SWC at 30: Enter: The Goth Adventuress

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

In late 2009, I decided to take the plunge again and get back to publishing. But what project would be worth restarting the SWC engine? As much as I enjoyed writing Lorelei, I hadn’t been having much luck in reconnecting with the audience that had purchased her 1990s series, so it was probably best to not go back to the well on that character. However, taking the easy path of turning the company into a home for superhero titles didn’t appeal to me at all.

Then I remembered a book project that I had shopped around between 2005 and 2006 to editors and literary agents, with no success: Heartstopper. Yes, the same title as the short-lived Mature Readers comic I had written and packaged during the 1990s “bad girl” era—only this was a revival of a book series proposal that I’d come close to selling in 1998 to Parachute Press, best known for its R.L. Stine–authored, bestselling Goosebumps and Fear Street book series. In this version, the comic’s writer-turned-part-time-exotic-dancer, Sebastienne “Annie” Mazarin, was now more of a fully clothed, supernatural Doctor Who, battling monsters with the aid of a teen Goth sidekick named Pandora Zwieback. Pan had been added because the books were going to be aimed at teenaged readers; she would serve as the audience’s entry point to Annie’s strange adventures.

You can read the whole story behind my interaction with Parachute Press here.

By 2005, I’d overhauled the project after following some really great advice I received from a number of people I knew in the book industry. The one thing they’d all agreed on was that for a young adult readership, Pan needed to become the main character instead of Annie. It made a lot of sense, but to me that meant a title change: Heartstopper had been attached to Annie since her creation in 1994 and it felt wrong to shift it over to Pan. The girl needed her own identity.

So I visited bookstores and wandered through the fantasy and young adult sections for inspiration, checking out titles. Eventually, I began to notice that some novel series were referred to as sagas—well, then, why not the same for Pan?

Thus, The Saga of Pandora Zwieback was born. Sure sounded like a catchy enough title to get people’s attention.

But catchy titles and Goth leading heroines held little appeal for the editors and agents I approached with my proposal. A lot of “It’s not right for us” (book-speak for I personally don’t care for it) responses followed, accompanied by some god-awful suggestions for how I could “improve” the material to make it more marketable: Make it a Twilight knockoff. Ditch Pan’s Goth background. Add more romance, cut out all the violence. Change the ethnicity of Pan’s new boyfriend, Javier (“Does he have to be a Puerto Rican? If you’re trying to get a foreign rights sale, he’s the wrong kind of Hispanic.”). The stupidity ultimately reached the point where I threw up my hands and said, “Screw it! I’ll publish it myself.”

Which brings us back to 2009.

Why notpublish it myself? I thought. Better yet, why not also upgrade the company’s identity from comic publisher to book publisher? StarWarp Concepts: the home of dark urban fantasy (few in the industry call it “horror” anymore) novels, graphic novels, and the occasional comic, aimed at readers from eight to eighty! I liked the sound of it.

All right, so I had a new direction for the company, and a new project to launch it with; now, how to get the word out? I decided that the 2010 New York Comic Con would be the place to make the announcement. All I needed was a hook to catch the eye of con-goers…