SWC at 30: Convention Memories: San Diego Comic-Con 2005

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

Back in the August 30th post, I talked about Lorelei’s second brief return to comic shops in 2002, after the original series’ cancellation in 1995, and Volume 2’s debut at the 2002 San Diego Comic-Con. Unfortunately, the market had drastically changed since the last time I’d published Lori, and my inability to find an audience for the new series meant Lori and The ’Warp both went back on hiatus after two issues.

So, what could The ’Warp do next? Well, how about graphic novel publishing? That appeared to be the thing everyone was doing by the early 2000s. All right, let’s do a graphic novel! But what would it be…?

Collecting in trade paperback form the six chapters of the 1990s Lorelei comic series seemed to be the easiest way to go. With cover art by painting legend Bob Larkin (known for his Doc Savage and Marvel Comics covers in the 1970s and ’80s, as well as for being the cover artist of my X-Men: The Chaos Engine Trilogy novels) and an introduction by award-winning fantasy author Charles de Lint (who’d been my first Lorelei comic subscriber when I launched in 1993!), SWC’s first graphic novel was soon ready for its time in the spotlight.  

(And yes, when I mentioned to Bob that the dark lord Arioch—Beast’s hellish antagonist—was based on horror icon Boris Karloff, of Frankenstein fame…well, he literally painted Karloff. Nice likeness.)

Lorelei: Building the Perfect Beast, Vol. 1—the title borrowed from a Don Henley album—debuted at the 2005 San Diego Comic-Con…with a fairly resounding thud, unfortunately. No sales were made at the show, and most comic reviewers who’d received preview copies ignored it, complained about the nudity, or hated the (admittedly) glacial pacing. And as for horror reviewers…

Horror reviewers actually liked it! They looked past the nudity and the slow pacing to find the story beneath. As I’ve often told people, what horror fans understand, unlike most comic readers, is that sex and death are the peanut-butter-and-chocolate combination of the genre—two great tastes that go great together!

And so, you wind up with publications like the esteemed Cemetery Dance, one of the horror genre’s top literary-and-review magazines, saying this:

“Roman’s writing is effective and propulsive. The story moves along quickly and convincingly; even at 142 pages, it’s a fast-paced adventure whose story will leave readers eager for more.”

Unfortunately, good horror reviews were the most I could hope for where Beast was concerned— its solicitation to retail shops through Diamond Comics and its appearance at SDCC were again both met with a fair degree of silence. And that meant there wouldn’t be a second volume of Building the Perfect Beast—although I did consider reviving the project in 2009, when I reached out to Lorelei fan and bad-girl-art lover Richard Boom, and asked if he knew any artists who might be willing to take on the assignment.

As a result, I was introduced to Eliseu “Zeu” Gouveia, a Portuguese artist whose American comics debut had come in 2004, in the Image sci-fi graphic novel Cloudburst, written by Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti. And though our e-mail correspondence didn’t lead to Perfect Beast, Volume 2, it did lead to our numerous—and growing—collaborations on other projects: the graphic novel Lorelei: Sects and the City; the comics The Saga of Pandora Zwieback #0 and The Saga of Pandora Zwieback Annual #1, and the upcoming Lester del Rey’s Time Ring and Lorelei: Sweet Soul Music; and the Piko Interactive licensed comic The Legend of Calamity Jane: The Devil Herself. (Zeu also provided illustrations for the SWC Illustrated Classics Carmilla and A Princess of Mars, and my Pandora Zwieback novels Blood Feud and Blood Reign.)

Convention-wise, SDCC ’05 became my last appearance at that con—the show was too crazy, the attendees too focused on the pop-culture aspects, the costs of travel and round-trip, cross-country shipping too crushing.

And so it was back to limbo for The ’Warp, this time for another long stretch—five years, in fact.

During those Wilderness Years, I often thought that if I could just come up with the right idea, it might be worth putting my publisher’s cap back on. But what could “the right idea” be?

The answer would come in the form of a teenaged Goth adventuress…