Continuing the history of StarWarp Concepts, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year.
Last time, in Convention Memories, I recounted how Lorelei made another brief appearance in comic shops and at the 2005 San Diego Comic-Con, in the form of Lorelei: Building the Perfect Beast, Vol. 1, a little-noticed but critically well-received trade paperback that collected the original Lorelei series from the 1990s.
But was I going to let a little thing like poor sales and a lack of public attention stop me from keeping The ’Warp up and running? Ummm…actually, it did, as I made the tough decision to put the company on hiatus while I figured out the next direction to take it.
In the meantime, I kept busy, writing two books for gaming company Games Workshop, through their licensed-publishing imprint The Black Library: Final Destination: Dead Man’s Hand, an original novel based on the movie franchise, and The Twilight Zone: Chosen/The Placebo Effect, novelizing (under the pseudonym K.C. Winters) two episodes of the early 2000s’ reboot of the classic TV series, this one hosted by actor Forest Whitaker (Ghost Dog, Star Wars: Rogue One). Those were followed by the Fourth Doctor short story “Into the Silent Land” for the 2006 anthology Doctor Who: Short Trips: Farewells, for audio drama producer and publishing house Big Finish Productions, and “To Sit in Darkness Here, Hatching Vain Empires,” in the 2007 DAW Books anthology If I Were an Evil Overlord.
In the works, too, was an intended relaunch of Lorelei—as I also mentioned in that previous Convention Memories post, I had been introduced to artist Eliseu “Zeu” Gouveia, who was initially hired to help me develop Lorelei: Building the Perfect Beast, Vol. 2, the conclusion to Lori’s origin story. However, after really thinking about the finances involved in producing a graphic novel sequel to a book that didn’t sell well to begin with, I put Beast 2 aside to focus on other, non-Lori projects…
…until, that is, I was approached in late 2008 by “Reed Man,” owner and publisher of France-based Organic Comix, who was interested in reviving the Vampirella-esque, Elder Gods storyline I’d introduced in 2001’s Lorelei, Volume 2 #1. Problem was, original artist Steve Geiger was no longer available—but that’s when I remembered Zeu, and offered him the opportunity to help me finish the story. Zeu said yes, and Organic Comix began serializing “Une Marée de Sang” (basically “Blood Tide”) in issue 10 of its anthology comic magazine, Strange, sharing space with Reed Man’s superheroic Fantask Force and a reprint chapter of Godland, a Jack Kirby–inspired series by writer Joe Casey and artist Tom Scioli originally published by Image Comics.
“Blood Tide” ran in Strange 10–14, with the previously published art of Geiger and Neil Vokes appearing in the first two issues, and Zeu taking over with issue 12.
And then we got canceled.
From what I could figure out—Organic’s reasons for stopping us never being made clear to me—it had to do with the change in art style. Reed Man was a major fan of Jack Kirby’s work, which could be seen reflected in his own Fantask Force. Godland appealed to him because Scioli’s style was based on Kirby’s. As for Lorelei…well, it’s no secret that Steve Geiger’s style was influenced by one of his mentors, comic-art legend Neal Adams, so that Adams-esque style also appealed to Reed Man’s love of “Bronze Age” comics—something we had in common.
But Zeu’s art had nothing in common with Adams’s, or Geiger’s, and so the publisher lost interest in continuing Lori’s story—even though, as he later admitted to me, “Blood Tide” was the most popular feature with Strange’s readership, and Lori their favorite character.
Still, despite her popularity, Lori quickly departed France ten pages into her latest chapter, sharing Strange #14 with another Godland chapter and the third installment of Stan Lee’s Alexa, a canceled-after-the-first-issue superhero comic I’d scripted in 2005 for ibooks, inc. (long story short, ibooks’ publisher, Byron Press, had passed away that year and the company was subsequently shut down), and which had been reprinted by Organic starting in Strange #12. (Organic later reprinted the entire Alexa issue as a one-shot special, with new pages written by me and illustrated by Chris Malgrain. But just like the American version, it still ended with “To Be Continued,” and the story remains unfinished to this day.)
That wasn’t the end of “Blood Tide,” though. Since Zeu and I were already deep into producing the story, we just kept going—and the end result was the 2012 SWC graphic novel Lorelei: Sects and the City. So, a happy ending!
But before Lori returned to U.S. comic shops, I was still making plans for introducing another leading lady of horror to followers of StarWarp Concepts: a Gothy teenage monster fighter named Pandora Zwieback…
