Concluding the history of StarWarp Concepts, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year.
For all the promotion Pandora Zwieback got at New York Comic Con 2010, it was The Bob Larkin Sketchbook that became StarWarp Concepts’ first book release, in May 2011: a collection of pencil drawings (that later became paintings) by the legendary cover painter for Marvel, DC, Warren Publishing, and many other publishing houses and movie studios.
It was followed in June by a two-fer: Blood Feud: The Saga of Pandora Zwieback, Book 1, with the much-hyped teen Goth monster fighter making her literary debut behind a Bob Larkin cover painting; and Carmilla, a reprint of J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s 19th-century female-vampire novella that was the first entry in our SWC Illustrated Classics line.
The mesmerizing cover image for Carmilla was provided by Marc Witz, a professional photographer whose work you would have seen in DC Comics at that time—it was his pictures of various DC licensed products (action figures, statues, etc.) that appeared in the company’s in-house ads. Marc later provided an equally impressive photo for our second Illustrated Classic, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars, published in 2012, in time for the book’s 100th anniversary.
There was one hiccup, though. Carmilla’s interior artist was originally announced as Louis Small, Jr., who had built up a legion of fans from his work in the 1990s for Harris Comics on their various Vampirella comic books; Louis had also provided cover art for my own Lorelei, Vol. 1 #0–1 in 1993. For reasons I can’t remember Louis became unavailable (I think it was he just dropped out of touch), and I had to scramble to find a replacement.
Luckily, I had already been working with Eliseu “Zeu” Gouveia on what would become the graphic novel Lorelei: Sects and the City (published in 2012), and he was happy to jump in and deliver what turned out to be his first (but certainly not last!) spectacular job for SWC. It just meant I had to slap a sticker in every copy of the recently printed 2011 catalog explaining that Zeu was the new artist. (He then went on to illustrate A Princess of Marsas well.)
As the years progressed, we entered into a deal with my friend Richard C. White—whose small-press version of Troubleshooters, Incorporated I’d published in the early ’90s—to publish his book projects, including the graphic novel version of TSI; introduced print and digital comics to our growing list; and launched the SWC Horror Bites line of digital-exclusive short tales of terror.
As one might expect, there have been ups and downs in the dozen years that have passed since those first releases—in particular, the COVID lockdown in 2020 played absolute havoc with the promotion of my Vampirella history book, From the Stars…a Vampiress, which came out the week before we all had to shelter in place. But through the good times and the bad we’ve stayed positive, and look forward to the projects we’ve got in the works, including Lorelei: Sweet Soul Music, her first full-color comic adventure, and Lester del Rey’s Time Ring, our first licensed comic adaptation.
And so we come to the end of StarWarp Concepts’ history…so far. But as the title card says just before the closing credits of 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture:
I hope you’ll come along for the ride!
