SWC at 30: Exit: the Monster Hunter!

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. 

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.)