Hey, Monster Kids! The celebration of King Kong’s 90th anniversary this year continues with today’s Netflix debut of Skull Island, a brand-new animated series starring the King and set in the “Monsterverse” created by Legendary Pictures in the films Godzilla, Kong: Skull Island, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and Godzilla vs. Kong. According to the press release:
“Skull Island takes viewers on a thrilling adventure as a group of kindhearted explorers rescues Annie from the ocean, unaware that their act of heroism will lead them to the treacherous Skull Island….”
I’ll definitely be checking it out, since I think Kong: Skull Island is the best of the Monterverse movies (although I enjoy the others, too, and am looking forward to next year’s Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire).
While we’re on the subject of the big ape, in case you’re unfamiliar with the story of Kong and his monster-filled island home, it just so happens that your friendly fiends here at ’Warp Central have the perfect book for you to catch up on his background…
King Kong is a digital-exclusive republication of the 1932 novelization of the original movie classic. Written by Delos W. Lovelace, based on the story by Edgar Wallace and Merian C. Cooper and the screenplay by James A. Creelman and Ruth Rose, it includes scenes that didn’t appear in the final cut of the film—including the notorious “spider pit” sequence in which Kong’s human pursuers are attacked by horrific arachnids and insects. Our version features six original black-and-white illustrations by comics artist Paul Tuma, whose work has appeared in the pages of The Twilight Zone, Paul Kupperberg’s Secret Romances, and Bloke’s Terrible Tomb of Terror.
King Kong is available for download right now, so visit its product page for ordering information.
Continuing the history of StarWarp Concepts, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. When we left off, 1996 had seen the return of our resident succubus, Lorelei, in the aptly named Lorelei Returns! Special from indie house Power Comics…only for PC to fold shortly after the special’s publication.
Now, with no comic ptojects on the horizon, perhaps StarWarp Concepts’ future didn’t lie in comic books, as I’d originally set out to publish. Maybe the literary market was a direction to go in to find success—and what better way than to find a major book company to perhaps publish a brand-new project…?
(I know I told this story back in January 2021, to mark the passing of publishing industry giant Michael Z. Hobson, but his part in the history of the project that became The Saga of Pandora Zwieback is a major one, as you’ll see.)
It all started in 1997, during my time as a book editor, when my boss at the time, Byron Preiss, had hired Michael Z. Hobson to be executive vice president of publishing for his Byron Preiss Multimedia Company, which not only produced screensavers and the like but also co-published a highly successful line of original novels and anthologies based on the Marvel Comics characters.
Mike and I got along really well. He was an easily likeable guy: he didn’t put on the sort of superior attitude you’d expect from someone who’d been in the business as long as he had, and who’d been a top-level executive for just as long—a Harvard graduate, he’d been a literary agent, and an executive at Little, Brown and Company and Scholastic Publishing before joining Marvel Comics as an executive vice president from 1981 to 1994.
Mike was attentive, encouraging, and a firm believer in letting creative people be creative. It was those qualities that made him one of the most respected people in publishing; adding Mike to your roster was considered a major get.
Unfortunately, it didn’t take Mike very long to discover that as EVP he wasn’t really allowed to make a lot of final decisions; as president and publisher, Byron held on to that position. Over time, Mike grew tired of the situation and decided to move on—the line of wellwishers on his last day stretched down the hall.
In 1998, there was news that he’d landed as the new president of Parachute Properties, whose book-packaging company, Parachute Publishing, was the home of R.L. Stein’s bestselling Goosebumps and Fear Street series. That summer, after he’d had time to settle in, I got a call from Mike, and an invitation to lunch. Hey, who was I to turn down a free meal?
At a bistro not far from Parachute’s offices, Mike explained the reason for the get-together: he was looking for new titles. As he put it, he’d sat down with management and told them that Goosebumps and Fear Street were all well and good, but if Parachute was to remain successful, it needed to expand its lineup, and that meant bringing in outside projects—creator-owned outside projects.
That was a huge step. Book-packaging companies like Parachute—as well as Byron’s Byron Preiss Visual Publications—typically owned the projects they assembled, and hired authors and artists through work-for-hire contracts, which meant that what they wrote and drew was wholly owned by the company. For a packaging company to start offering deals in which they were profit participants on projects but owned no part of them would be a game changer.
Mike went on to remind me that he greatly enjoyed my writing and my approach to editing, which was why, given the praise he’d just heaped on me, I thought he might be headhunting me to join him as a Parachute editor. But he had an even better proposal to offer:
“So…do you have any project of your own you think would fit in at Parachute?”
Well, no, but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t have one for him in record time!
A couple weeks later I presented him with Heartstopper, a proposed six-book series of young-adult novels starring an immortal monster hunter named Sebastienne Mazarin and her teenaged Goth-girl sidekick, Pandora Zwieback. I even included character designs, courtesy of Pan and Annie’s co-creator, artist Uriel Caton, who had collaborated with me on the original-but-failed Heartstopper mature-readers comic published in 1994. (Hey, there’s nothing wrong with recycling a title and a character and adding a teen assistant to get it into the YA market. Oh, and you can download those issues for free, by the way.)
Pan and Annie. Art & color by Eliseu Gouveia.
Mike loved it. He especially loved the title—Heartstopper was a short, memorable title like Goosebumps, easy to sell. Even more, he immediately saw its potential—not just YA books, but comics, movies, TV shows, merchandising…yes, this was exactly the sort of new Parachute title he was looking for. By mid-1999, after some fine-tuning of the proposal and a series of editorial back-and-forths, a deal was reached and contracts signed—Heartstopper was now one of the half dozen (or so) creator-owned properties that Parachute Publishing was going to package. Even better, Mike had put me in touch with one of the other property owners, an artist who needed a writer to help develop his storyline; so now I was looking at two writing projects!
“Off we go!” Mike wrote in his cover letter to the final executed agreement.
But then a few months later, I got another call from Mike, and another invitation to lunch. When we got together, Mike explained he had some very bad news to deliver: the new line of books was being scuttled. He couldn’t tell me exactly why that was—that was in-house politics not open for discussion with outsiders—but my impression was that Parachute soured on the idea that they weren’t going to own any of these new properties and thereby reap all the benefits. And possibly they hadn’t realized at the start just how successful Mike would be in launching his plans, or how quickly he’d be able to line up talent for them.
So now they were killing the program, and Mike was placed in the position of having to go back to all us creators and apologize for having us do all this work for no reward. (Since we owned the properties, none of the creators were paid for developing them; the money would have come from eventual sales and a 50/50 split with Parachute. But we all understood that going in.)
For someone with Mike’s standing in the industry, it was a major embarrassment.
The good news, though, was that with the publishing deals dead the creators were free and clear to do what we liked with our projects, hopefully finding homes for them at other publishing houses. Mike even later reached out to some of his contacts to see if Heartstopper could land somewhere (unfortunately, everyone passed on it).
Heartstopper the YA book series never did find a home, but its stars, Sebastienne Mazarin and Pandora Zwieback, would eventually make their literary debut. It would just take some time for it to happen…
It’s New York Comicon—but probably not the one you were expecting!
Held by Great Eastern Conventions at the Sheraton Hotel and Towers on the northern edge of Times Square (a welcome change from the Penn Hotel), the show boasted such luminaries as Jim Lee (X-Men), Walter Simonson (The Mighty Thor), Howard Chaykin (Star Wars)—and me, of course!
I set up camp in artists’ alley with one of my non-comics friends who was just curious about what a comic con was like—he preferred sci-fi conventions, so this was a first for him. What he discovered is it was a lot of sitting around and chatting while I occasionally sketched to pass the time and made no money.
Not that there weren’t moments of interest—at least for me. Vampirella superstar artist Louis Small Jr., who’d drawn the covers for Lorelei, Volume 1 #0 and #1, stopped by to say hello and let me know what he was working on—he was either at Neal Adams’s Continuity Studios, penciling Ms. Mystic, or had just started a gig at Valiant Comics (I’m not sure which).
Later on in the day, another visitor stopped by: an artist named Fauve (real name: Holly Golightly) was making the rounds on a break from her own table, and Lorelei’s red hair—about the same shade as Fauve’s—had caught her eye. We chatted for a bit and she asked if I’d like to see some of her work. I followed her back to her table, where I learned she was an artist for indie house Carnal Comics, which published comic-book biographies of pornographic actresses; Louis had done one or two of those himself.
(Hey, indie comics in the ’90s was like the Wild West—anything and everything was getting published, especially when it came to black-and-white comics. And adult comics have been and always will be a surefire way for generating income.)
The work was good, and she enjoyed the assignments, but Holly was looking for something a bit more mainstream. We exchanged phone numbers (pre-Internet, remember)…and before the year was over, we had the opportunity to work together on the Heartstopper: Sorrow About to Fall comic that came to an unfortunately quick end. (You can read all about the history of Heartstopperhere and here, and download its three issues for free, by going to the Heartstopper product page.)
(As it turned out, Holly did eventually get her chance for mainstream assignments, working for Archie Comics on—I think—stories starring their own redhead, Cheryl Blossom.)
At the end of the day, though, I had little to no sales, my sketches didn’t sell, and my non-comics friend decided he’d stick to sci-fi shows. I, however, was already making plans for whatever my next convention appearance would be…
Celebrated on the first Saturday in June, International Tabletop Day is an annual event celebrating tabletop and board games of all sorts, launched in 2013 by creator Boyan Radakovich and originally hosted on actress (and gamer) Felicia Day’s Geek & Sundry YouTube channel. As the website Days of the Year explains, it’s “an opportunity for players to remember why they got into playing tabletop games in the first place. It’s all about pitting yourself against strangers and finding ways to survive through to the next turn.”
Well, if you’re looking to celebrate this special event, which is marking its 10th anniversary this year, it just so happens that StarWarp Concepts has a book that’s perfect for tabletop RPG gamers:
Terra Incognito: A Guide to Building the Worlds of Your Imagination is our popular how-to book for writers and gamers in which bestselling fantasy author Richard C. White (Harbinger of Darkness, For a Few Gold Pieces More, Troubleshooters, Incorporated: Night Stalkings) takes you through the step-by-step process of constructing a world for your characters, from societies and governments to currency and religion.
A bonus feature is an exclusive interview with New York Times bestselling author Tracy Hickman (Dragonlance) that discusses his methods of world building, as well as his creative experiences during his time as a designer for gaming company TSR, the original home of Dungeons & Dragons. In fact, it’s a book that’s become so popular with gamers that it’s currently being used as a textbook in the Interactive Media & Game Development program at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worchester, Massachusetts!
Continuing the history of StarWarp Concepts, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. When we left off, the year 1995 had seen the end of SWC’s Lorelei series and the blink-and-you-missed-it debut of Heartstopper, a “bad girl” comic that I canceled after a falling out with its publisher.
Nineteen ninety-six found StarWarp Concepts without a comic to solicit or even publish, yet Lori still made her way back to store shelves that summer, courtesy of indie house Power Comics (formerly Pocket Change Comics) and its head honcho, Scott Shriver.
Scott—who, like me, had made the decision to move from digest-size photocopied books to full-sized comics around the same time that I did—had been publishing his own femme fatale series, Shadow Slasher, and was a Lorelei fan disappointed by my cancelation of the series. His solution? Bring Lori over to Power and he’d reprint my issues under the PC banner, and then continue publishing from where I’d left off. How could I say no to such an offer? And I had a way in mind that we could continue the story while at the same time introducing new potential readers to the character.
The Lorelei Returns! Special was released in June; accompanying the latest chapter of Lori’s origin story (intended to be SWC’s Lorelei #6, and still being drawn by David C. Matthews) was a handy recap of the series up to that point. The recap featured pencils by Uriel Caton and inks by “Chainsaw” Chuck Majewski, both veterans of Heartstopper, and looked amazing when it was turned in. Unfortunately, Chuck’s delicate linework was fairly obliterated by the poor printing job the special received.
(In fact, I felt so bad about the art reproduction that I reused the pages—now with 21st-century printing technology—as the opening segment of Lorelei Presents: House Macabre, published by SWC in 2015…and still available from the SWC webstore!)
Also published that month was a reprint of Lorelei #1—the cover art printed with gold ink to distinguish it from the SWC edition—and a limited-edition digest version of the new chapter from the special, with cover art by Uriel; half the run was printed on gold cover stock, the other half on silver.
Things were looking up for The ’Warp…until Scott closed Power’s doors when he ran out of money, just after the special came out. If I remember correctly, he’d expended his finances on his own comic, and on printing the Lorelei variant printings and the special; the retailer orders had been shockingly low, the return on his investment nonexistent. It wasn’t too long after that he informed me Power Comics was shutting down.
So much for Lori’s triumphant return, eh? Well, it was fun while it lasted, and I appreciated Scott for making that herculean effort. He had the right attitude to be an indie publisher, he just lacked the resources to handle more than one series.
(Scott, by the way, has continued to pop up in comics now and then, providing art for such titles as Bloke’s Terrible Tomb of Terror, Champions of Earth, and AC Comics’ Femforce.)
And so SWC Hiatus 2.0 when into effect at that point, and it would last until 2001. But that didn’t mean I was lacking in SWC-related things to keep me occupied…
Hey, Monster Kids! The celebration of King Kong’s 90th anniversary this year continues with the return of our Kong-related feature Hail to the King (Kong), a series of occasional posts in which we spotlight images related to the god-emperor of Skull Island—some you might recognize; some might be completely new to you.
We’ll kick things off with a promotional lobby card featuring two of the human stars of the classic monster movie, scream queen Fay Wray and her leading man, Bruce Cabot:
“King Kong still has the wiseacres guessing, though there seems to be no doubt that it will be one of the big ones of the year. Apart from the ape-monster, who has the name role and who is twenty-five feet tall, the picture stars Bruce Cabot and Fay Wray. If there really is a fight between this huge ape and a dinosaur, we shouldn’t worry much about the rest of the picture.”—The New Movie Magazine, January 1933
Of course, New Movie Magazine proved to be right—there was nothing to worry about when audiences finally got to see King Kong just two months later. From the contributions of Wray and Cabot, to that much-anticipated monkey-dinosaur fight, a good time was had by all!
And while we’re on the subject of the big ape, in case you’re unfamiliar with the story of Kong and his obsession with Ms. Wray’s character, struggling Depression-era actress Anne Darrow—the Beauty to his Beast—it just so happens that your friendly fiends here at ’Warp Central have the perfect book for you…
King Kong is a digital-exclusive republication of the 1932 novelization of the original movie classic. Written by Delos W. Lovelace, based on the story by Edgar Wallace and Merian C. Cooper and the screenplay by James A. Creelman and Ruth Rose, it includes scenes that didn’t appear in the final cut of the film—including the notorious “spider pit” sequence in which Kong’s human pursuers are attacked by horrific arachnids and insects. Our version features six original black-and-white illustrations by comics artist Paul Tuma, whose work has appeared in the pages of The Twilight Zone, Paul Kupperberg’s Secret Romances, and Bloke’s Terrible Tomb of Terror.
King Kong is available for download right now, so visit its product page for ordering information.
Next Monday, May 29, is Memorial Day in the United States—a time when the country takes a moment to recognize the sacrifices of the members of our armed forces who’ve given their lives to protect our and the world’s freedoms.
Generally, it’s meant to be a solemn occasion, but Memorial Day Weekend is also considered the unofficial start of summer (which officially falls on June 21, and ends September 23). For many Americans who may or may not have made vacation plans, tomorrow is the start of a four-day weekend—and that means it’s beach season. And beach season means summer reading. And you know what would make for perfect reading this summer? The currently most popular titles from our awesome backlist!
From the Stars…a Vampiress: An Unauthorized Guide to Vampirella’s Classic Horror Adventures, by Steven A. Roman (that’s me!) is a nonfiction history that takes an extensive look at the queen of cpomic book bad girls, from the debut of her series in 1969 to the death of Warren Publishing in 1983. I provide an in-depth guide to all her Warren stories, a checklist of all her Warren appearances (plus the publications from Harris Comics and Dynamite Entertainment that reprinted her Warren adventures), and an overview of the six novelizations by pulp sci-fi author Ron Goulart that were published in the 1970s by Warner Books. Plus, there’s the story behind the rise and fall of Hammer Films’ proposed Vampi movie of the 1970s that was meant to star Playboy model Barbara Leigh and horror icon Peter Cushing—along with a peek at Peter Cushing’s personal copy of the ’70s Vampirella screenplay—and my look at the awful 1996 direct-to-cable-TV movie that was made, produced by b-movie icon Roger Corman and starring Talisa Soto (Mortal Kombat) as Vampirella and rock god Roger Daltrey, legendary lead singer of the Who, as Dracula. There’s also a foreword by Official Vampirella Historian Sean Fernald, a frontispiece by Warren artist Bob Larkin, and photographs from the personal archives of Vampi’s cocreator (and creator/editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland), Forrest J Ackerman.
Terra Incognito: A Guide to Building the Worlds of Your Imagination is our popular how-to book for writers and role-playing gamers in which fantasy author Richard C. White (Harbinger of Darkness, Chasing Danger: The Case Files of Theron Chase) takes you through the step-by-step process of constructing a world for your characters, from societies and governments to currency and religion. A bonus feature is an interview with New York Times bestselling author Tracy Hickman (Dragonlance) that discusses his methods of world building, as well as his creative experiences during his time as a designer for gaming company TSR, the original home of Dungeons & Dragons. In fact, the book is so popular that it’s currently being used as a textbook in the Interactive Media & Game Development program at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worchester, Massachusetts!
Lorelei: Sects and the City is a Mature Readers graphic novel in which Lori battles a cult of Elder God worshipers attempting to unleash hell on Earth. Basically a love letter to 1970s horror comics like Vampirella, Tomb of Dracula, and “Satana, the Devil’s Daughter,” it’s written by yours truly, Steven A. Roman, and illustrated by Eliseu Gouveia (The Saga of Pandora Zwieback Annual, Lady Death), Steve Geiger (Amazing Spider-Man Epic Collection: Kraven’s Last Hunt, Incredible Hulk Epic Collection: Going Gray), and Neil Vokes (Tom Holland’s Fright Night, Elvira, Mistress of the Dark). It also features art by a trio of comic-art legends: a cover painting by Esteban Maroto (Vampirella, Zatanna, Lady Rawhide), a frontispiece by original Vampirella artist Tom Sutton (Ghost Rider, Man-Thing, Werewolf by Night), and a one-page history of succubi illustrated by Ernie Colon (Vampirella, The Grim Ghost).
Lorelei Presents: House Macabre is Lori’s debut as the hostess of a horror anthology comic. Behind an eye-catching cover by bad-girl artist supreme Louis Small Jr. (Vampirella, Vampirella Strikes, Vampirella/Lady Death), you’ll find stories by me and Dwight Jon Zimmerman (She-Hulk Epic Collection: The Cosmic Squish Principle). Art is provided by Uriel Caton & “Chainsaw” Chuck Majewski (Heartstopper: The Legend of La Bella Tenebrosa), Lou Manna (Infinity Inc., Young All-Stars, T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents), John Pierard (Graphic Classics: Horror Classics), and Juan Carlos Abraldes Rendo (Bloke’s Tomb of Terror).
A Princess of Mars, one of our SWC Illustrated Classics, is the first in the “John Carter of Mars” series by Edgar Rice Burroughs, best known as the creator of the pulp-fiction jungle lord, Tarzan. Unlike Tarzan’s African adventures, Princess is the story of a post–Civil War era American who suddenly finds himself transported to the Red Planet, where he must constantly fight to stay alive against all sorts of alien threats—and where he falls in love with Dejah Thoris, the titular Martian princess. It served as the basis for Disney’s 2012 film adaptation, John Carter and inspired works like Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, George Lucas’s Star Wars, and James Cameron’s Avatar.Our edition features six incredible illustrations by SWC artist supreme Eliseu Gouveia (Carmilla, Lorelei: Sects and the City, The Saga of Pandora Zwieback Annual #1), and a special introduction by Mars-fiction expert John Gosling, author of Waging the War of the Worlds.
And Carmilla is J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s 19th-century classic vampiric tale of love gone wrong. Laura is so desperate for a friend that when a young woman named Carmilla practically turns up on the doorstep of the castle owned by Laura’s father, she thinks her prayers for companionship have been answered. But as she comes to realize, Carmilla isn’t as interested in making friends as she is in spilling blood. Regarded as the one of the earliest female vampire tales—if not the first—Carmilla was an influence on author Bram Stoker in the creation of the vampire brides in his seminal novel, Dracula, and remains a popular character in fiction to this day. Just like with A Princess of Mars, our edition contains six original illustrations done especially for StarWarp Concepts by the super-talented Eliseu Gouveia.
All titles are available in both print and digital formats. Visit their respective product pages for ordering information.
Continuing the history of StarWarp Concepts, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year.
Last week, I was telling you the history of Heartstopper: a 1994 femme-fatale spin-off from the Lorelei comic series I was publishing at the time. Starring an immortal, shape-shifting monster hunter named Sebastienne “Annie” Mazarin, the project has made its debut in NightCry #1—a horror-comic anthology published by indie house Visual Anarchy—as a four-page introduction written by yours truly and penciled by Vampirella artist Louis Small, Jr.
However, when the VA project fell apart, I found a new home for Annie at Millennium Publications, along with an all-new artistic team: penciler Uriel Caton (Ex-Mutants), inker Alan Larsen (Femforce), and colorist Dan Peters (Troubleshooters, Incorporated). But after the first issue was published, things quickly fell apart…
It started when Uriel had to bow out in the middle of the second issue, after completing pencils for eight pages. Then Dan left for Hollywood to pursue his digital-effects-artist career (starting with a run as an animator for the syndicated animated series Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles).
In order to get the miniseries back on track, I needed replacements—fast. So I immediately called my Lorelei artist, David C. Matthews, and asked him to pencil the remaining pages. Dave, thankfully, said yes and got to work right away. Finally, unlike his experience with Lorelei, he was going to get to draw one of my bad-girl characters outside and inside the same comic!
Except another problem popped up: After showing Dave’s work in progress to Millennium, I was told he wasn’t the right match for the style Uriel had established, and either I dropped him, or they’d cancel the project. I balked and argued that since I was packaging the project, providing them with the final product to print, and that it was my project to begin with, I should get to decide who works on my comic.
They refused to budge. Find a new artist, they said, or Heartstopper ends here and now.
Sigh.
So I explained the situation to Dave and thanked him for his help, and then turned to an artist I’d recently met at an NYC comic con.
Fauve (real name Holly Golightly) had a background in drawing biographies of adult film stars for indie house Carnal Comics (I think Louis did one or two of those, too), so sexy leading ladies were kinda right in her artistic wheelhouse. She was game to jump in when I offered Heartstopper to her, wanting to do something outside of adult-movie comics; drawing bad girls seemed like the next logical step. And with Holly came her friend Zeea Adams—daughter of comics legend Neal Adams—who offered to provide color.
The only mainstay, other than myself, was inker Alan Larsen, who wound up doing a stellar job of taking the art of three pencillers and finding a way to make it all look consistent.
In a decent amount of time we were finally back on schedule, the materials got delivered to Millennium, and issue 2 eventually hit comic shops. Thank God. So, on to issue 3!
But then Millennium dropped a bomb on me.
Despite selling over 15,000 copies of issue one (outselling the then-current issue of Harris Comics’ Vampirella), Millennium’s publisher informed me there would be no money coming my way—and therefore no money for me to pay my collaborators.
He quoted printing costs, design costs, shipping costs, and office production fees as the reasons for why I’d never see a dime on the net-sales royalties deal I’d signed (a pretty standard arrangement in publishing, so I’d signed the contract fully knowing what was involved). Issue two was going to turn out the same, but, I was told, if I’d just hang on until the series was completed and the trade paperback collection eventually came out, why, gosh almighty, there should be plenty of money to make by then.
Truth be told, that didn’t really work for me. People were expecting to get paid for their work—hell, I was expecting to get paid for my work. The thought of two more issues of free story and art with no guarantee of ever seeing money for our efforts…nah, that just wasn’t going to happen.
(As I often tell people who’ve approached me with unpaid, “for the love” projects—in other words, contributing one’s efforts just for the love of doing it—if I want to work for free…well, that’s why I have my own company.)
So after much mental anguish, I canceled the project just after Holly delivered the third issue’s pencils and the inked cover art. It would have turned out to be a good-looking issue—Alan Larsen had already moved on after finishing issue 2, but an artist named “Chainsaw” Chuck Majewski, whom I’d met through my day job as an editor for Byron Preiss Visual Publications, had already delivered the inks on Holly’s first four pages, and they looked spectacular.
Even worse, I’d already negotiated a deal for Sebastienne’s first crossover with an even more successful indie comic series (and one of my favorites): writer Paul Fricke and artist Scott Beaderstadt’s urban fantasy Trollords, which debuted in the late 1980s and starred a trio of knuckleheaded bridge trolls inspired by the Three Stooges.
Rough cover design for Heartstopper/Trollords. Colors by Eliseu Gouveia.
Heartstopper/Trollords would involve the Trolls—Larry, Harry, and Jerry—helping their ongoing nemesis Death try to spark a romantic relationship with Sebastienne, with whom he’d become infatuated. The cover, already penciled by Holly and Scott, and inked by Bill Lavin (of our graphic novel Troubleshooters, Incorporated: Night Stalkings), featured Annie attending a shotgun wedding—her own, with Death!—with the Trolls definitely on the groom’s side of the aisle. Scott had also penciled the first three pages, which Bill had also inked. I thought it was a great opening: Death attending a family reunion, where he was going to be nagged by relatives about “why can’t you find a nice girl to settle down with?,” which would set the plot in motion.
Unfortunately, when I broke ties with Millennium, that was the end of the crossover as well.
So it was back to limbo for The ’Warp. Lorelei had been shelved, and now Heartstopper got tucked away in the Drawer of Ideas, hopefully to be revived in some form or another down the road—which it was. But that’s a story for another time…
But was StarWarp Concepts (and me) finally out of comics now? Not for long…
(By the way, you can currently download all three existing issues—for free—from our Heartstopper page. Go check them out.)
It was while I was still making the rounds as a small-press-comic publisher that September 1992 saw me hop an Amtrak train and head upstate to the city of Utica for a one-day comic con.
The show, created by comics fan and small presser Bob Elinskas—publisher of the reviewzine Small Press Feedback and writer of the minicomic series The Adventures of Mister Mid-Nite—was launched in 1990 to help raise money for the American Diabetes Association, for which Bob had served as a youth advisor. I can’t remember if Bob had contacted me about attending as an exhibitor, or I’d reached out to him, but either way I’d packed a box with copies of the digest-size Lorelei and Troubleshooters, Incorporated comics, shoved a sketchpad, pencils, and markers in a bag, and set off to meet the upstate comic fans.
Back then, the convention didn’t have a name—as you can see from the flyer, it was just listed as the “3rd Annual Comic Book & Card Show,” and held in a high school gymnasium—but today it’s known by a much catchier name: Uticon.
When I attended it, the con had a real homey feel—in fact, on the night before the event Bob invited all the guests to his house for a home-cooked meal! (I think it was lasagna.) I remember it as a dining-room-table gathering mainly of fellow small pressers, with mainstream writer Tom Peyer from DC Comics (Sandman, Legion of Super-Heroes) being the “big” name at the meal.
I don’t remember making many sales the next day—certainly not enough to cover the round-trip Amtrak fare to and from Utica, and the hotel room—but I do remember having a good time there, and coming back feeling confident about my involvement in the comic creator community (holy alliteration!). I think by this time I’d already decided that SWC would be expanding to full-size comics; being at this show and getting positive feedback about Lorelei just confirmed on I was on the right track.
Over 30 years later, Uticon is still run by Bob, and still features a mix of indie/small press creators and mainstream comic veterans. With all the mega-pop-culture conventions out there loudly making noise, if you’re looking for a quieter, more relaxed con experience, maybe you should give Uticon a try.
Continuing the history of StarWarp Concepts, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year.
Part 1 covered our earliest days, as a small-press publishing house that dealt in digest-size comics starring Lorelei and the supernatural superhero team Troubleshooters, Incorporated. In Part 2, we covered the premiere of Lorelei as a full-sized horror comic series that SWC released between 1993 and 1995—a series I ultimately canceled due to overwhelming production costs, just as the comic distributors market was collapsing due to Marvel Comics’ machinations (what timing!).
But although I put Lori on the shelf, that didn’t mean The ’Warp was entirely out of the game…
In 1995, before I stopped publishing Lorelei, I’d cut a deal with another company, Millennium Publications, to launch a full-color, four-issue miniseries that would take advantage of the “bad girl” comics currently in vogue. (Basically, “bad girl” comics were any that had a leading heroine who wore as little clothing as possible while acting like a total badass; see Vampirella, Lady Death, Shi, and the 1990s Catwoman for prime examples.)
Titled Heartstopper: Sorrow About To Fall, it would star an immortal, shape-changing monster hunter named Sebastienne “Annie” Mazarin who spent her days as a freelance writer and her nights chasing the creatures of the night…although, this being a bad girl comic, her nocturnal activities in this particular story would involve her working as a stripper in a Times Square “gentlemen’s club”—strictly as research for an article, you understand.
Annie/Heartstopper had originally made her debut in the pages of NightCry #1, published in 1994 by Visual Anarchy, the indie house run by Joseph Monks, who had been the writing half of the creative team behind the popular horror series Cry for Dawn (the other half being, of course, artist Joseph Michael Linsner). Monks had been very interested in publishing Heartstopper, especially when I told him the name of the artist eager to be involved: Louis Small Jr. of Vampirella fame (and the artist for the covers of Lorelei #0 and #1).
NightCry #1 turned out to be a big deal, with a headlining Evil Ernie story by Brian Pulido and Leonardo Jimenez; a story of the homicidal bad girl Razor, by creator Everette Hartsoe and artist Ed McGuinness (yes, the same McGuinness currently drawing Spider-Man); and tales by Monks with art by Ken Meyer and Thomas O’Connor.
Unfortunately, after delivering the first four pages of “Heartstopper,” Louis had to bail on the project due to the demands of better-paying mainstream work. Monks still wanted to publish what there was—they were done by a popular Vampirella artist, after all—but he insisted on having them inked. Louis didn’t have the time, and the inker that Monks eventually assigned was…let’s just say not the best fit. Louis, to put it mildly, was not pleased with the results.
The pages got published, of course, but there ended the project, and Heartstopper’s association with Visual Anarchy.
But then later that year, through my friendship with artist Delfin Barral, I was introduced to Uriel Caton, who’d done work for Eternity Comics in the late 1980s under the name “Uriel Antonio” (Ex-Mutants Annual #1, Starlight) and was currently working on a reboot of Starlight as The Outer Space Babes (hey, who needed subtlety during the Bad-Girl Era?) for indie house Silhouette Studios. As he was described on the back of the Vampirella trading card he drew for a 1995 set from Topps: “Uriel Caton: He’s a mystery man. Not widely known by the public, yet any number of of artists, including Buzz, Caesar and Steve Crespo cite this graduate of New York’s School of Art and Design as an inspiration for their own work.”
(For a bit of context, Buzz—real name: Aldrin Aw—Caesar Antomattei, and Steve Crespo were all Vampirella artists at Harris Comics at the time.)
Uriel and I discussed rebooting Heartstopper, junking Louis’s design and starting fresh. It didn’t take him long to come up with a new look, and we started the whole project over,
So, I put a proposal together for a four-issue miniseries and showed it around to some indie publishers, to see if anyone wanted to pick up what would be a proper, full-color bad-girl comic. No just-on-the-cover femme fatale this time—Annie would be front and center cover to cover doing seductively murderous bad-girl stuff. I’d learned my lesson with Lorelei!
And so Millennium Publications became the house that made me an offer, and sent me a contract. Once the paperwork had been settled, Uriel and I got to work—he drawing, me writing and hand-lettering—with help from colorist Dan Peters (he of small-press Troubleshooters, Incorporated artistic fame), and before you knew it, the first issue of the miniseries now titled Heartstopper: Sorrow About to Fall was complete and off to the printer.
But before it hit comic shops, in a setup that Hollywood refers to as a “backdoor pilot,” in which characters being considered for their own television series are introduced first in an established show—think Gary Seven in the Original Star Trek episode “Assignment Earth,” Mork from Ork (Robin Williams) in the Happy Days episode “My Favorite Orkan” that led to Mork & Mindy, and the organization Torchwood in Doctor Who—I had Annie debut in a cameo role in Lorelei #5 (the final issue published), drawn by Lori series artist David C. Matthews, as a lead-in to Millennium’s Heartstopper #1.
There were also discussions about them taking over the publishing chores on Lorelei, as well, if things worked out with the initial project. Again, things were looking up for SWC.
I should’ve known that good feeling wouldn’t last…
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