Welcome back to StarWarp Spotlight, a series of posts that runs each week to shine a spotlight on one of our titles, as a reminder of the awesome books and comics we publish and to introduce new SWC fans to our backlist. True, we normally run this feature on Mondays, but what with yesterday being Labor Day—a national holiday in the United States—and National Buy a Book Day, we decided to bump the installment over to today.
And speaking of today, with this installment we wrap-up the Spotlight feature with a look at a 1990s “bad girl” comic that helped inspire the creation of our Saga of Pandora Zwieback series…
Hearstopper: The Legend of La Bella Tenebrosa is a free three-issue digital-exclusive miniseries originally published in 1994, during the height of what became known as comics’ “Bad Girl Era,” in which every publisher scrambled to put out a series that featured a sexy heroine who was such a total badass that she could crush evildoers with ease—and do it while wearing as little clothing as possible! Lady Death, Shi, Elektra, Hellina, Mantra, Witchblade, Razor—Heartstopper not only had a lot of company on the racks of your local comic shop, its first issue even outsold Vampirella that same month!
Sebastienne Mazarin—an immortal, monster-hunting shape-shifter who would go on to become Pandora Zwieback’s supernatural mentor, starting in the young-adult, dark-urban-fantasy novel Blood Feud: The Saga of Pandora Zwieback, Book 1—made her debut in this short-lived Mature Readers series from Millennium Publications. (FYI, “La Bella Tenebrosa” in the Olde Tongue of monsterdom means “the beautiful dark one.”) In Heartstopper, a nefarious heavy metal band has arrived in New York City, and its lead singer, Coum de Sade, is more than just a sex magnet for his female fans—he’s an incubus! Will Annie put an end to his plans for worldwide chaos, or fall prey to his supernatural charms?
Written by Steven A. Roman (that’s me!), with pencils by co-creator Uriel Caton (JSA Annual 2000), Holly Golightly (Vampfire), and David C. Matthews (Satin Steele), inks by Alan Larsen (Femforce) and “Chainsaw” Chuck Majewski (Harvey Kurtzman’s New Two-Fisted Tales), and colors by Dan Peters and Zeea Adams, this full-color miniseries offers a rare look into Annie’s past.
Plus, issue 3 contains a glimpse at the planned-but-never-completed crossover special Heartstopper/Trollords, in which Annie was going to meet Harry, Larry, and Jerry—a trio of Three Stooges–inspired trolls who starred in a very popular comic series at the time.
Heartstopper: The Legend of La Bella Tenebrosa #1–3 are available for free as digital exclusives. Visit their product page for ordering information and sample pages.
And so, we’ve reached the end of StarWarp Spotlight—for 2020, that is! This was a fun, easy way of promoting our backlist—in fact, I’m thinking of making this an annual event. As a publishing company, it’s always a good thing to make folks aware of your backlist, especially as your number of titles continues to grow, because you never know what’ll catch the eye of a potential reader.
So get ready for StarWarp Spotlight 2021, and stay tuned for more information on it!
