Dean Mullaney
Encyclopedia
Dean Mullaney is an American
editor and publisher whose Eclipse Enterprises, founded in 1977, was one of the earliest independent comic book companies. Eclipse would publish some of the first graphic novels; become the first comics company to publish trading cards; and was one of the first comics publishers to champion creators' rights. In the 2000s, he established the imprint
The Library of American Comics at IDW Publishing
, to publish hardcover collections of comic strips.
musician Dave Mullaney of the band Hot Butter
. The brothers founded Eclipse Enterprises in Staten Island
, New York City
, New York
, in 1977, and the following year published one of the first original graphic novel
s, Sabre: Slow Fade of an Endangered Species
. Written by Don McGregor
and drawn by Paul Gulacy
, Sabre was additionally the first graphic novel sold through the new "direct market
" of comic-book stores. Eclipse went on to publish the anthology magazine
Eclipse
and the color-comic anthology Eclipse Monthly
, the first of an Eclipse Comics line that eventually included such titles and creators as The Rocketeer
by Dave Stevens
; Zot!
by Scott McCloud
; two volumes of Detectives Inc.
by McGregor and artists Marshall Rogers
and Gene Colan
, respectively; Stewart the Rat
by writer Steve Gerber
and artists Colan and Tom Palmer
; and the U.S. reprints of Miracleman
by Alan Moore
. Eclipse also brought out graphic novels featuring opera
adaptations, such as The Magic Flute
by P. Craig Russell
, and children's literature such as The Hobbit
by J. R. R. Tolkien
.
In the early 1980s, Mullaney met writer-editor Catherine Yronwode
, who was working for cartoonist and entrepreneur Will Eisner
. Yronwode recalled that Eisner and his wife Ann "hosted a party for me with all these comic book men I was flirting with. All these men came up; they all wanted to meet Will. One of them was Dean Mullaney, the co-owner of Eclipse Comics, a small independent publishing house. He was the most flirtatious." At some point afterward, once Yronwode finished her work organizing Eisner's archives, she and Mullaney became engaged and moved to California
, where they were married.
In 1986, Eclipse lost most of its back-issue stock in a flood. This event, along with the repercussions of Mullaney's divorce from Yronwode, by then his partner at Eclipse, and the mid-1990s
collapse of the direct market
distribution system, caused the company to cease operations in 1994, and file for bankruptcy in 1995. The company's intellectual property
rights were later acquired by Todd McFarlane
. Mullaney also attributed the company's demise to a problematic contract with the book publisher HarperCollins
. Eclipse's last publication was its Spring 1993 catalog, which was a complete bibliography of its publications.
In the mid-2000s, Mullaney approached IDW Publishing
with a proposal to publish hardcover reprints of American comic strips. This became the IDW imprint
The Library of American Comics, which debuted with the 2007 book The Complete Terry and the Pirates
, Vol. 1: 1934-1936, by Milton Caniff
. As Mullaney described, "Terry' s always been my favorite strip, and I was going to publish it in the early '80s (through Eclipse Comics), but Terry Nantier at NBM
beat me to it. Luckily, I've lived long enough so that 25 years later I'm in a position to release new editions of Terry. With Mullaney as its creative director, the imprint has gone on to published collections of strips including Dick Tracy
, Little Orphan Annie
, Bringing Up Father
, Family Circus, and Bloom County
.
People of the United States
The people of the United States, also known as simply Americans or American people, are the inhabitants or citizens of the United States. The United States is a multi-ethnic nation, home to people of different ethnic and national backgrounds...
editor and publisher whose Eclipse Enterprises, founded in 1977, was one of the earliest independent comic book companies. Eclipse would publish some of the first graphic novels; become the first comics company to publish trading cards; and was one of the first comics publishers to champion creators' rights. In the 2000s, he established the imprint
Imprint
In the publishing industry, an imprint can mean several different things:* As a piece of bibliographic information about a book, it refers to the name and address of the book's publisher and its date of publication as given at the foot or on the verso of its title page.* It can mean a trade name...
The Library of American Comics at IDW Publishing
IDW Publishing
IDW Publishing, also known as Idea + Design Works, LLC and IDW, is an American publisher of comic books and comic strip collections. The company was founded in 1999 and has been awarded the title "Publisher of the Year Under 5% Market Share" for the years 2004, 2005 and 2006 by Diamond Comic...
, to publish hardcover collections of comic strips.
Biography
Dean Mullaney and his brother, rock musician Jan Mullaney, are the sons of early electronicaElectronica
Electronica includes a wide range of contemporary electronic music designed for a wide range of uses, including foreground listening, some forms of dancing, and background music for other activities; however, unlike electronic dance music, it is not specifically made for dancing...
musician Dave Mullaney of the band Hot Butter
Hot Butter
Hot Butter was an instrumental cover band fronted by the keyboard player Stan Free. The other band members were Dave Mullaney, John Abbott, Bill Jerome, Steve Jerome, and Danny Jordan. They are best known for their 1972 cover of the Moog synthpop instrumental, "Popcorn", originally recorded by its...
. The brothers founded Eclipse Enterprises in Staten Island
Staten Island
Staten Island is a borough of New York City, New York, United States, located in the southwest part of the city. Staten Island is separated from New Jersey by the Arthur Kill and the Kill Van Kull, and from the rest of New York by New York Bay...
, New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
, New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
, in 1977, and the following year published one of the first original graphic novel
Graphic novel
A graphic novel is a narrative work in which the story is conveyed to the reader using sequential art in either an experimental design or in a traditional comics format...
s, Sabre: Slow Fade of an Endangered Species
Sabre (graphic novel)
Sabre , published in August 1978, is one of the first modern graphic novels and the first to be distributed in comic book shops...
. Written by Don McGregor
Don McGregor
Donald Francis McGregor is an American comic book writer best known for his work for Marvel Comics, and the author of one of the first graphic novels.-Early life and career:...
and drawn by Paul Gulacy
Paul Gulacy
Paul Gulacy is an American comic book illustrator best known for his work for DC Comics and Marvel Comics, and for drawing one of the first graphic novels, Eclipse Enterprises' 1978 Sabre: Slow Fade of an Endangered Species, with writer Don McGregor.-Early life and career:Paul Gulacy began...
, Sabre was additionally the first graphic novel sold through the new "direct market
Direct market
The direct market is the dominant distribution and retail network for North American comic books. It consists of one dominant distributor and the majority of comics specialty stores, as well as other retailers of comic books and related merchandise...
" of comic-book stores. Eclipse went on to publish the anthology magazine
Magazine
Magazines, periodicals, glossies or serials are publications, generally published on a regular schedule, containing a variety of articles. They are generally financed by advertising, by a purchase price, by pre-paid magazine subscriptions, or all three...
Eclipse
Eclipse Magazine
Eclipse Magazine was a black and white comics anthology magazine published by Eclipse Comics from 1981 to 1983.-Overview:...
and the color-comic anthology Eclipse Monthly
Eclipse Monthly
Eclipse Monthly was a full color comics anthology title published by Eclipse Comics. It introduced many characters that would later be featured in their own series or collections.-Series:Series published:*Capt. Quick and A Foozle by Marshall Rogers...
, the first of an Eclipse Comics line that eventually included such titles and creators as The Rocketeer
The Rocketeer
The Rocketeer is a superhero created by writer/illustrator Dave Stevens. The character first appeared in 1982 and is a homage to the Saturday matinee heroes of the 1930s and 1940s....
by Dave Stevens
Dave Stevens
Dave Stevens was an American illustrator and comics artist. He is most famous for creating The Rocketeer comic book and film character, and for his pin-up style "glamour art" illustrations, especially of model Bettie Page...
; Zot!
Zot!
Zot! is a comic book created by Scott McCloud in 1984 and published by Eclipse Comics until 1990 as a lighthearted alternative to the darker and more violent comics that predominated the industry during that period. There were a total of 36 issues, with the first ten in color and the remainder in...
by Scott McCloud
Scott McCloud
Scott McCloud is an American cartoonist and theorist on comics as a distinct literary and artistic medium...
; two volumes of Detectives Inc.
Detectives Inc.
Detectives Inc. is a series of two original graphic novels written by Don McGregor and published by Eclipse Enterprises in 1980 and 1985.The first, Detectives Inc.: A Remembrance of Threatening Green, featured black-and-white art by penciler-inker Marshall Rogers...
by McGregor and artists Marshall Rogers
Marshall Rogers
Marshall Rogers was an American comic-book artist best known for his work at Marvel and DC Comics in the 1970s, particularly as one of the illustrators of Batman and Silver Surfer...
and Gene Colan
Gene Colan
Eugene Jules "Gene" Colan was an American comic book artist best known for his work for Marvel Comics, where his signature titles include the superhero series, Daredevil, the cult-hit satiric series Howard the Duck, and The Tomb of Dracula, considered one of comics' classic horror series...
, respectively; Stewart the Rat
Stewart the Rat
Stewart the Rat is a graphic novel written by Steve Gerber, penciled by Gene Colan, and inked by Tom Palmer. Stewart was published in November 1980 by Eclipse Enterprises. Stewart the Rat was reprinted in January 2003 by About Comics....
by writer Steve Gerber
Steve Gerber
Stephen Ross "Steve" Gerber was an American comic book writer best known as co-creator of the satiric Marvel Comics character Howard the Duck....
and artists Colan and Tom Palmer
Tom Palmer (comics)
-Biography:Although Palmer has done a small amount of pencilling work , the vast majority of his artistic output since the 1960s has been as a comic book inker...
; and the U.S. reprints of Miracleman
Miracleman
Marvelman, also known as Miracleman for trademark reasons in his American reprints and story continuation, is a fictional comic book superhero created in 1954 by writer-artist Mick Anglo for publisher L. Miller & Son. Originally intended as a United Kingdom home-grown substitute for the American...
by Alan Moore
Alan Moore
Alan Oswald Moore is an English writer primarily known for his work in comic books, a medium where he has produced a number of critically acclaimed and popular series, including Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and From Hell...
. Eclipse also brought out graphic novels featuring opera
Opera
Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...
adaptations, such as The Magic Flute
The Magic Flute
The Magic Flute is an opera in two acts composed in 1791 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to a German libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder. The work is in the form of a Singspiel, a popular form that included both singing and spoken dialogue....
by P. Craig Russell
P. Craig Russell
Philip Craig Russell , also known as P. Craig Russell, is an American comic book writer, artist, and illustrator. His work has won multiple Harvey and Eisner Awards...
, and children's literature such as The Hobbit
The Hobbit
The Hobbit, or There and Back Again, better known by its abbreviated title The Hobbit, is a fantasy novel and children's book by J. R. R. Tolkien. It was published on 21 September 1937 to wide critical acclaim, being nominated for the Carnegie Medal and awarded a prize from the New York Herald...
by J. R. R. Tolkien
J. R. R. Tolkien
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, CBE was an English writer, poet, philologist, and university professor, best known as the author of the classic high fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion.Tolkien was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College,...
.
In the early 1980s, Mullaney met writer-editor Catherine Yronwode
Catherine yronwode
Catherine "Cat" Yronwode is an American writer, editor, graphic designer, typesetter, publisher, and practitioner of folk magic with an extensive career in the comic book industry....
, who was working for cartoonist and entrepreneur Will Eisner
Will Eisner
William Erwin "Will" Eisner was an American comics writer, artist and entrepreneur. He is considered one of the most important contributors to the development of the medium and is known for the cartooning studio he founded; for his highly influential series The Spirit; for his use of comics as an...
. Yronwode recalled that Eisner and his wife Ann "hosted a party for me with all these comic book men I was flirting with. All these men came up; they all wanted to meet Will. One of them was Dean Mullaney, the co-owner of Eclipse Comics, a small independent publishing house. He was the most flirtatious." At some point afterward, once Yronwode finished her work organizing Eisner's archives, she and Mullaney became engaged and moved to California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
, where they were married.
In 1986, Eclipse lost most of its back-issue stock in a flood. This event, along with the repercussions of Mullaney's divorce from Yronwode, by then his partner at Eclipse, and the mid-1990s
1990s
File:1990s decade montage.png|From left, clockwise: The Hubble Space Telescope floats in space after it was taken up in 1990; American F-16s and F-15s fly over burning oil fields and the USA Lexie in Operation Desert Storm, also known as the 1991 Gulf War; The signing of the Oslo Accords on...
collapse of the direct market
Direct market
The direct market is the dominant distribution and retail network for North American comic books. It consists of one dominant distributor and the majority of comics specialty stores, as well as other retailers of comic books and related merchandise...
distribution system, caused the company to cease operations in 1994, and file for bankruptcy in 1995. The company's intellectual property
Intellectual property
Intellectual property is a term referring to a number of distinct types of creations of the mind for which a set of exclusive rights are recognized—and the corresponding fields of law...
rights were later acquired by Todd McFarlane
Todd McFarlane
Todd McFarlane is a Canadian cartoonist, writer, toy designer and entrepreneur, best known for his work in comic books, such as the fantasy series Spawn....
. Mullaney also attributed the company's demise to a problematic contract with the book publisher HarperCollins
HarperCollins
HarperCollins is a publishing company owned by News Corporation. It is the combination of the publishers William Collins, Sons and Co Ltd, a British company, and Harper & Row, an American company, itself the result of an earlier merger of Harper & Brothers and Row, Peterson & Company. The worldwide...
. Eclipse's last publication was its Spring 1993 catalog, which was a complete bibliography of its publications.
In the mid-2000s, Mullaney approached IDW Publishing
IDW Publishing
IDW Publishing, also known as Idea + Design Works, LLC and IDW, is an American publisher of comic books and comic strip collections. The company was founded in 1999 and has been awarded the title "Publisher of the Year Under 5% Market Share" for the years 2004, 2005 and 2006 by Diamond Comic...
with a proposal to publish hardcover reprints of American comic strips. This became the IDW imprint
Imprint
In the publishing industry, an imprint can mean several different things:* As a piece of bibliographic information about a book, it refers to the name and address of the book's publisher and its date of publication as given at the foot or on the verso of its title page.* It can mean a trade name...
The Library of American Comics, which debuted with the 2007 book The Complete Terry and the Pirates
Terry and the Pirates
Terry and the Pirates is the title of:* Terry and the Pirates , the comic strip created by Milton Caniff* Terry and the Pirates , a radio serial based on the comic strip...
, Vol. 1: 1934-1936, by Milton Caniff
Milton Caniff
Milton Arthur Paul Caniff was an American cartoonist famous for the Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon comic strips.-Biography:...
. As Mullaney described, "Terry
NBM Publishing
NBM Publishing is an American publisher of graphic novels. The company specializes in non-superhero comic genres and has translated and published over 150 graphic novels from Europe and Canada, as well as several works by Americans...
beat me to it. Luckily, I've lived long enough so that 25 years later I'm in a position to release new editions of Terry. With Mullaney as its creative director, the imprint has gone on to published collections of strips including Dick Tracy
Dick Tracy
Dick Tracy is a comic strip featuring Dick Tracy, a hard-hitting, fast-shooting and intelligent police detective. Created by Chester Gould, the strip made its debut on October 4, 1931, in the Detroit Mirror. It was distributed by the Chicago Tribune New York News Syndicate...
, Little Orphan Annie
Little Orphan Annie
Little Orphan Annie was a daily American comic strip created by Harold Gray and syndicated by Tribune Media Services. The strip took its name from the 1885 poem "Little Orphant Annie" by James Whitcomb Riley, and made its debut on August 5, 1924 in the New York Daily News...
, Bringing Up Father
Bringing up Father
Bringing Up Father was an influential American comic strip created by cartoonist George McManus . Distributed by King Features Syndicate, it ran for 87 years, from January 12, 1913 to May 28, 2000....
, Family Circus, and Bloom County
Bloom County
Bloom County is an American comic strip by Berkeley Breathed which ran from December 8, 1980, until August 6, 1989. It examined events in politics and culture through the viewpoint of a fanciful small town in Middle America, where children often have adult personalities and vocabularies and where...
.
Awards
As creative director of The Library of American Comics., winner of three Eisner awards in the imprint's first four years, out of fourteen Eisner and Harvey Award nominations.- 2008 Eisner AwardEisner AwardThe Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, commonly shortened to the Eisner Awards, and sometimes referred to as the Oscar Awards of the Comics Industry, are prizes given for creative achievement in American comic books. The Eisner Awards were first conferred in 1988, created in response to the...
: Best Archival Collection/Project - Comic Strips: The Complete Terry and the PiratesTerry and the PiratesTerry and the Pirates is the title of:* Terry and the Pirates , the comic strip created by Milton Caniff* Terry and the Pirates , a radio serial based on the comic strip...
, Vol. 1: 1934-1936, by Milton CaniffMilton CaniffMilton Arthur Paul Caniff was an American cartoonist famous for the Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon comic strips.-Biography:...
. Award presented to IDW PublishingIDW PublishingIDW Publishing, also known as Idea + Design Works, LLC and IDW, is an American publisher of comic books and comic strip collections. The company was founded in 1999 and has been awarded the title "Publisher of the Year Under 5% Market Share" for the years 2004, 2005 and 2006 by Diamond Comic... - 2010 Eisner AwardEisner AwardThe Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, commonly shortened to the Eisner Awards, and sometimes referred to as the Oscar Awards of the Comics Industry, are prizes given for creative achievement in American comic books. The Eisner Awards were first conferred in 1988, created in response to the...
: Best Archival Collection/Project - Comic Strips: The Complete Bloom County, by Berkeley Breathed. Award presented to IDW Publishing - 2011 Eisner AwardEisner AwardThe Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, commonly shortened to the Eisner Awards, and sometimes referred to as the Oscar Awards of the Comics Industry, are prizes given for creative achievement in American comic books. The Eisner Awards were first conferred in 1988, created in response to the...
: Best Archival Collection/Project - Comic Strips: Archie, by Bob Montana. Award presented to IDW Publishing