Eclipse Comics

~ the eulogy ~

Eclipse Enterprises was started in April 1977 by two brothers, Jan and Dean Mullaney, and it was built around an argument rather than around a character. Dean had read about Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster signing away Superman and then spending decades asking for their names back, and he decided that whatever he published would run the other way. Creators would keep their copyrights. They would be paid a royalty on what actually sold.

The first thing the company put out was Sabre in 1978, written by Don McGregor and drawn by Paul Gulacy, and it has a reasonable claim to being the first original graphic novel sold through the direct market of comic shops instead of through newsstand distribution. Editorial control passed to cat yronwode, who took the editor-in-chief title in October 1984 and became the public face of a publisher that had been two brothers and a principle.

By the middle of the 1980s Eclipse was moving around half a million comics a month and holding roughly eight percent of the American market, which put it third behind Marvel and DC. The catalog ran from Miracleman and Airboy at one end to Zot! at the other. It also carried one of the first serious English-language manga lines in the United States, translated and packaged under contract by Toren Smith's Studio Proteus.

The comics stopped in 1993. Operations stopped in 1994. Eclipse filed for bankruptcy on 21 December 1994, and what it had left went to a trustee.

~ the dossier ~

~ two sets of books ~

Studio Proteus had done the translation and packaging on the Japanese titles from 1988 onward, and when Toren Smith took his operation elsewhere he had an audit run. What the audit found was a second set of accounts, kept so that the royalties Eclipse had agreed to pay would be calculated against smaller numbers than the ones the company was actually posting. The California Superior Court awarded Smith $122,328.

That is the fact that sits worst against everything else here. The company existed because Dean Mullaney thought publishers cheated the people who made the work, and it was found, in court, to have been keeping the books that let a publisher do exactly that. Neil Gaiman, who had his own reasons to be paying attention, remembered the figure as a round hundred thousand. The Comics Journal printed the exact number.

~ the russian river ~

On 14 February 1986 the Russian River flooded the offices in Guerneville. Inventory was destroyed and the damage ran to about two hundred thousand dollars, though a good deal of the original artwork was pulled out wet and saved. A publisher with eight percent of a market and no real capital behind it does not absorb that. Every account of the next eight years treats the flood as the point where the arithmetic stopped working, and the lawsuit and the divorce as things that arrived at a company already short.

~ who ended up owning miracleman ~

The trustee held an auction on 29 February 1996 and Todd McFarlane won it with a bid of twenty five thousand dollars, which bought him the trademarks and the character rights. It also bought him two pallets of physical property out of storage. What he did not buy, because it had already lapsed, was any clean right to publish Miracleman, the series Alan Moore had written for sixteen issues and Neil Gaiman for eight. That question took another thirteen years. Gaiman and McFarlane litigated it for years. Marvel bought Mick Anglo's underlying copyright in July 2009, and Gaiman eventually handed his share across as well.

So the most valuable thing Eclipse ever published spent roughly two decades legally unprintable, and the only way it circulated in that window was as scans passed around by people who had found a copy somewhere. That is how it reached Turkey, if it reached here at all, because there was no other route. No shop carried it and no reprint existed to carry. A company whose entire founding premise was that a creator should be paid per copy sold ended up with its best work traveling the world in the one format that counts no copies and pays nobody.

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