Brand Echh: TOTAL ECLIPSE #1

In 1988, Eclipse comics was celebrating its ten-year anniversary as a publisher. Founded by Jan and Dean Mullaney, Eclipse was one of the earliest entrants into the nascent Direct Sales marketplace of Comic Book specialty shops. The company was also a proponent of creator-ownership and offered a better publishing arrangement than the mainstream outfits of the era. Over that decade, Eclipse had put out a lot of good work, though of late their efforts had been shifting away from what had once been their bread and butter.

At the beginning, Jan and Dean as well as their editor Cat Yronwode, had been fans of the comic book scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Consequently, a lot of their initial output was built around those creators who were particular fan favorites in that era, in particular writers such as Don McGregor, Steve Gerber and Steve Englehart. They were also invested in the growing movement to create more sophisticated stories for more adult audiences, works of personal expression that operated in a number of different genres beyond the tried and true super hero format.

But the thing Eclipse found as the decade of the 1980s wore on was that, while their intentions were good, the Direct Market was just as much enamored of super heroes as the mainstream newsstand outlets. Consequently, they began shifting their publishing focus over time, releasing more and more series that had a super hero bent to them, for all that most of them also were works by interesting key creators and were a bit off the beaten path of what a Marvel or DC might release.

Which brings us back around to Eclipse’s 10th anniversary. To celebrate this milestone, the firm decided to release a special series–one built in emulation of the popular new movement in comic books at that time. TOTAL ECLIPSE would be a line-wide crossover series bringing together characters from throughout the Eclipse publishing line, including heroes both company-owned (Eclipse had begun a number of titles to develop a nascent super hero universe by this point) as well as creator-owned. So it was to be unflinchingly commercial, if at odds with some of teh foundational ethos that teh outfit had been founded upon. But needs must.

In an attempt to made TOTAL ECLIPSE as appealing to fans and retailers as possible, in particular ones that hadn’t given the company the time of day to any great extent, the company enlisted the services of writer Marv Wolfman to write the crossover. At the time, Marv was best-known both for the top-selling NEW TEEN TITANS as well as for having written CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS for DC, largely considered to be the best of the big crossover series.

To illustrate the project, which was going to involve a host of characters drawn in a host of styles in their own series, Eclipse lined up Bo Hampton, one of a pair of brothers who had been doing fantasy and high adventure series for the most part. Hampton wasn’t as exciting or detail-oriented as CRISIS’s George Perez, but he had a straightforward commercial style that was more likely to appeal to the mainstream super hero readers that Eclipse was chasing than many of their other artistic options. Popular artist Bill Sienkiewicz was commissioned to paint the covers to the series.

In coming up with a plot central enough and massive enough to unite an assortment of Eclipse characters from across time and space, Wolfman hit upon Zzed, an immortal villain from a pair of Airboy stories first published in the Golden Age. Eclipse had revived AIRBOY in a new series with the original hero’s son having taken up the name, so this fit in well with the prototypic universe that Eclipse was constructing. It did mean that pretty much nobody among the audience would have read the original Zzed stories at the time that TOTAL ECLIPSE came out, but using such obscure and ancient continuity had never stopped Roy Thomas before.

As an additional push, Eclipse decided to release TOTAL ECLIPSE in what was then largely known colloquially as the “DARK KNIGHT format”–that is to say squarebound with cardstock covers and a higher overall price point. Since the release of Frank Miller’s DARK KNIGHT RETURNS two years earlier, this format was seen as a signifier of a project that was more adult-oriented than the typical super hero comic book, and had been used only sparingly since then. But the floodgates were about to open on it, and TOTAL ECLIPSE was far from the only release in 1988 and 1989 to be put out in that format, thus blunting its effectiveness.

The first chapter of TOTAL ECLIPSE largely confined itself to characters who were a part of Eclipse’s home-grown super hero universe: Airboy and his fellow aviators Valkyrie, Sky Wolf and Black Angel, the super hero Strike and his WWII-progenitor Sgt. Strike, the Prowler and his new protege, and the members of the New Wave, a super hero team that headlined their own series for a short while. Eventually, though, the story would branch out to include a variety of other characters from other realities, including Aztec Ace, the Black Terror, the Liberty Project, Miracleman and even Beanish from Tales of the Beanworld.

Probably the best-remembered issue of the run of TOTAL ECLIPSE is #4, which included a Miracleman back-up story by Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham, the first they would produce as a team. Eventually, that story would be reprinted as a part of their run on MIRACLEMAN after Alan Moore and John Totleben’s tenure came to a close.

As far as I can tell, TOTAL ECLIPSE sold all right but didn’t really set the comic book world on fire. Eclipse continued their publishing operations for another five or six years before throwing in the towel as the marketplace became more competitive. But the notion that TOTAL ECLIPSE would turn around the fortunes of the company’s haphazard super hero line died on the vine. It wasn’t a CRISIS or even a SECRET WARS II. But it was the first line-wide crossover attempted by an independent publisher.