SWC at 30: Convention Memories: San Diego Comic-Con 2002

Continuing the history of StarWarp Concepts, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. 

July 2001 found me making my first-ever visit to San Diego Comic-Con, the US’s biggest comic and pop-culture convention that had grown so large since its launch in 1970 that it practically took over the entirety of the city’s downtown area. As a comics fan, I’d naturally heard about the con, but could never afford to make the cross-country trip. That changed, though, while I was working as an editor for book packager and publisher Byron Preiss, who sent me and fellow editor Dwight Jon Zimmerman (a Marvel Comics editorial alumnus) to SDCC to man the Byron Preiss Visual Publications/ibooks, inc. booth.

Unlike other publishing companies and the majority of vendors in attendance, we wouldn’t be doing sales at the booth—it was strictly a promotional gig: set up a display of our most recent projects, hand out promotional flyers and talk up the books, and then on the final day see if retailers were interested in buying what we had (at a discount) so we didn’t have to ship everything back. So, that’s what we did (also in 2003 and 2004).

Aside from my work for Byron at SDCC 2001, I’d set up a meeting with representatives of Diamond Comic Distributors—the sole means of getting your comic into shops, following the distributor wars of the 1990s—to discuss a relaunch of Lorelei as a series, this time less soap opera-ish in tone and more a tribute to the classic horror anthology comics of the 1970s, especially Vampirella. Each issue would contain a main Lori story—this time appearing in her full succubus identity—followed by a reprint chapter of the 1990s series and then a backup tale or two by other creators. And it would debut in time for the 2002 Comic Con.

I showed off the work in progress: pages by new Lori artist Steve Geiger, who’d made a name for himself not just as penciler for Web of Spider-Man and The Incredible Hulk (among other titles), but as a Marvel Comics art director; a four-page prologue drawn by Neil Vokes, who’d been the artist for such titles as Fright Night, Blood of Dracula, Ninjak, and Eagle; and a cover painting by Bob Larkin, who’d painted covers for Warren Publishing’s Creepy, Eerie, and Vampirella, and Marvel’s Haunt of Horror, Monsters From the Movies, and Tomb of Dracula. The Diamond folks were suitably impressed.

If only the rest of comicdom had echoed their reaction when Lorelei #1 premiered a year later…

Skip ahead twelve months. I went into the 2002 San Diego Comic Con with a great deal of excitement, certain that it was the perfect venue for Lori’s return. What I hadn’t factored in was the extreme change in readers’ attitudes toward bad-girl comics. In 1995, when I stopped the first Lori series, everybody had wanted to read them, and Lorelei suffered because it was more soap opera than bad-girl book. In 2002, when I decided to give folks what they’d been asking for the first time around, I learned that comics fans now absolutely loathed them. 

For me, the show was a disaster. I lost count of the number of people who turned up their noses at the new Lorelei; who dismissed it as crap based solely on the cover; of boyfriends/husbands who were literally pulled away from the booth while the guys were thumbing through the comic, with a stern “That’s not for you!” I think I sold all of ten copies over the four days of the show—whose attendance numbers had been somewhere north of 100,000.

To say I was in a bad mood by the end of day 4 would be an understatement. My brother, who’d accompanied me for support in running the booth, tried to bolster my spirits by mentioning that all his friends and coworkers had been impressed when they found out I was a self-publisher and had taken the leap of faith to set up at the con, but right then I didn’t want to hear it. By the time our plane landed back in New York, though, my mood had somewhat improved.

The negative response toward Lorelei, however, continued the rest of the year, with readers and reviewers making it clear my comic wasn’t wanted; a couple of reviewers went so far as to label it “soft-core p*rn” because of the presence of strippers and bare breasts in a few panels (in the reprint of the Volume 1, #0 issue).

In the end, low sales, not political correctness—or perhaps it was a combination of the two—killed the Lorelei relaunch; #2 was the final issue. By the end of 2002, it was apparent the time had come to think of a different, non-succubus project…but not just yet…

(By the way, you can check out Steve Geiger’s and Neil Vokes’s magnificent work on the short-lived reboot by ordering a copy of Lorelei: Sects and the City, the graphic novel that collects their work on Volume 2, issues 1–2, and teams them with the stellar art of Eliseu Gouveia, who completed the rest of the story. And it’s all behind a mesmerizing cover painting by Vampirella artist Esteban Maroto!)

Stay tuned for further Convention Memories!