Comments on: RETRO REVIEW: Eclipse, The Magazine # 1 https://gobacktothepast.com/retro-review-eclipse-the-magazine-1/ Your Source for Everything Pop Culture Thu, 05 Apr 2018 21:27:11 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.4 By: Greg Turner https://gobacktothepast.com/retro-review-eclipse-the-magazine-1/#comment-3903 Thu, 05 Apr 2018 21:27:11 +0000 https://gobacktothepast.com/?p=28799#comment-3903 Thanks for you additional comments on my post, Dave Ryan! I love Marshall Rogers artwork and I too enjoyed B.C. Boyer’s Masked Man comics!

]]>
By: Dave Ryan https://gobacktothepast.com/retro-review-eclipse-the-magazine-1/#comment-3898 Sat, 31 Mar 2018 05:58:45 +0000 https://gobacktothepast.com/?p=28799#comment-3898 The outstanding “I Am Coyote” series (serialized in ECLIPSE magazine in black-and-white) was later collected and beautifully colored in an Eclipse Graphic Novel.

Most of the material has an underground (or “middleground/overground”) feel to it, and the names such as Metzger, Trina Robbins, Howard Cruse, and mainstreamers who worked for STAR-REACH and IMAGINE such as Marshall Rogers and Jim Starlin.
ECLIPSE magazine ran 8 issues. The other series that I really enjoyed in it is “The Masked Man” by B.C. Boyer, a warm and Eisner-esque human-interest series, with a lot of humor.

And it should be noted that ECLIPSE magazine was followed by an ECLIPSE MONTHLY comic that ran 10 issues. The first four ECLIPSE MONTHLY issues had “Cap’n Quick and a Foozle” by Marshall Rogers, which is a loose spin-off of characters in his “I Am Coyote” series. In all 10 issues is B.C. Boyer’s “Masked Man”. Other highlights are an outstanding western series called “Rio” (in issues 1, 2, 5, 9 and 10. And another western feature, “Carlos MacEllyr” in issues 6-8, where he fights rogue Mexican soldiers and tracks down a rabid killer bear. Plus “Static” by Steve Ditko in issues 1-4 (a superhero/science experiment gone out of control story), and “Dope” by Trina Robbins (a Fu Manchu-type series about heroin addiction and trafficking.) I like how many creators and series continued over from ECLIPSE magazine into ECLIPSE MONTHLY. The latter ECLIPSE MONTHLY series more mainstream/alternative, and less “underground” in feel.

Also of note from Eclipse at the same time (1983), another Englehart/Rogers collaboration was SCORPIO ROSE, that ran two issues. It actually began in 1981 with a MADAME XANADU one-issue special by Englehart/Rogers, that might have continued as a series. Apparently Englehart was unhappy with his treatment by DC, and walked away from MADAME XANADU, and two years later revised the unused scripts into the new character of SCORPIO ROSE.
Also from roughly the same era, and well worth picking up, were Englehart/Rogers’ MISTER MIRACLE 19-22, and DETECTIVE COMICS/Batman 471-476. All among my favorites. The Batman stories reprinted in an inexpensive BATMAN: STRANGE APPARITIONS trade paperback, and more recently in BATMAN: MARSHALL ROGERS hardcover, also more recently released as a trade. Would that material this good were not so difficult to find these days in the current fare offered.

]]>