Author: larsmagne23

Graphic Novel Index

In any history of Eclipse comics, it’s emphasised how they were the first US company to publish a graphic novel. And there are some quibbles both on the timing (Will Eisner’s A Contract With God was also published in 1978, but that’s a short story collection, and then there’s stuff from underground comix) and the format (the first few graphic novels Eclipse published were saddle-stitched, so they’re… magazines?), but anyway: They were early, and they were the only publisher who was focused mainly on graphic novels in the direct sales market.

That changed after a couple of years, and then it changed back in 1990, but here’s publisher Dean Mullaney talking about how Eclipse got started and how he managed to finance the first graphic novel Eclipse published, which was Sabre:

I brazenly asked them all to pay in advance for the orders. This money helped fund the project. Today, you need an investment banker; back then all we needed were fans starved for something good, and storeowners willing to pay up front in order to get new comics to sell. I also published a Sabre poster in December 1977, partially to appease people for the delay in the graphic album, but also to generate more working capital.

Then I went over the bridge to Brooklyn to talk with the Big Man himself—Phil Seuling, the only distributor to the comics market at the time. Phil put his reaction to my pitch on paper and handed it to me: a cartoon of Phil’s head, hair standing straight up, saying “$5.00 for a comic book!!!!”

Despite his bombastic outward appearance, Phil was one of the nicest people I ever met in comics. He was also one of the most encouraging to young publishers (I was 23 at the time). He agreed to take 200 copies and sent a solicitation out to his stores. A short time later, I got a call from Phil telling me to get over to his office. I thought he wanted his money back, but as it turned out, the reaction to his solicitation was so good that he wanted to double his order. Before Sabre saw print, Phil had upped his order several more times, and based on the strength of his continuing orders, we went into a second printing!

OK, so here’s an overview of all the graphic novels Eclipse published.

They used to include these pages in the back of some of the graphic novels, so that you can keep track of what to buy. I mean, if you’re obsessive. Also note that they have a separate category “Eclipse Books” that lists both books-about-comics like Women and the Comics, but also the Krazy + Ignatz newspaper comic strip reprint series.

Then Eclipse started numbering the graphic novels. Or albums. Note that in this numbering scheme, basically everything that’s squarebound has its own number, so Air Fighters Classics vol. 2 is number 20 here. And they stopped listing the books that were part of the “Eclipse Books” designation, presumably because there’s not enough space any more.

Then they changed their minds and started numbering based on semantics, not by the volume. So here all five volumes of Air Fighters Classics now get the number “15”, and everything from that point on has been renumbered. (And, curiously enough, Twisted Tales that used to be number 15 has now become number 16.)

(And also note that there’s two things that are numbered as “70”. And that all the Miracleman books share the same album number, even “Apocrypha”, while the two Valkyrie books get separate album numbers. And that Krazy + Ignatz is now a “graphic album” and not an “Eclipse Book”.)

I know, I know, that’s the nerdiest exegesis ever in the history of ever, but sites like comics.org have a tendency to say “and this is Eclipse Graphic Novel 27”, and these numbers aren’t stable. The horse has left the stable? Something like that.

And one more note until we get to the precious numbered list (based on the final Eclipse graphic novel that has a listing, which is Downside): When reading and writing this blog series, I concentrated on the first published instance of any work. Many of these graphic novels are collections of floppies, so many of the links below point to blog articles where I talk about the floppies, and not the graphic novels, I mean albums.

*phew*

Paper Doll Index

Paper dolls are a grand tradition in comics, and Eclipse embraced that fully by releasing two full volumes of paper dolls. But the regular comics also got in on the fun, and sometimes not the ones you’d expect, like Airboy…

Acme Index

In 1988, Eclipse started co-publishing, or distributing, or (as they called it in the indicia) “releasing” comics from Acme Comics. Cefn Ridout edited most of these, but they also had an editorial board that I assume like did something. Perhaps edited that board.

Many of these comics were printed in Europe, and many of them are reprints of material already published on the European mainland. So it’s a slightly odd setup where a British editor picks European comics to be (co-)published in the US, but Ridout has pretty good taste, so there’s a few good ones here. I can’t imagine that they did very well commercially in the US, though.

Oh Why

Hi, my name is Lars Ingebrigtsen and I wrote this blog about Eclipse Comics. That’s a strange thing to do, so I thought I’d perhaps better explain.

I was a fan of Eclipse Comics as a child, during their first phase when they were publishing things like Aztec Ace, Zot! and Destroyer Duck. I’ve recently finally gotten enough space that I could do some comics sorting, and I realised that re-reading those comics sounded kinda attractive. A nostalgic trip back to my childhood comics reading habits, even if they don’t exactly align with my current interests.

But looking at their 16 year publishing history, I saw how many strange twists and turns their publishing history took, and I grew interested in examining just what happened.

Eclipse is in many ways the quintessential 80s American independent publisher. They went through all the phases, from the early direct sales era, when you could publish as quirky comics as you wanted and still shift a lot of copies, to catering to the ever-more desperate shifting sands of comics collector whims and machinations from Marvel and DC Comics.

I also wanted to use this as an exercise in plain writing. I’ve lately become so tired of reading insider speak, so I’ve been using my most pedantic tone and spelling things out again and again. So it’s “during the Black and White Boom and Bust, Eclipse Comics editor-in-chief catherine ⊕ yronwode…” and not “during the B&WB&B, E-i-C cy…”. It’s a choice! I’m not really this boring usually! Honest!

If you feel like reading all these blog entries in the voice of the Simpson’s Comic Book Guy, please do.

But it’s really kind of silly using this voice for a subject as esoteric as Eclipse Comics. Anybody interested in the subject (and I would estimate that to be around four people) already knows what “E-i-C” means much better than I do, so it’s like eh.

Also, speaking of silly: I’m writing about comics that are almost 40 years old, and I’m writing about many of them very critically. I feel sort of bad doing that, because I feel like it might read like I’m going “YOU WROTE A BAD COMIC BOOK 40 YEARS AGO AND YOU SHOULD FEEL SORRY FOR WHAT YOU DID BACK THEN YOU BAD PERSON!!1!”, but… That’s not what I meant to do, and if I hurt creators’ feelings, I apologise. But I’m just a random Internet asshole, so you shouldn’t mind what I’m saying anyway.

And I hope I didn’t write anything too libellous, either.

But speaking of bad writing: If you notice a lot of speeling erors and hopeless grammer on these pages, that’s because… I haven’t read these blog posts myself. I just write them. Nobody has time for all that reading, eh?

Eh?

Oh.

Anyway, I had fun doing this series, but now I’m not going to read another 80s comic book for a year. But I must say that the idea of doing something that’s a bit closer to my heart, like Vortex Comics, or late-70s New York punk comix, sounds quite appealing.

I’ve also started eyeing the 80s output from Epic Comics, but hopefully that’s just a phase I’m going through and I’ll forget about that altogether. I’ll just keep repeating to myself: I do not want to do Epic Comics. I do not want to do Epic Comics. I do not want to do Epic Comics….

Since I’m a programming kind of human bean, and I’m an Emacs fan, I wrote an Emacs package to facilitate keeping track of the comics. Here’s the Eclipse data file I ended up with, which is mostly data from comics.org, but supplemented with the bits they lack.

Total Eclipse

This is a blog about the 80s independent comics publisher Eclipse Comics written by somebody with no association whatsoever with that publisher.

To the right, there should be a menu listing all the blog posts in this series, and below there’s a capsule history of Eclipse Comics with an index over all the comics (and some miscellany) they published. One thing I’ve found interesting about Eclipse is that over the years, Eclipse changed a lot, so I’ve broken the index into chunks. Somewhat arbitrary chunks, because Eclipse continued publishing comics from previous periods even as they shifted focus. Still, you can sort of see how they changed publishing strategies several times, pivoting from one approach to another.

I’m also going to be quoting quite a lot from an interview with Eclipse publisher and co-owner Dean Mullaney here.

The Refuge for Disgruntled Marvel Writers

Eclipse Comics’ first publication was the Sabre graphic novel, written by Don McGregor, a writer best-known for his work at Marvel Comics, and that set the tone for the first years of Eclipse. McGregor, along with other high-profile writers like Steve Gerber, Jim Starlin, Doug Moench, and artists like P. Craig Russell and Marshall Rogers, were dissatisfied with Marvel’s editorial restrictions, and also wanted to own their own work. They all ended up doing work for Eclipse Comics. And almost all of them went back to Marvel after Archie Goodwin started the Epic imprint, which allowed the creators to keep ownership to their works.

Here’s publisher Dean Mullaney:

RA: What prompted you to make the jump to comic publisher?

DM: I, like many fans, became disgusted with how Marvel was treating its creative talent. One night in 1977, at Don McGregor’s loft on the Bowery, I noticed a penciled drawing of (what I thought was) Jimi Hendrix on the wall. Don explained that it was a new character he was working on with Paul Gulacy. By the time the night was over, Eclipse was conceived with the idea that not only would he and Paul be given creative freedom, but that we would emulate the high-quality paper format of the Ed Aprill strip reprints. At the time, all comics were printed on crappy newsprint using plastic plates. Our concept was to use metal plates, print on 100 lb. vellum, and sell it as a book. We called it a “graphic album,” and it became the first graphic novel published for the comic’s specialty market.

RA: Sabre came out in 1978. Were you aware that McGregor had previously used the character in a couple of the Killraven strips over at Marvel? There he was a dark-skinned Hispanic but his name, weaponry and general appearance was basically the same.

DM: I don’t recall the Sabre character in Killraven. As I said however, Sabre was already conceived when I came aboard.

RA: What can you tell us about starting up Eclipse?

DM: I started Eclipse with whatever minimal publishing knowledge I gained publishing fanzines. The goals of Eclipse were threefold: allow creators to own their own material, to publish work I liked and thought other fans would like, and to publish in a high-quality format. My brother Jan and I formed the company. Jan’s band was touring with Bad Company at the time, so he had a little money and he asked me how much money it would cost to get it started. I said “$2,000” and that’s what he put up. Although it wasn’t much money, I thought, using my accounting background, that we could get by. I had agreed to pay Don, Paul and Annette Kawecki their going Marvel rates. No one was asked to work on the cheap. So, as my friend Chuck Dixon likes to say about me, I used guerrilla marketing techniques from the start. I wrote individual solicitation letters to fans whose names appeared in letters pages, and to individual store owners who advertised in RBCC, The Comic Reader, Alan Light’s The Comic-Buyer’s Guide, etc. I brazenly asked them all to pay in advance for the orders. This money helped fund the project. Today, you need an investment banker; back then all we needed were fans starved for something good, and storeowners willing to pay up front in order to get new comics to sell. I also published a Sabre poster in December 1977, partially to appease people for the delay in the graphic album, but also to generate more working capital.

Then I went over the bridge to Brooklyn to talk with the Big Man himself—Phil Seuling, the only distributor to the comics market at the time. Phil put his reaction to my pitch on paper and handed it to me: a cartoon of Phil’s head, hair standing straight up, saying “$5.00 for a comic book!!!!”

Despite his bombastic outward appearance, Phil was one of the nicest people I ever met in comics. He was also one of the most encouraging to young publishers (I was 23 at the time). He agreed to take 200 copies and sent a solicitation out to his stores. A short time later, I got a call from Phil telling me to get over to his office. I thought he wanted his money back, but as it turned out, the reaction to his solicitation was so good that he wanted to double his order. Before Sabre saw print, Phil had upped his order several more times, and based on the strength of his continuing orders, we went into a second printing!

Pacific Takeover

So for the first six years, from 1978 to 1984, Eclipse was a small, but well-respected publisher, publishing what seemed to be a cohesive and well-curated set of comics. In addition to the Marvel diaspora, they’d also dipped their toes into other waters, with Zot! and DNAgents, but we’re talking mostly superior genre comics.

Then Pacific Comics went bankrupt. Not due to publishing comics that didn’t sell, but because they had a distribution arm that went under. Eclipse bought the rights to all the comics that were already in the pipeline, and also the rights to comics that were only in the planning phase. This changed the tone and size of the company overnight: In one month, December of 1984, they published a whopping eleven ex-Pacific books, which came on top of the normal three to five they were normally doing.

The Imperial Phase

This cash infusion from the Pacific titles seemed to have two effects: First, having gotten the taste for easy pickings, Eclipse spent the next half year doing one micro-series after another of horror reprints, and most of them taken from the little-known Web of Horror early-70s magazine, along with a smattering of stories from Warren titles.

Then it all segued into the launch of their two most commercially successful titles, Scout and Airboy, as well as their most critically acclaimed title, Miracleman (which was part of the Pacific deal).

My guess is that Eclipse were finally making some money and getting their comics out to a larger audience. Which makes their next phase all the more bewildering, but may be related to The Flood.

The Black and White Boom and Bust

Eclipse Comics may not have created the speculator craze that was The Black and White Boom, but they certainly got in on the action. Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters was considered, by many, to be patient zero in this phenomenon which almost wiped out alternative comics in 1987.

While also shovelling out whatever black and white comic they could get their hands on, Eclipse also published a bewildering number of 3-D comics, and foreshadows Eclipse’s move from critically respected but small indie comics publisher to gimmick-first product extrusion factory.

How much of this was caused by geniune enthusiasm for 3-D and really bad black and white comics I have no idea. But it’s perhaps worth nothing these comics mostly appeared after the big Guerneville flood in February 1986, which completely flooded Eclipse’s offices and warehouse. Eclipse Comics had, at the time, a major mail-order back-issue operation going, and losing all the backstock had to be a major economic blow.

The Major Player Gambit

Eclipse buckled down and tried to make their action series a thing, centred around Airboy and related properties. This included the company-wide crossover series Total Eclipse, written by Marv Wolfman, the man who’d done Crisis on Infinite Earths for DC Comics. It didn’t really work out well, and Eclipse started stepping away from the monthly comics market… slowly.

Respectable and Adult

When running a mainstream-ish cheap action/adventure comic book company wasn’t sustainable, Eclipse went all in on upscale graphic novels. Most of these were adaptations of famous properties (like James Bond and The Hobbit), but also a number of political books like Brought to Light, which was about the CIAs crimes. This period also saw Eclipse continue their very successful Japanese translations, and their entry into what would come to consume Eclipse almost completely for their last couple of years: Non-sports trading cards.

Decline and Fall

The most successful property Eclipse had in its last few years was a deal with Clive Barker to adapt all of his Books of Blood short stories: The final book they published before going bankrupt was one of these. By 1992, rumours about Eclipse’s money troubles had begun popping up in the trade press, and writers like Neil Gaiman had stopped doing work for them until they got paid for the last thing they did.

Eclipse also went into a distribution deal with HarperCollins, and publisher Dean Mullaney claims that was the reason for their money woes:

RA: What did cause the collapse of Eclipse in 1994?

DM: I’ve never really told anyone why Eclipse folded. It had nothing to do with cat and I getting divorced. First of all, the comics specialty market was in the toilet. Like every other publisher, we were scrambling to sell enough comics to keep things going. We didn’t have the luxury of losing $150 million a year like one of competitors did. We were a small, family-run business. So things were incredibly tight. Eclipse didn’t have bankable continuing monthly series. We often published a wide variety of one-shots, mini-series and graphic novels because we liked them. Comic shops were closing and the remaining shops, for the most part, drastically cut orders on anything not from Marvel or DC.

We saw the comics specialty market alone was not a receptive place for our company’s survival, let alone expansion. My dream, from 1978 when I published Sabre, was to get graphic novels in mainstream bookstores. As the direct market became overcome with greed and milking readers by focusing on comics as investment, multiple covers, etc., I saw the future in the bookstores. We had great success with Ballantine on The Hobbit (75,000 copies in the first half year, not counting the comics shops where we sold 25,000 copies of the collection and over 100,000 each of the three $4.95 issues), and so when the opportunity arose to have a co-publishing deal with one of the world’s largest publishers, I had to go for it. 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.

But my plans for placing graphic novels in bookstores was still a good one. I just picked the wrong publisher and was about ten years too early. If Eclipse were around now, there’s no doubt that we would be the leading graphic novel publisher in mainstream bookstores.

However, Eclipse Comics were sued by Toren Smith, who won a judgement of $120K against Eclipse apparently for failing to pay him what they owed him. They filed for bankruptcy a few months after the sentencing.

And that was that.

1994: Rawhead Rex

Rawhead Rex (1994) adapted by Steve Niles, Les Edwards and Hector Gomez.

I covered the other five stand-alone Barker adaptations in another post, but I saved this for a separate blog post because it not only has an interesting origin story, but it’s the final thing Eclipse ever published, I think.

But before we get into that, let’s have a look at the book. Yup, that’s the standard Eclipse approach to adapting a short story: Cram in as much of the original text as possible in captions that float around nicely painted artwork. This time it’s by Steve Niles and Les Edwards.

It’s a remarkably grisly adaptation (but I’m not going to show any of the more full-on pages, because this is, after all, a family oriented blog). It’s not like the other Barker adaptations had shied away from showing violence or anything, but the sheer detail of Edwards’ carcasses and entrails is rather over the top.

The story, which I think I’ve read before as a short story back in the 80s, is all about male and female power. VERY SYMBOL. But it’s fun to see menstruation being a super power.

Edwards’ artwork looks very photo reference based. Except for the monster, which I hope isn’t? But, as usual, it means that the artwork is limited by how good actors they managed to scare up to be photo models. And, as usual, they aren’t very.

But you have to say that the stiffness of the characters suits the stiff and portentous prose, right?

Heh heh. That’s an impressively deranged looking priest.

Oh, yeah, now I see what the monster reminded me of: The xenomorph from Alien. But, of course, that monster was also modelled after a penis, so that’s not that surprising.

I didn’t think that this was a particularly exciting reading experience. Like I keep saying about these adaptations (I should find a new phrase (oh, wait, this is the last post I”M FREE!1!!)), it’s more like reading an illustrated prose story than reading a comic book. You could rearrange these drawings and blocks of texts and just have a traditional picture book, and you’d get the same effect.

The second story in this book, with artwork by Hector Gomez (which is about werewolves OOPS SPOILERS), is so drenched with prose that it looks like a parody of what you imagine an adaptation to be.

And I think they were scraping the bottom of the Books of Blood barrel here. It doesn’t seem like a particularly compelling story.

But here’s the stunning origin story of the Eclipse adaptation of Rawhead Rex. I’m quoting at length from Steve Bissette’s interview in The Comics Journal 185:

Around that same time was Rawhead Rex: similar lesson. Michael Zulli and I struck a deal with Steve Niles at Arcane Publishing; I was going to do the story adaptation, and we going to collaborate on the artwork.

Steve was a young guy, like 20, 21 — very young guy. Heaven knows how, but Steve ended up with the rights to Clive Barker’s material in comic book form some of it, in any case, Clive was also doing stuff with Marvel, which Steve Niles was not concerned with.

So we struck a deal to do Rawhead Rex, same thing happens, marketing machine goes into place. The only art that I was ever paid for by Arcane Press was a poster I did. I wasn’t paid in money, I was paid in Clive Barker portfolios. (laughs) Which I still have. Beautiful portfolios.

Arcane immediately started having business problems. Steve, being young and inexperienced, hired some business management people, who did what business management people do: They made sure they got paid. (laughs) It’s absurd to hire business managers for a business whereyou’ve only published one book. (He had a book Out called Bad Moon,)

The promo of Rawhead Rex was more important to Arcane Publishing than the doing of Rawhead Rex. When it came to the point where Arcane could not pay for the work, I came back to them with what I thought was a creative solution; Michael Zulli thought so too, and Clive Barker was willing to work with it: We’d serialize it in Taboo.

Now think about this for just a moment, Kim, this is how foolhardy Bissette was. I am now going to now work my ass off to pay myself to draw Rawhead Rex. At that time, it seemed worth it in the long run. Alan had been sending John Totleben and me Clive’s books in the Sphere paperback editions as they first came out in England. We met Clive in England, again through Alan, long before people in the U.S. were aware Of who Clive was. I had by that time read all six Books of Blood, thanks to Alan. I knew that Clive was a revelation, an important author in the genre.

At one point, we all met at the DC offices; Clive , actually did persuade Dick Giordano to let John and I adapt and illustrate any one of his stories we chose! So to me, to invest my own money into doing this serialization in Taboo made a certain amount Of sense. If we then retained all the rights to the Rawhead Rex property in comic form we had something to go to the book market with. Ah, that promised land again. So it sounds wacky in hindsight, but at the time I was able to rationalize it.

Zulli cleared his work schedule So that he could start work within a specific window, and I was overjoyed that I would finally draw a serial running in my own book; up to then I’d only done one or two short pieces in Taboo. I was working my ass off to make enough money to pay Alan and Eddie and all these other folks in Taboo.

I had broken “Rawhead Rex” down to comic layouts in a paperback copy of Books of Blood; it was going to be 92 pages long. I called up Clive and we worked Out a couple of narrative sequences I felt were necessary for the story to work as a visual narrative.

Things got sticky when Niles called and said, “Well, Arcane’s going out Of publishing. I’m going to work with Eclipse.” And I went, “No fuckin’ way” (laughs). This was after the Scout thing and all this other shit. Steve groaned and he says, “Not you, too — everybody says that.” He was losing long-term commitments he’ d had w ith people like Ted McKeever because he had to gravitate to where the money was to continue packaging and publishing projects, which was Eclipse. Eclipse wanted Steve Niles not because Steve was a visionary of any kind; he had the Barker stuff. They wanted to corner that market. They wanted to be, along with Marvel, the only publisher of the Barker material. It was one of the more lucrative properties Eclipse had in its final years.

THOMPSON: It kept them alive for a few more years, probably.

BISSETTE: Yeah, I’m sure. At that point, I told Steve, “Look, I just don’t see the sense in this.” What I didn’t know was Arcane’s option on “Rawhead” had expired, and Eclipse had purchased it.

One phone call from Dean Mullaney killed it for me.

I had already been through a little dance with Dean. Dean had approached me when Eclipse was putting together the Clive Barker anthology Tapping the Vein; he wanted me to take on doing one of the adaptations. I countered with, “My problems with Eclipse beside the point, Dean, you would not want to publish what I would draw from Clive’s stories.” And he said, “What do you mean?” He had only read one Barker story, the first story in the Books of Blood. They had already chosen the story for me, “Jacqueline Ess, Her Will and Testament,” in which the title character, a prostitute, can manipulate the molecules ofher ow n flesh to satisfy her customers; it ends with a vicious confrontation between the man she’s fallen in love with and her pimp, and she folds her body around her lover to become this single, organic being. Clive being Clive, it’s very explicit. I don’t have a problem with that. For me, especially with some of the stories Clive was doing at that time, it had to be explicit for you to understand it, like a David Cronenberg film. If you don’t see that shit in The Brood or Videodrome, it makes no sense to you — the concepts are so alien to how most people think Ilaughsl that it has to be made explicit. I read a passage to Dean, as her vagina folds around itself, and he was just mortified. “Well, couldn’t you put it in the shadows and have a caption?” “Dean, there’s my point, you’re not going to want to publish what I draw from this.”

So I had already had my little dance with them and bowed out. With Rawhead Rex, I got one call from Dean: “Well, we’re a team now!” Zulli’s and my attitude was, using the Dean’s metaphor, we weren’t baseball players, we were not about to be traded from one publisher to another. Dean’s arguing that I could still publish it in Taboo. “Dean, I am not going to bust my hump topayme, Michael Zulli and Clive Barker so you get a book at the end of it.”

That was the end of Rawhead Rex, and it got very vindictive, because we felt it important to publish our designs. Clive’s ownership of “Rawhead Rex” the Story is unquestioned, but we own those drawings that we did. That design is Zulli’s and my design, so we went through some pains to get them published —you ran them in the sketchbook in the Journal with my interview, we sent a press release with some of the drawings to the CBG. It was very important to us that that stuff, it be seen so that whatever Eclipse did, they would have to do it differently than had, and they ultimately did.

And here’s Bissette’s design for the monster:

That’s very different and not very penisy at all. I mean, except for the penis.

Anyway, sorry I had to quote at length, but it was difficult to cut anything. But it does confirm my hypothesis about how the Barker short stories ended up at Eclipse: Via Steve Niles, who ended up working for Eclipse.

But this is the final thing Eclipse published. Here’s what publisher Dean Mullaney said was the reason they closed up shop was:

Eclipse had signed a mutually-exclusive contract with HarperCollins to produce graphic novels. The plan was to first introduce titles by authors already known to booksellers — J.R.R. Tolkien, Clive Barker, Dean Koontz, Anne McCaffrey… we even had an original by Doris Lessing in the planning stages.

Unfortunately, HarperCollins didn’t, in my opinion, really understand what graphic novels were all about. And there were internal conflicts at HC, to which I was never privy, that left Eclipse holding the bag. They had given us an advance to start production, but that money ran out, and we had a full schedule in production. We never received a single royalty statement, let alone check, from HC’s sales to bookstores. The cash flow deficit eventually forced us to close up shop.

Now, Toren Smith sued Eclipse in December 1993. He won the suit and was awarded $122,238.59 in September 30th, 1994. (Those last 59c probably hurt the most.) Eclipse filed for chapter 7 bankruptcy on December 21st, 1994.

catherine ⊕ yronwode said this in 2013:

Now, Dean has directly stated that he was owed money by Harper-Collins (“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”), and that might explain his company’s failure to continue payments to Toren Smith — except for one thing: Dean and Jan could (and should) have sued Harper-Collins for breach of contract, and apparently they did not. So my next question would be to ask Dean why he and Jan did not sue Harper-Collins for failing to produce sales records and royalty statements.

Yeah, Mullaney’s explanation as to why Eclipse folded raises more questions than it answers, doesn’t it?

This is the last comic Eclipse published… but I’m sure you’ll be relieved to learn that it’s not the last post on this blog. I’ll be posting an overview of Eclipse’s history (through the comics), and then a number of indices that focus on certain parts of Eclipse’s output (i.e., a post to list all the graphic novels, another for the 3-D comics, another for the Japanese translations, and so on). We’ll return to some of these questions in those posts.

Is there any way to read old US court transcripts, by any chance?

[edit some time later: There is! Read the documents here.]

1993: Downside

Downside (1993) by Dave McNamara and Peter Ketley.

This is one of the very few comics from Eclipse from the early 90s that I bought at the time (instead of for this blog series). But I can’t remember anything at all about it, so it didn’t make much of an impression.

This squarebound “album” size comic was originally published in the UK as a series of floppies.

Eclipse publisher Dean Mullaney talks about there being more to comics than “juvenile power fantasies”, which is very true, of course. But it’s a little ironic that Eclipse launched the FX line the same year they publish this, and that’s explicitly a line of juvenile power fantasies. Don’t you think?

The artwork is a bit on the basic side. They stick to a nine panel grid (which was very popular at the time for crossover semi-literate comics, I mean, er, more high tone comics. But the first thing I thought when I saw this page was “Carol Swain!” And then I started to wonder why, because her artwork is stunning and beautiful, while this… isn’t. Perhaps it’s just that angle in the last panel there… It’s a kinda Swain angle.

But this is rather relentlessly ugly. I think the most disturbing thing about the artwork is that it doesn’t seem to have any sense of space. Somehow the characters often are in vaguely defined environments that doesn’t help with the flow of the story. I mean… just take a detail like the door in the page above. In the first panel the door is open like 50 degress. Then in the fourth panel, the door is almost completely open, so 80 degrees. Then the next panel it’s hard to say what it’s supposed to be, but the panel after that, it’s at 30 degrees.

Yeah I know, it’s an irrelevant detail, but the book is like that: There’s no sense of space; of place.

And what are the odds that there are two people called Serious Joe in one comic book!?

But apart from the artwork, the main problem with this book is that every single line in the book is something that you could see somebody utter on a mid-80s Channel 4 “relevant” TV series. That’s not a bad thing… if this were a mid-80s Channel 4 “relevant” TV series, but it’s not. It’s a comic book, and reading scene after scene directly transposed from an imaginary TV series to the page makes for dull reading.

The artist does whip up a couple of pages here and there that has some visual impact. That’s not spread transposed from a TV series, but something almost like a proper comic book.

This book is mainly about a slum lord intimidating and evicting tenants, and how the tenants protest and try to fight back. But about half the pages (it seems like) are taken up with a sub-plot about Serious Joe II coming back, and the characters are asking themselves why, and why he left, and we get a lot of flashbacks to things happening in the past (like in the spread above).

We’re never shown why we should care. He doesn’t seem very interesting, and all that relationship stuff is cliché beyond the call of duty.

Why! WHYYY!!!

Oh, that’s a kinda Swainish drawing again, but not really.

The artwork does improve as the book progresses. It was drawn over a two year period, apparently, and the artist grows to spot his blacks a lot better, and hide his scratchy line effectively. There’s almost a Tardi starkness to it in parts.

Indeed.

It’s surprisingly difficult to find any reaction to this book on the web. Here’s one from Goodreads:

The plot make sit difficult to sympathise with anyone. The squatters are, after all, not legally entitled in any way to the flats they’re staying in; Carmichael is utterly villain material, as are his goons, his trophy secretary, the police, unseen journalists, politicos…in fact anyone outside of the squatters’ immediate circle.

I’m guessing that’s an American.

Here’s a Brit from the Usenet:

Downside is a very `real’ comic strip, much more so than Jamie Hernandez’s supposedly real-life cute punk shennanigans. Dole queues, cigarette butts, demos, riot police, filing cabinets and half-bricks. More PC than Crisis, if such a thing is possible.

[…]

The art has always been a bit of a weakness in Downside, but it’s improving with leaps and bounds. Minimal, sketchy B&W, reminds me of Eddie Campbell (of From Hell in Taboo) a bit. The scene where the riot starts, with hands reaching for bottles and cans and bricks until it finally explodes into a borderless panel is rather wondeful.

1993: Trapped

Trapped (1993) adapted by Edward Gorman and Anthony Bilau from a novel by Dean R. Koontz.

As horror comics go (and I’m assuming that that’s what this is), that’s not a very scary cover. The mouse? rat? there looks more cuddly than anything else…

Bilau’s artwork looks very much like Spanish children’s comics from the 60s. Only painted, which gives it an even further kitsch look.

For fuck’s sake!

The father had been killed by an unshaven, drunk driver… while on his way to chair a fund-raising committee… at a church.

I’ve never read any Koontz books because I’ve just naturally assumed that they suck, and I’m already patting myself on my back for my excellent prejudices. There’s so much pat sentimentality here.

A common problem with comics adaptations of novels is that they try to maintain the mood of the book by just cramming as many words as possible into the comic. Gorman doesn’t do that, but there’s still some unnecessary overlap between the captions and what the images show.

But it’s not overwhelming. For instance, here, while she’s walking around looking for those pesky rats (well, she doesn’t know that yet), she ruminates on other things, and the captions don’t simply restate what we already see. It works, and I think probably is faithful to the mood of the book.

I’m guessing Bilau has his background in romance comics, because he doesn’t do action very well. Above, she’s supposed to finally see the monstrous rats and be really scared.

On the other hand, Bilau totally super-dramatises scenes where people are just standing around talking. Those are some totally bizarre angles to use here.

And what’s really going on here? Are there two separate explosions somehow? Why don’t they see each other when the woman jumps out of the burning building a couple of pages later? WHAT”S GOING ON.

Anyway, I’m assuming that this adaptation (only 80 pages) shortens the novel, like, a lot, because it’s not a very satisfactory read. Just when things get exciting (she discovered the rats and somebody tries to brave the snowy woods to get to her), it’s basically over. They did manage to make the ramp-up exciting… but what a let-down.

Hm… Wow! From The Comics Journal #155:

Eclipse Books has announced that it is engaging in a joint venture with HarperCollins Publishers to develop and publish a series Of graphic novels The series will include both original graphic novels and adaptations Of published novels and stories. HarperCollins will distribute the books to the U.K. and British Commonwealth, HarperPaperbacks will distribute to the U.S. book trade, and Eclipse Books will distribute to the U.S. direct comic market. Playing the Game, a graphic novel by Doris Lessing and Daniel Vallely, will be the first Eclipse/HarperCollins release in January of 1993. Twenty-four titles are planned for 1993 and 1994, among them Trapped by Dean Koontz, Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey, Miracleman: The Golden Age by Neil Gaiman, Revelations by Clive Barker and Uh-oh City by Jonathan Carroll and Dave McKean.

24 titles! I’m not sure how many were published, but not more than a handful, I think.

Here’s a review:

This was kind of disappointing on the narrative aspects. The story had real potential, huge smart rats?! Come on, could have been way, way creepier. The ending was the worst part, it just sort of … ended. Unexpectedly and disappointingly.

The illustrations were superb, though, Anthony Bilau did a grand job. The best part was the doggo, a Lab named Doofus!

Here’s another:

I didn’t read this book. I put it on my list of books to read but I see it’s like a comic book. I hate comic books. So I’m going to mark this one as “read” just so that I don’t go check it out again.

Heh heh.

This one is more to the point:

Clichéd premise? Yes. James Herbert’s The Rats put through the filter of a really terrible B-movie? You bet. A potentially interesting thematic set-up of grief and feeling trapped that in no way resolves, and is only tokenly referred to in the final page? That’s the one.

And it’s really not helped by the artwork. There are times when you’re expected to rely on characters’ reactions to scenes, but this is impossible because their faces have the emotional nuance of dough. The lines are imprecise, the proportions off, the villainous rats hackneyed.

1993: Deadbeats

Deadbeats (1993) #1-6 by Richard Howell and Ricardo Villagran.

This is the fourth and final Claypool Comics series that Eclipse Comics distributed/co-published/whatever during Eclipse’s waning days. If it hadn’t been for these comics, Eclipse would have published virtually nothing but trading cards (and other collectables) during the last half of 1993 into 1994.

The Claypool series have been more miss than hit, in my opinion. Elvira was surprisingly fun, and Soulsearchers had its moments, but the other “serious” series, Phantom of Fear City, wasn’t much cop, so I read this book with low expectations.

And those expectations turned out to be prescient.

The obvious comparison for this series is the Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie which had been released a year or two before this comic book. While the vampires in the TV series were more… sympathetic…? the vampires here are over-the-top evil and grisly and spout lines that’s hard to tell whether are supposed to underscore that evil or be… funny?

“I can hardly wait to bit his cheeks– his chest!” “He’s mine, too, Colleen! I get the lower regions!”

*sigh*

We also get a really extended torture scene later, but then again, everything in this book takes forever.

Writer/editor Howell was probably best known for his Portia Prinz of the Glamazons series back then. It was also extremely wordy, and had several characters that talked in exactly the same convoluted way.

Howell continues where he left off, really, with half the characters spouting in-credible sentences, while a few of the other characters make fun of the excessive erudition.

The characters also have a tendency to state, out loud, to the other characters, what their motivations are. I guess that’s… efficient?

The poor letterer has huge problems fitting all the speech balloons in, and getting them to read in a natural way. Several times an issue I had to backtrack to read the dialogues in the intended sequence, so perhaps he should have used the arrow trick more often… although in this instance, it seems rather superfluous.

And as always in these Claypool comics, editor Howell writes an essay about how the comic came to be. This time, the rationale seems straightforward enough: It’s a soap opera with vampires.

Eclipse distributed this comic, but that can mean a wide variety of things. Here Howell thanks them “for help with production, typesetting, press coverage, printing, and punctuation”. So I guess Claypool handled the editorial bits, and Eclipse did all the practical things, including readying the comic for the printer?

The “soap opera” thing makes a lot of sense. The plot here is rather convoluted, with the four main vampires having some kind of thing going that they won’t explain to the newbie vampire (and what that thing is isn’t explained by the sixth issue, so we’re also getting inspiration from daytime soaps for the pacing). There are also further vampire factions, and different people fighting against the vampires…

It’s a large cast, but I have to say that Howell handles that admirably. He’s also helped by having some diversity to his character design (although not much diversity otherwise), and Villagran does a professional inking job. But skimp out on backgrounds now and then.

There are three comics set in the “Fear City” universe, and the promotional material promised that these comics would interact and give you a fuller reading experience. That didn’t really happen much, but you get these occasional references to the other comics.

Howell makes sure that we get a full recap of what’s going on in every issue.

SUCH JOKE.

Some letter writers note the wordiness (and makes comparisons to Portia Prinz).

One weird thing about Howell’s depiction of the eeevil vampires is that he virtually always has them smiling and writing around as if in perpetual ecstasy. But I guess it kinda makes sense…

Oh, we get a callback to that initial scene of slaughter and we get to have a gay joke in the book, and also an admonition against noting that there was a gay joke in the book. Self criticism is the first defence against outside criticism.

Uhm… fortnight-and-a-half? I don’t think that’s right… it’s published every six weeks, but perhaps Howell just likes the word “fortnight” and wanted to work it in somehow…

For the first time in the Fear City books, we get a genuine crossover as Soulsearchers and Company show up and actually participates in the plot.

Oh, yeah, one of the vampires gets moody and visits his mother. More shades of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but of Buffy to come. Which makes me wonder whether Joss Whedon, the Buffy creator, ever read this comic book? Because the complex, soap opera plotlines combined with angsty vampires is what that show was partially about.

I’m guessing that the plot turned more to this guy as the series progressed? He’s the king of the vampires or something, but it’s only hinted at during the first six issues.

Oh, “month-and-a-fortnight”. That’s what Howell tried to write last time…

A writer notes that Deadbeats is rather grisly, but it did let off somewhat after the first issues, I think.

And here’s where I leave this series, because Eclipse stopped distributing it after issue number six. And I’m not in the least bit tempted to continue to read it, because getting through it was a chore.

But other people liked it, and it continued to be published for more than a decade. Howell and Villagran remained the creators for an impressive run, and even continues doing the strip online to this day, after Diamond Distributors refused to carry it in 2007.

Not because of the content or anything, but because it sold so little that Diamond didn’t find it worth their time to sell it. Which I think is rather fascinating: The Claypool books made enough money for the creators to do? But not enough for the distributor?

Or is Howell independently rich and subsidised the books? It’s weird.

Some of the Deadbeats comics seem to have been collected and republished, but not extensively.

I was unable to locate any reviews of Deadbeats on the internet, even when consulting the Dark Web (i.e., page two and three of the Google search results).

1993: Soulsearchers and Company

Soulsearchers and Company (1993) #1-6 by Peter David, Amanda Conner, Jim Mooney, Richard Howell et al.

This is the third of the Claypool comics that Eclipse distributed during 1993/94, and it’s a supernatural comedy thing.

Having a lot of Pinocchio-like dolls tell lies to make their noses grow so they can stab their victim with the noses is a pretty, er, original? idea. I mean: I hope so!

The humour isn’t very incisive. It’s mostly a stream of low level bad jokes and puns, but that’s OK.

Microsoft II. Such topicality.

David takes the occasional jab at giving the characters some depth, and Conner’s on-point (and very readable) artwork helps quite a bit.

But it’s not… Hm. I find myself at a loss two write pretty much anything about this book, because I feel there just isn’t that much to write about. It’s a competent, somewhat amusing, nicely drawn, pretty inventive comic, but it’s just not very… interesting. At least to me, right now, but I may just be burned out on reading these comics now.

As a bonus, we get the original pitch for the comic book. David and Howell originally wanted to do it over at Marvel Comics, and using characters from Marvel’s super-hero/magical cast of characters, but they never let us know who those characters originally were, so half the letters try to guess.

Popular guesses are Scarlet Witch and The Vision, or Patsy Walker (Hellcat) and that guy who’s called… er…. De… I forget. Oh, yeah, Daimon Hellstrom. I think the latter sounds more likely.

As the series progresses, it becomes more of a parody book than a humorous monster-of-the-week (I mean six weeks) book, so we get a parody of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, who’s called Dream, or here: Dweeb.

Ok, they can’t all be winners.

This is part of the Fear City line of books, and the schtick was supposed to be that there’s a new book every two weeks, with lots of interconnections between the titles. That doesn’t really seem to happen a lot, though, so perhaps they changed their minds. We’re left with the occasional reference to the Deadbeats title (which I’ll post about tomorrow, I guess), but that’s about it. At least in the six issues I read.

Also, as the series progresses, Conner’s artwork (inked by Jim Mooney) gets progressively more attractive, with juicy blacks and more inventive (but still very readable) layouts.

And this is the best-selling of the three Fear City books. I’m not surprised, because that Phantom of Fear City was a bit of a dog.

And then we get an Image Comics parody issue, with about a page each to parody a separate Image title.

I love the Rob Liefeld. There’s something about this panel that’s just perfect, what with the two characters to the left, with their over-the-top outfits, staring blankly in different directions, with their mouths wide open (while not shouting) that’s quintessential Liefeld.

And with issue six, I say farewell to this series, because Claypool wisely stopped using Eclipse as distributors. (Eclipse went bankrupt a few months later of unrelated causes.)

Peter David continued writing this series until 2007, when it was cancelled after more than 80 issues. Which is an impressive run.

A couple of collections have been released, but most of the run remains uncollected, apparently.