Hi all. Not sure if this had been posted yet, but reading Steven Grant's column at comic book resources, I came across something some of us might be intersted in:



LORELEI: BUILDING THE PERFECT BEAST Vol. 1, by Steven Roman, David Matthews & Kevin Tuma, 142 pg b&w trade (Starwarp Concepts;$9.95)


Hmmm. If you love vampires but don't think there's enough t&a in VAMPIRELLA, this is the book for you. It's a curious book; the art's just passable, and the story's pretty traditional for this sort of thing - a woman comes back from the dead and finds herself targeted by an evil cult (didn't I just read this is DEAD@17 - and the lettering is so amateurish it drives me up a wall, but writer Roman takes a vehemently novelistic approach. While that's intriguing, the downside is that it takes forever to get anywhere; the whole book seems to function as prelude, we still don't really know what any of the multitude of characters is up to and why, and "Lorelei," as focal character, hasn't even shown up yet.

I got my "contributor's copies" of the TPB a couple of weeks ago from Steve. I hadn't mentioned it here at Amaz0ns because there aren't any muscle-women in it, and thus (I thought) outside of the subject matter to which this forum is devoted.

Anyway, as noted, Lorelei: Building the Perfect Beast Vol. 1 collects the six issues of the original series, together with a never-before-published prologue illustrated by Kevin Tuma. This brings the reader almost halfway through the origin story (which Steve had originally slated to run for fourteen(!) issues). Steve now wants to complete the origin in one more (I hope) TPB; he and I haven't talked about my coming back as artist, and I'm not sure I want to: taking on a "pro" job right now would cut drastically into the time I have to do my own projects, and I'm not sure the monetary returns will make that worthwhile. (I certainly won't be able to quit my job to concentrate on Lorelei!)

You can read more about my participation in the Lorelei project here, and about Lorelei herself at the Starwarp Concepts website (which, unfortunately, hasn't been updated with info about the TPB yet). I have to presume that the book is available from comics shops (although they'd probably have to special-order it).

One humorous note: the volume features a Foreward by one Charles de Lint. About my artwork, he writes: "I have to admit that I wasn't  completely enamored with the somewhat exploitative "good girl" art - artist David C. Matthews shows great promise, but too often his women seem to be posing for a pin-up, and please, couldn't we cut back a little on the size of their breasts? All those poor women are going to have so much back trouble from having to carry around all that weight...." (ellipses in original) Amusing because I wasn't consciously drawing huge gazongas on these characters (this pic of Lorelei shows pretty much the size of most of the breasts I drew). If Mr. de Lint thought these women were "well-endowed", heh heh heh, he hasn't seen anything yet!!

From the foreword it sounds more like "someone" didn't wanna admit anyone was his equal if he could find a way to say otherwise.

I believe that in one issue of Lorelei, you did put a panel with a muscular woman in it, Dave.  In fact, I do believe that I purchased that issue because of that.   :evil:

Z