Long before a certain Goth adventuress ever made her literary debut in my young adult novel Blood Feud: The Saga of Pandora Zwieback, Book 1, there was teenager Amanda Waters, the lead character in The Mysterious Mr. Peabody, a shot-on-video student film that I wrote and directed during my last year of college, back in 1984. Running about fifteen minutes, it was about a girl who suspects that her science teacher has a strange secret and, doing her best Nancy Drew imitation, goes forth to find out what it is. Spoiler: He’s an alien!
Hmmm. A smart, inquisitive teenaged girl who finds herself drawn into the beginning of a weird adventure—now where might I have seen that most recently…in book form? 😉 So, yeah, you could say that Pan and Amanda are distant cousins, or that Amanda was the template from which I constructed Pan—after all, between Mr. Peabody and Blood Feud I didn’t do a whole lot of writing (as in, any) involving young adult characters.
Mr. Peabody (the name borrowed from my high school science teacher, not the time-traveling cartoon dog) was my final student project for a television production class at New York University. The class was taught by George Heinemann, a former NBC executive who’d developed children’s educational programs in the fifties and sixties, and whose work (weirdly coincidental) won multiple Peabody Awards for television excellence. Heinemann taught us students the steps required in creating a show by having us work in NYU’s video-production studios—there we learned how to use the massive studio cameras (the kind that roll across the floor); how to use the control room’s sound and video boards; and how to direct. Then he turned us loose to create our own projects, so that we’d have hands-on experience with all aspects of production—for example, on Jane’s project I might be one of the camera operators, but for Tom’s I’d be working the sound board, and for Jerry’s I’d be handling the video board.
For Mr. Peabody, I wrote the script, drew the storyboards, and directed the in-studio segments from the control room—but then I had to go and complicate things by wanting to shoot at other locations: an office for a scene involving computers, and a couple scenes in which characters walked down city streets. And that involved lugging around video-recording equipment like the Sony setup you see here (courtesy of Wikipedia); that’s right, it had a separate tape deck—and worse, the tapes were Betamax, the small, boxy precursor to VHS that became obsolete as soon as VHS was accepted as the standard format for videotapes. Schlepping around a camera, a tape deck, and a tripod was a major pain in the butt—especially because my weekend shoots meant no one from the class was available to help out—but, y’know, that’s how we did things back in the days of the dinosaurs. (You kids, with your cell-phone cameras and tiny recorders and the like—you’ve got it easy!) But what did I care—I was too wired on coffee and lack of sleep to be slowed down by things like hauling equipment. Nothing was gonna stop me!
It was shot over the course of a month, if I remember correctly, since I had to work around the unpaid cast’s schedule, and then sit with my video editor to put the whole thing together. But when the final product was shown to the cast and “crew,” I was overjoyed. Having watched it again recently—I had the “master” Beta edit transferred to a DVD—I can laugh and cringe at what it looks like, thirty-one years later, but I’m still happy with what I accomplished.
Other than its historical value—in terms of its tiny influence on the creation of Pan Zwieback, fourteen years later—the short features a pair of actors Heinemann introduced me to, who went on to successful careers:
Lucy Deakins, who played Amanda, is best remembered for her role in the 1986 cult film The Boy Who Could Fly, but she also appeared—according to her Internet Movie DataBase page—in the comedy The Great Outdoors (starring John Candy and Dan Aykroyd), the movies Cheetah and There Goes My Baby, an ABC Afterschool Special in which she sued a boy for standing her up on a date, and a couple of episodes of Law & Order. She left the acting profession in 2002 and became an attorney (well, that involves a bit of acting, too, doesn’t it?). Lucy also made a terrific Amanda Waters, too.
Michael J. Harney (seen here in a recent picture) played Amanda’s father. You recognize him, don’t you? He’s one of those famous “I know you, you’re that guy whose name I can’t remember” character actors you’ve seen in dozens of movies and television episodes. Michael’s sort of made a career of playing law-enforcement types over the decades, mostly as detectives in shows like Law & Order, NYPD Blue, and Without a Trace; he also played Xander’s father in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Two of his most recent high-profile appearances have been as a supporting character on the first season of HBO’s megapopular series True Detective (starring Matthew McConaghey and Woody Harrelson); and in a recurring role on Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black.
Special note for literary historians: This short film about a student and her alien school teacher predated author Bruce Coville’s bestselling middle-grade series My Teacher Is an Alien by five years. (Oddly enough, the series was co-created and packaged by Byron Preiss, the very same publisher for whom I worked as a fiction editor ten years after The Mysterious Mr. Peabody was shot. Talk about coincides!)
Oh, and by the way, since I was there first, I believe you owe me some royalties, Bruce… 😉
The online promotional tour for StarWarp Concepts and its latest young adult, dark-urban-fantasy novel, 
These days, Bob is busily working for Topps, painting trading cards for their upcoming Mars Attacks: Occupation set, which is a sequel to the classic card series published in the 1960s. All of us here at ’Warp Central are eagerly awaiting the set’s release—and to see what other projects Bob has in development!
Q: Welcome, Steven. Can we start out by telling us whether you are published for the first time or are you multi-published?
In 2010, I decided to go the self-publishing route by reviving StarWarp Concepts—a publishing company I’d launched in 1993 for my comic book projects—as a book-publishing house. And in 2011, I released my first young adult dark-fantasy novel, Blood Feud: The Saga of Pandora Zwieback, Book 1. The reason I decided to self-publish it was because I’d done the agent-and-editor submission dances, sending a proposal around in hopes of a book deal and/or an author representative, only to have it rejected for some head-scratching reasons. Most of them fell under two categories: “It’s just not right for us,” which is sort of agent-speak for “I just didn’t care for it on a personal level”; and “Could it be more like…?,” which means they’d like you to knock off something successful—at the time I sent the Pandora proposal around, everyone was trying to clone Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight. (Today, it’s things like E. L. James’s 50 Shades of Grey and John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars.)
Q: How did it make you feel to become published for the first time and how did you celebrate?
With the Saga of Pandora Zwieback and my other StarWarp Concepts projects, since I’m sort of the master of my own fate—being the publisher as well as the writer—I’m much more proactive in how my work is promoted. I send out press releases and review copies, print up catalogs and brochures, make appearances at horror and comic book conventions and book festivals, heavily blog at the StarWarp Concepts and Pandora Zwieback websites, and set up interviews—like this one! To promote the debut of Blood Feud, the first Pandora Zwieback novel, I published a free full-color comic book, The Saga of Pandora Zwieback #0, that introduces Pan to potential readers, and handed out a couple thousand copies at conventions—and then I made it a free digital comic that can still be downloaded from the StarWarp Concepts site.
On June 30, e-book subscription service Scribd announced that they were making dramatic cuts to the number of romance titles they offer, due to the large number of genre fans who’ve “rented” so many books that Scribd is losing money. Distributor Smashwords estimates it may adversely affect 
So, you ask, what does all this Doc Savage talk have to do with our resident Goth adventuress, Pandora Zwieback? Well, everything in this particular case; I just wanted you to have some background for what follows.
One night, while I was talking to Bob, I asked him if he’d be interested in taking the blank sketch cover and doing his own version of the Ron Wilson cover for Marvel Two-in-One #21, a 1976 comic that teamed Doc Savage with the Thing from the Fantastic Four (Two-in-One was a series in which the Thing teamed up with all sorts of Marvel characters, usually in stories that lasted only one issue). You see the cover there to the left: Doc and the Thing, crashing through a wall.
In 2011, as I was gearing up for the release of Blood Feud, the first Pandora Zwieback novel, I considered ways to attract attention to this momentous occasion in publishing history, and eventually came up with the idea for an art gallery featuring Pan. But it wouldn’t just be any sort of art gallery, it would be “The 13 Days of Pan-demonium,” during which thirteen commissioned artists would present their unique takes on SWC’s latest leading lady. (As it turned out, only twelve artists wound up being commissioned, with me ending up as the thirteenth contributor.)
And who was the happiest Goth of all, when the published comic debuted? Why, Henar Torinos herself!
But when the artist I’d hired, 
Nice, huh? And it all started with the happy accident (as the late painter