Where did the time go? It seems like only yesterday that StarWarp Concepts launched its first full-size comic—Lorelei #0, published in summer 1993, written by Steven A. Roman (that’s me!), drawn by David C. Matthews, and sporting an awesome cover by then–megapopular Vampirella artist Louis Small Jr.—and suddenly here we are, three decades later, with a variety of books, comics, and graphic novels!
Lorelei, the soul-stealing succubus, is still around, of course. As SWC’s first lady of horror, she’s been here from the start, making her debut in 1989’s Lorelei One-Shot Special, a digest-size, black-and-white, small-press comic that I wrote and drew (and which you can find in the pages of our digital comic Lorelei: Genesis, available from the SWC webstore).
It was my first attempt at doing a comic, taking inspiration from “How to Draw Women the Frank Thorne Way”—a one-day art class that I attended at a 1988 comic con, taught by the acclaimed artist of Marvel Comics’ Red Sonja and his own Ghita of Alizaar graphic novels—the work of writer Bill Mantlo (Cloak & Dagger), the ’80s TV show The Equalizer, and Small Press Comics Explosion, a magazine that showcased the efforts of small-press creators who turned out their own comics on photocopiers.
By 1993, though, I’d made the switch from digests to full-size comics, and then in 2010 I took SWC in a whole new direction as a book and graphic novel publisher (with the occasional comic thrown into the mix), and introduced readers to our second lady of horror: the teenaged Goth Pandora Zwieback, who’s just trying to make sense of her weird life as she, her friends and family, and her immortal, monster-fighting, shapeshifting mentor, Annie, deal with all manner of supernatural threats.
I’ll be telling a more complete history of the company in a series of blog posts as our 30th Anniversary year progresses—but that’s not all we’ll be doing to mark the occasion, as we’ve got new books and comics on the way. It’s not quite making up for lost time during the fallow, pandemic-inspired period we went through in the past few years, but it might give that impression—and we’re okay with that. 🙂
So as the old saying goes, stand by for action!
