Author: larsmagne23

In 1994, Eclipse Comics went bankrupt, and there are two conflicting stories why.

Here’s owner Dean Mullaney’s take:

We never—EVER—received a single sales statement. Therefore, no royalty statements. So there I was, paying advances to creators (bigger than the top rates in the field at the time—hey, we were going to be in bookstores, too!), tying up all my capital. And then nothing from Harper. No statements, no money. Meanwhile, creators were naturally asking for THEIR statements and royalitites. I explained the situation, but still never got anything from Harper. It go to the point that I had no cash left to even carry on normal business because we had laid out everything we had for advances.

All that was left to do was sell off every piece of inventory I could get my hands on, pay all the little guys (individual creators and small vendors), and stiff the large ones (printers and freight companies). And declare bankruptcy.

And here’s Neil Gaiman::

When Toren took the licence away from Eclipse and went to Dark Horse, he suddenly discovered that he was making four or five times as much money! But the sales had not gone up and the deal was pretty much the same. So then he got his accountant or his lawyer to get in touch with Eclipse to say, ‘Please send me all the figures so we can do an audit.’ And Eclipse sent both sets of books, the one with the true figures and the false figures. Given that Toren had the true figures and the false figures, he took them to court and the judgement… it was pretty much an open-and-shut case. There was a $100,000 judgement against Eclipse.

Now, this is hearsay, of course, but that’s quite a story, and I wondered whether there might be an easy way to verify whether it’s true or not. So I outsourced to an er American er associate the task of getting the case information: Toren Smith sued Eclipse Enterprises in a California court, so that should be easy enough, right?

Nine months later, I finally have the papers!

And instead of building the suspense here in this blog article, I’m just going to state my findings up front: There’s nothing in these papers to either support or invalidate Gaiman’s summary of the story.

So that’s a major disappointment.

Either American court cases are just plain weird, or Toren Smith’s lawyers are weird.

But while the papers don’t tell me what I wanted to know, they’re kinda interesting in other ways, so let’s just go through them for amusing bits. I’ve scanned all the documents and you can download the PDFs from the links below if you want to read them. But I’ll summarise.

First of all, there’s an index of sorts that lists all the documents available in the case. I didn’t get all of them, but the ones that are missing do not seem very likely to have anything interesting in them, but there’s always the possibility that I just didn’t get the right papers.

The meat of the matter is in the complaint. It’s a series of numbered allegations from Toren Smith, like:

Basically the first few pages state that Jan and Dean Mullaney are responsible for whatever Eclipse Enterprises do, which seems uncontroversial enough. Then there’s a couple of section for each series Toren Smith translated for Eclipse (Black Magic, Appleseed, etc) like this:

Finally, at allegation 40 we get something:

OK, Smith alleges that Eclipse has failed to pay him (and the Japanese owners of the comics).

But how did Smith know that Eclipse failed to pay him?

“has thereby been damagen in the amount of not less than Thirty Nine Thousand Six Hundred Seventy Three Dollars and 24/100 ($39,673.24) with the exact amount to be determined according to proof”. (This is just for Appleseed; there’s a section like this for each of the series Smith was involved with.)

So that’s a weirdly specific amount, which lends some credence to the story from Gaiman that Smith had received both sets of books (real and fake) from Eclipse. On the other hand, it says “to be determined according to proof”, so perhaps that’s just a number Smith’s lawyers pulled out of their asses.

The sum of all these unexplained allegations is $150,561.66:

Again with the “according to proof”. Is this a done thing? You start a court case without even a hint of proof of misdoing, but just allege a bunch of things, and then you do the proof during the court case itself? Giving away what the proof is give the opponent a heads up and you don’t want to do that?

There’s nothing in this complaint to even hint at how Smith knows that Eclipse done him wrong, and if this was how I was being sued, I would scratch my head and say “eh? what?”

This is more or less what Eclipse’s lawyer, Daniel Kornbluth, Esq. does in the answer, but he’s less long-winded than Smith’s lawyers:

And then does “uhm?” on a bunch of other allegations:

Kornbluth manages to get in a zinger or two:

Heh heh.

But, finally, the answer to the meat of the suit:

The “er, what?” part of the answer: Kornbluth points of that the suit doesn’t really state any facts that they can act on.

Which seems like the correct response to me.

And then there’s a bunch of (what I take to be) copypasta defenses, like:

If it had been the doctrine of leaches, it would have been funnier.

And that’s it: There’s no further evidence, either for or against Eclipse, presented in these papers. But the documents keep rolling in. First of all, Smith wants an injunction against Eclipse to stop them from
liquidating their assets:

As proof of this, they include two articles from The Comics Journal about Eclipse’s problems… and a letter from Jan Mullaney to Smith where Mullaney seems to say that he’s working on paying Smith (if Smith is willing to settle for $50K), but Smith takes this to mean that he’s doing nothing of the kind:

Which is kinda mind boggling. Here’s the letter:

I’m guessing this declaration from Smith is his way of saying “no thanks”.

Kornbluth responds by saying that the parties had been involved in a settlement negotiation, but that Smith’s lawyers were being unreasonable:

And that they’re using this process (“Ex Parte Temporary Protective Order”) to blackmail Eclipse into settling on terms impossible for them.

Dean Mullaney files a similar declaration, where he says that he still doesn’t know exactly how Smith came up with the sums he’s suing Eclipse for:

And that the Ex Parte was blackmail:

And he disputes that Eclipse is selling off assets in an attempt to defraud Smith:

Then there’s a stipulation that a judge is a judge.

But then, on May 3rd, two weeks after the Ex Parte, there’s a
“stipulation for entry of judgment”, which seems to be… an agreement between Eclipse and Toren Smith as how they’re going to pay him all this money. I can’t see anything in there where Eclipse admits to owing him money, but they’re going to pay him… and under severe conditions.

But first of all, the Ex Parte thing was “held in abeyance” by the judge:

The agreement between the parties say that Kornbluth will establish an escrow account:

And here’s the terms of payment:

Basically, Smith will get all the money that Eclipse earns through any channel. Except back issue sales, for some reason. These are terms that are impossible for any company do business on. Eclipse can keep only $500; all the rest are belong to Smith.

The rest of these 16 pages describe in perverse minutiae (was Smith’s lawyer’s paid by the page?) how Eclipse are to do this, and what the consequences are if they fail to pay Smith. I have to admit I only skimmed this document, because it’s paranoid and perverse:

And on and on:

There’s a personal obligation for the Mullaneys, too:

The final document is “Judgment pursuant to stipulation for entry of judgment” (phew) from September 30th, 1994. It’s short:

Paragraph 13 is the one that says that if Eclipse fails to pay Smith according to the schedule, then Smith should get all the money immediately.

So that’s what the judge does now:

Eclipse has to pay Smith $122,328.59.

This lines up somewhat with what Gaiman said:

They paid it for one month, they paid it for a second month, but when the third month happened there was no payment forthcoming. Dean and Jan had cleaned out Eclipse and let it close down.

The documents don’t really say how long Eclipse kept paying Smith, though.

So there you are: The court documents are frustratingly vague on what actually happened and how the parties knew they were happening.

Eclipse’s lawyers seem like better lawyers than Smith’s, though, so my guess would be that Smith had the facts on his size… Otherwise they wouldn’t have folded the way they did.

Eclipse entered into a deal with publishing giant HarperCollins to package graphic novels that HarperCollins would then publish and distribute. Eclipse Comics continued to publish themselves, too, and several of these graphic novels were first published by Eclipse on their own, and then re-published by HarperCollins; often in expanded editions (by bundling a short story after the main story).

So I’m not quite sure how many of these Eclipse/HarperCollins things exist, because I have the pure-Eclipse version of some of them, and the expanded version of others.

And, as you can see, HarperCollins was basically mostly interested in Eclipse’s Barker license.

So how did the collaboration go?

Here’s Eclipse publisher Dean Mullaney’s telling of the story:

We entered into a co-publishing deal with HarperCollins. Harper published Clive Barker and didn’t want us taking his graphic novels to a competitor. Harper had also bought Unwyn-Hyman, publishers of Tolkien’s work in every country but the US, and again didn’t want a competitor to have the graphic novel. They also realized that we could get the graphic novel rights to books published by other houses and bring them to Harper (this was before graphic novel rights were on the mind of mainstream publishers).

It was an exclusive deal both ways. In the beginning, it was a fantastic relationship. We did all the production and were invited to give presentations at all their sales meetings in the US and UK. They made fantastic floor and counter displays for bookstores. When they released The Hobbit graphic novel, they sold more copies in the UK alone than Ballantine did in all the US! The problems started when we asked for sales figures on the other books (Miracleman, Clive Barker’s titles, Dragonflight, Dean Koontz’s Trapped, etc.). We never—EVER—received a single sales statement. Therefore, no royalty statements. So there I was, paying advances to creators (bigger than the top rates in the field at the time—hey, we were going to be in bookstores, too!), tying up all my capital. And then nothing from Harper. No statements, no money. Meanwhile, creators were naturally asking for THEIR statements and royalitites. I explained the situation, but still never got anything from Harper. It go to the point that I had no cash left to even carry on normal business because we had laid out everything we had for advances.

All that was left to do was sell off every piece of inventory I could get my hands on, pay all the little guys (individual creators and small vendors), and stiff the large ones (printers and freight companies). And declare bankruptcy.

I still have no idea how many copies of our graphic novels Harper sold, or what they did with the money owed us and creators.

Some people thought that explanation was kind of odd, but
Eclipse Comics editor-in-chief catherine yronwode says:

For all i know, his assessment of the Harper-Collins aspect of his company’s financial woes may have been accurate, but i would not have been able to judge that[.]

Mullaney and yronwode were going through a divorce at the time, and yronwode did a column where the first letters in each line read:

Those Who Read Code Can Get The Real News Dean Has Left Me For A Woman Named Jane Kingsbury Who Has Bone Chips In Her Brain – Cat

Eclipse were also being sued by Studio Proteus, so a lot of drama was going on.

I’ve been unable to find out if anybody ever tried talking to HarperCollins. If they stiffed Eclipse Comics, that should have been a news item, you’d have thought? But perhaps Mullaney didn’t spill the beans on that bit until some years later?

In the mid-80s, Eclipse were regular advertisers in Amazing Heroes, a magazine about comics published by Fantagraphics Comics. The ads are mostly focused on specific comics, but there’s a series featuring some very smarmy-looking models telling us that comics aren’t for kids any more.

I wonder whether they published these ads in other venues, too, but perhaps that would have made even less sense. Perhaps the idea behind these ads are less about attracting a new readership (which is what the text is all about), but more about stroking the ego of people who are already reading comics from Eclipse? “You, too, is probably as smart as this bespectacled Wall Street Journal-reading douchecanoe?”

Of course, if they had run these ads in The Wall Street Journal it might have made more sense… but in venues like that the reaction would 100% be “eh? Eclipse Comics? What’s that then?”

Very grown up.

In addition to that series of ads, I’ve picked some of the more interesting ads that are kinda actually trying to sell specific comics (and books). I think they’ve got a kinda interesting graphic identity going here…

These ads are from Eclipse’s “imperial” period, when their coffers were presumably pretty flush from the Pacific bankruptcy buyout and the success of Miracleman, Scout and Airboy, and before the flood which wiped out their back issue business.

During Eclipse’s Imperial phase (i.e., when they started publishing a bunch of series… and most of them took off (i.e., 1986)), Airboy (along with Scout) was the series with most visibility. The main series was published every two weeks, and there were a bunch of spin-off mini-series and special published at the same time.

Starting in 1989, adaptations of Clive Barker works (all taken from his short story collections Books of Blood) became a major concern at Eclipse Comics.

In additions to the works covered below, Eclipse published a portfolio, a trading card set called “The Box of Blood” and Hellraiser trading cards.

Independent Comics Group was an imprint of Eclipse Comics. It was originally used as the imprint for the final two issues of Twisted Tales, a book Eclipse took on after Pacific Comics went under. Why use a separate imprint and leave the Eclipse logo off the cover? I don’t know, but we (I mean I) could speculate that Eclipse wanted to keep some percieved distance between themselves and the sometimes grisly contents of that book.

Eclipse then recycled the imprint a year later for a series of officially sanctioned indices of popular DC Comics series. They managed to get 27¹ issues published before they abandoned the venture apparently due to low sales.

In addition, they weirdly enough published one single comic book under that banner: Naive Inter-Dimensional Commando Koalas, which was a spoof of a spoof of a spoof of an homage, and also Directory to a Non-Existent Universe, which is a spoof of this series of indices.

I didn’t mean to cover any of these books in this blog series, but I got curious and did the Koalas and one of the index series and then the parody book.

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¹) Thanks to Roger Noble for clarifying and for noticing the Twisted Tales bit.

In 1993 time, Eclipse had almost stopped publishing comics themselves. They were packaging graphic novels (mostly adaptations) for HarperCollins, who published and distributed the books to the bookstore market. That left Eclipse with nothing but non-sports trading cards to publish themselves, which they did prodigiously.

Enter Claypool Comics: Despite what seemed to be the assumption at the time, Claypool was apparently not an Eclipse imprint or front, but instead a completely independent publisher who outsourced the practical details of publishing (production work, sending the books to the printers, collecting the money from the distributors) to Eclipse.

And it meant that the “Eclipse” portion of the solicitation form wasn’t blank during this period.

All these series continued after Claypool (sort of) severed their ties with Eclipse, and three of them continued to be published until 2006. Elvira, for instance, reached issue 116 before Claypool owner Richard Howell was forced to shut down when Diamond, the sole comics distributor at the time, stopped carrying their comics.

I say “sort of”, because Eclipse Comics editor-in-chief catherine yronwode continued to do their back issue sales for many years through her Comics Warehouse.

Eclipse did the distribution for a couple of comics lines (Ken Pierce Books, Claypool) as well as kinda-sorta co-publishing some other books (most of the Acme books listed Eclipse as the ones who “released” the books, but didn’t publish them), but they also would distribute other random books; sometimes mentioned in the indicia and sometimes not.

Footnotes:

* Eclipse is mentioned in the indicia

† Eclipse is not mentioned anywhere in the book, but catherine ⊕ yronwode (the editor-in-chief at Eclipse) lists the book on her web site.

‡ Eclipse isn’t mentioned anywhere, but the book was listed in an “On the Stands” on the inside front cover of another Eclipse book, so the Eclipse connection should be taken with a grain of organic Maldon salt.

I didn’t cover the trading cards properly in this blog series, so this index leans heavily on catherine ⊕ yronwode’s web site. I somehow missed that’s that it was: It says “Comics Warehouse” at the top and doesn’t scream that it’s yronwode’s site.

I’ve included links to the ones I did write about here, though. For details on the rest, go to yronwode’s web site.

Eclipse released two types of card sets: The initial cards weren’t really trading cards: They were packs of 36 cards in one little cardboard box, and you bought it, looked at the cards, left them out at conversational pieces, and that was it.

In 1992, Eclipse shifted to releasing most of the sets as real trading cards. There were 110 cards in each set (plus some “chaser”/bonus cards), and they were offered for sale from Eclipse as display boxes
containing 36 foil-wrapped packages of 12 cards. Each pack had a random selection of cards, so you had to buy a lot of those packs to get a complete set. Or trade extras, as the name implies.

The sets were often also available as uncut sheets, and Eclipse also sold logo-stamped binders with 9-pocket sleeves to hold the cards.

It’s… quite a shift from being a publisher of graphic novels to… whatever this business is, I guess.

Most of the cards I didn’t cover were released during the final years of Eclipse’s existence; 1992-1993. They seemed to be publishing more trading card sets during 1993 than comic books.

Eclipse Comics didn’t publish many newspaper comic strip reprints. Perhaps that’s because Ken Pierce Books (which was distributed by Eclipse throughout the 80s) specialised in that, publishing reprints of Modesty Blaise and Axa and stuff.

If you want to be really strict about it, Eclipse basically published just three “classic” reprints: Jiggs is Back, Krazy Kat and Johnny Comet. But in the index below, I’ve included also comics that originally ran in alternative weeklies and the like, too.