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. RA: What prompted you to make the jump to comic publisher?ĭM: I, like many fans, became disgusted with how Marvel was treating its creative talent. 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. They all ended up doing work for Eclipse Comics. Craig Russell and Marshall Rogers, were dissatisfied with Marvel’s editorial restrictions, and also wanted to own their own work. McGregor, along with other high-profile writers like Steve Gerber, Jim Starlin, Doug Moench, and artists like P. The Refuge for Disgruntled Marvel WritersĮclipse 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. I’m also going to be quoting quite a lot from an interview with Eclipse publisher and co-owner Dean Mullaney here. Still, you can sort of see how they changed publishing strategies several times, pivoting from one approach to another.

Somewhat arbitrary chunks, because Eclipse continued publishing comics from previous periods even as they shifted focus. 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. 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.

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

Total eclipse