SWC at 30: In the Beginning…

Happy birthday, StarWarp Concepts! To celebrate, we got a Dumpy the Pumpkin ice cream cake from the vaults of Carvel! 

(They had to dig around a bit in the freezer, since Dumpy cakes haven’t been sold since the ’90s, but I’m sure it’ll taste just fine…)

Anyway, yes, it was thirty years ago this very day in 1993 that StarWarp Concepts officially launched as the latest independent publisher in the State of New York (in other words, that was the day when the Queens County clerk’s office certified my business application). Sure, it was just one more entry in a sea of small-press companies around the U.S. that had been inspired by the success of Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but it didn’t matter—I just wanted to make good horror comics!

The ’Warp, however, is actually a little older than this anniversary; it started out in early 1989 as an old-school small-press comic company, printing its black-and-white, digest-size (measuring 5.5” x 8.5”) titles on photocopiers. Inspiration came from a magazine I came across in 1988 called Small Press Comics Explosion—edited and published by small-press comic creator Tim Corrigan—and a one-day art class I attended at a New York comic convention, “How to Draw Women the Frank Thorne Way,” taught by the comic-art legend best known for his work as illustrator of Marvel’s Red Sonja comics.

Back then, I was the company’s only writer and artist (and staff member), and the Lorelei One-Shot Special became our first title, heralded by a press release and ad that ran in The Comics Buyer’s Guide, a newspaper-style publication that covered the industry, big and small, long before the Internet came along. Sales were done via mail order. My Thorne-inspired art was rough, my dialogue pretty stiff, but a lot of heart went into that first publication and I’m still proud of my efforts. And despite its rough qualities, Lori found an audience eager for her adventures.

(If you’d like to see that long-ago publication, you can order Lorelei: Genesis, a digital-exclusive comic that reprints the One-Shot Special and Lori’s other appearance from the early ’90s.)

Two years later, in 1991, I expanded the company, projects by other creators: the supernatural-superhero team comic Troubleshooters, Incorporated by writer Richard C. White and artist Dan Peters (the basis for our graphic novel Troubleshooters, Incorporated: Night Stalkings); and the gothy antihero Mr. Miguel, by writer/creator Sam Brown and artist Jim Linehan. Along with two issues of a new Lorelei comic, StarWarp Concepts had now expanded to four titles (with full-color covers!).

Unfortunately, bumps in the road soon cropped up. Dan Peters dropped out of Troubleshooters after the first issue was completed and moved to California to become a digital effects animator, ultimately working for The Asylum, the “mockbuster” movie studio made famous for its Sharknado films (according to the Internet Movie Database, Dan’s credits include Almighty Thor, Sharknado 3 and 4, and 2-Headed Shark Attack). 

Then the replacement artists Rich hired for issue #2 got kinda flaky pretty fast and its scheduling went to hell. Both Sam Brown and Jim Linehan dropped out of touch, and Mr. Miguel never got beyond that one issue. Even I had started to drift away from drawing Lorelei to focus on honing my writing—and my plans for moving away from digest publications. 

By mid-1992, I decided to concentrate on publishing a single full-size comic series—my obvious choice was Lorelei. But this would be a different version altogether…

To Be Continued…