StarWarp Concepts…it’s admittedly a pretty unusual name for a genre publishing company, given we’re predominently a horror house whose launch title was a comic book about a supernatural femme fatale who feasted on human souls. And in the 30 years we’ve been around, I’ve gotten a good share of odd looks when people hear the name, but I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone its origin.
So, how’d it come about? Truth is, I got the idea from a sci-fi novel, of all things!
Buck Rogers: That Man on Beta, written by Richard A. Lupoff under the psuedonym Addison E. Steele, was a novel based on a screenplay by Bob Shayne for an unproduced sequel to Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, the 1979 movie/series pilot that starred Gil Gerard as Buck and Erin Gray as his commander/best friend/potential love interest, Colonel Wilma Deering. Why an “unproduced sequel”? Because the movie did so well in theaters that Universal Studios scrapped a follow-up and greenlit a television series that aired for two seasons.
If you’re unfamiliar with the story of Buck Rogers, it goes like this: a 20th-century man is accidentally placed into suspended animation and reawakens 500 years in the future where, as the ultimate man out of time, he tries to figure out his place in this Brave New World while helping its inhabitants struggle against diabolical oppressors. In the sci-fi short story that introduced him, “Armageddon 2419 A.D.,” written by Philip Francis Nowlan and published in Amazing Stories magazine in 1928, Anthony Rogers was trapped in a mine collapse and overcome by unusual gases that kept him preserved for five centuries. In the 1979 movie, Buck was flying solo on a space shuttle mission in 1987 when his electrical system went haywire, shutting down life support and sending the shuttle on an uncontrolled round-the solar-system trip that brought him back to Earth in 2491.
It was while I was reading The Man on Beta that I came across the word starwarp—Lupoff/Steele used it as a descriptor for the hyperspace tunnel that Buck traveled through to cross vast cosmic distances in his 25th-century fighter starship. I thought it sounded really cool, and a decade later, when I was making plans to launch a comic publishing company, the word popped back into my head—and thus StarWarp Concepts was born!
Yes, I know—not the most exciting origin story you’ve ever read. But hey, at least the books and comics we publish are pretty exciting on their own, so it’s all good, right?
Stay tuned for further behind-the-scenes anniversary stories, here at ’Warp Central!
