panel “Sunday Night Talking Comics” with fellow creators Evan K. Pozios (Time Grunts), Joe D. McFee (Amazonia: The Continuing Adventures of E), Randy Zimmerman (Tales from the Aniverse, SWC’s Troubleshooters, Incorporated: Night Stalkings), and Ray Felix (Bronx Heroes), and publisher/podcaster Varian Grant (Indie Volt), to discuss the pros and cons of self-publishing.
Three releases and a pair of interviews: Not our busiest year, but right now we’ll settle for the satisfaction of having made it all the way through 2020 alive!
So as this awful year comes to a close, our New Year’s wish to all of you is to stay safe, stay well—and keep reading!
