Yes. Yes I did.
Well, I promised it to you way back in 2023, when I was still working at Vinegar Syndrome Publishing as their “creative director.” This was at a crucial moment in my career when I sold my comic book company to Vinegar and they folded it into their new publishing division. It was an exciting time, really. I was given more-or-less free rein at an all-new publishing platform to develop many original comic book series and the plan was to start releasing them in 2024, alongside box sets and other collected versions of our old stuff, like the film adaptations of MANIAC and ZOMBIE we had done. I dug into my file of unproduced screenplays and unpublished books, and even created a few new proposals, and pretty soon we had a slate of titles and a whole gang of artists working on each one. We had vampires and monsters and big guns and madness galore. When they asked me which Vinegar Syndrome film I’d like to do an adaptation of I stunned them all by suggesting the Phillis Davis girls-in-chains sleazer SWEET SUGAR from 1972, and they said yes to that too! A deal like this was almost too good to be true. Um. And as it turned out… it was, guys. But I’ll get to that later.
For now, it seemed I was getting an opportunity to do some really good work, much of which had been gestating in my creative nexus for some time. I was even able to make SUGAR something really special and substantial, while keeping the sleazy, sexy fun up front where it belonged.
Get it? Up front? Okay, sheesh, stop yelling at me…
Anyway, we did four issues of SUGAR. And there were many other projects too, most of which were super close to my heart as an artist. Like this one:
Um. These are the mutants I promised you.
It was a project I was screaming-girl happy about, because it dated back to the actual 1980s. We’re talking 1987 to be exact, the year I created the UTWM. It was a flagship year for genre cinema; when films like PREDATOR and EVIL DEAD 2 and ROBOCOP were answering the call sent out by 1986’s one-two-punch of ALIENS and THE FLY. (Oh, not to mention some little movies like BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, TOP GUN, LABYRINTH and CRITTERS.) Man, if you were alive back then, it was amazing to stand witness before. A real fringe moment, fueled by perverted, exploitative magic. The video stores overflowed with trashy brilliance like MUTANT HUNT and CREEPOZOIDS. The theaters reeled you in with MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE done by Golan and Globus. Everything was a copy of a copy somehow, with everyone trying their damndest to make THIER NEW VERSION the King’s Shit. I’ve always loved this type of shameless exploitation cinema. (No kidding, Stephen?) It speaks to adolescence, yet challenges the more creative among us to go the extra mile. You know, to make it all work? Some great cinematic art was done in this decade, in the “ripoff” mode. Of particular inspiration to me were BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS, and GALAXY OF TERROR, both early-eighties Roger Corman films crassly constructed on the surface as STAR WARS and ALIEN steals… but when you looked deeper, they were… well… deeper, man. They ware also, technically and artistically, some of the best movies of their kind, due in no small part to major contributions by future Oscar winning film professionals like James Horner, Robert and Dennis Skotak and James Cameron himself, in the days just before THE TERMINATOR and ALIENS.
I wanted to make a movie like that. Something that mixed-and-matched and hit some sort of perverted pay dirt. I wrote many pitches for many film projects during that time… but the one I was most in love with was the one about the UTWM. It was just the kind of crazy, adrenaline fueled turbo-tale you’d expect a 17 year old child in the late eighties to concoct: ALIENS meets BLADE RUNNER on the set of ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK and THE ROAD WARRIOR… with the CHUDS coming at ya. I pitched it as a movie to places like Concorde/New Horizons and Empire Pictures in 1987, but nobody bought it. I kept the story with me for years as an artifact of my wasted youth until I first used it as one of the fake movies in my book “Shock Festival.” I got excited after that and wrote it as an actual screenplay, which was optioned three times and never made.
We started making it at VSP in 2023, and I was very excited. I think they were too.
We busted our asses to do four issues of this series, a full graphic novel-length story. It only got halfway through my screenplay, but I thought it was a good start and I was pretty proud of it. I scripted another four issues to complete it and it was epic. Things were rocking right along.
We manufactured a full run of this first issue were pretty much ready to go out with it.
And then the axe fell at VSP.
I’m leaving the details somewhat vague in this posting because that’s for another forum, maybe even a book, but the bottom line is that I never signed an NDA and I am allowed to talk freely about what happened over there. And I will. Eventually. But all you need to know right now is that everything fell apart at VSP, pretty much overnight. I can say that it wasn’t MY fault. I was working like a madman and making every deadline. There were problems at the head office. And so, under new management in early 2024, UTWM was cancelled, along with nearly every other project I was working on for Vinegar. Needless to say, it was suddenly a very dark time. I spent the better part of that year locked in negotiations to get the rights to all that stuff back and I left the company in January of 2025 to start over with a new publishing enterprise, which you’ll be seeing soon with any luck. You’ll not only see UTWM, but also many other things we made and were never allowed to release. In my exit deal with Vinegar, we partnered to release my old stuff at Eibon Press, so it wasn’t a total loss. That stuff will start to come out on MAY 23, and you can read all about it HERE. Ironically, the first release from Eibon this month is the only title I developed and created for VSP back in 2023. The rest are library titles from the old days that never got a proper collected graphic novel release. That’s cool.
And meanwhile, there is the FUTURE to look forward to.
And what does UTWM stand for?
Well . . .
Neat, huh?
That plan is to get that stuff into your hands, however we can. We’re working on all of it right now. We even have some swell licensed titles in the works. It’s all happening. But such things take a little time. I just wanted to share one thought about all of this with you.
Dreams do happen. And they are worth fighting for. So fight for them. There’s nobody on earth who can stop you… especially on a long enough timeline. I’ve been dreaming of MUTANTS since 1987, before many people reading this were even born. So FIGHT, dammit. You WILL win. I promise.
Oh yeah, and I also directed a movie in November.
The fight continues . . .