Thread by @Comrade_Bullski

Alright everyone the time has finally come. I've put this off for so long because of reasons I will soon get into but now it's time for us to talk about Malibu Comics.

WARNING: This thread will contain discussion of sexual violence, theft, racism and other sensitive topics.

Why did I put off this retrospective? Many reasons.

Several of the people involved in the history of Malibu are very sordid or have very troubled histories.

The publishing history is a tangled mess.

And other things!

But now, strap in as we dive into the history of Malibu - the scandals, the allegations, the lawsuits... and the comics.

This thread will cover the period of 1986 to 1991, focusing on the first five years of the publisher's life. The famous Ultraverse and Genesis lines will have their own dedicated thread later. I realize those lines are what most people associate with Malibu, but trust me...

...you want to be there for the early history of the company because there's SOME STUFF GOING ON HERE YOU GUYS.

Our story begins, as many stories do, with four mutated turtles trained as ninjas by a giant rat.

Independent comics have always been a factor of varying size on the US and Canadian comic markets, but the immense success of Eastman & Laird's TMNT in 1984 changed everything.

It cannot be overstated what a huge motivating force the runaway success of TMNT was to independent comics creators. Here was a concept created on a napkin in a coffee shop by two "nobodies" that took the nation by storm, and eventually the world.

One person who quickly took note of this success was Scott Mitchell Rosenberg, the owner of a small comics chain called Sunrise Distribution. Rosenberg quickly took notice of the exploding independence scene and realized that there was a future in these small-press publications.

Rosenberg began funding several small-press publishers such as Wonder Comics, Amazing Comics, Imperial Comics and one other that we'll get into later. The titles published were eclectic to say the least, ranging from gritty violence to parody to superheroes.

Around that time Dave Olbrich, a comics fan who had risen to work for Fantagraphics and the Comics Journal (and was one of the people behind the Kirby and Eisner awards) was looking for a way to start up his own comic book company...

...together with his friend, writer Tom Mason of which there are scant few images on the internet, apparently.

Rosenberg talked with Olbrich and Mason and agreed to bankroll a new company which they called Malibu Comics. However, though Malibu was founded in 1986, you will not find many comics with the Malibu name or logo on the cover until a lot later.

Why?

One of the small companies Rosenberg had founded was called Eternity Comics. When Malibu was being created, Rosenberg closed down all his other ventures and poured everything into the new company, but he retained the name Eternity to be used as a publishing brand.

This was actually not an unusual move in the publishing world. While "Marvel Comics" was the brand on the comic books, the company publishing them wasn't called "Marvel" until quite a long time after Stan and Jack's FF#1

Malibu's very first published comic is also one with the messiest history. Ex-Mutants #1 came out in 1986 under the Eternity branding. Created by David Lawrence and future superstar Ron Lim, Ex-Mutants was the tentpole of Malibu's early publishing.

Ex-Mutants told the story of a radiation-ravaged future earth where a group of hideously deformed mutant humans were restored to full health and beauty by an eccentric scientist, and their subsequent adventures across their shattered world.

Ex-Mutants was clearly meant to evoke and draw in readers via the X-Men sounding title, but the setting and style was more akin to the popular post-apocalypse stories that flourished in the 80s such as the Mad Max movies.

In 1987 Ex-Mutants gave rise to a spin-off: The New Humans. This was the start of a small "universe" of titles often called the "Shattered Earth" universe.

At this time Olbrich and Mason had also hired Chris Ulm to work as an editor for Malibum and Ulm would go on to be quite influential on the company later.

1987 also saw Malibu launch another title - Shuriken! This title however had its roots even further back.

Shuriken was created by writer-artist Reggie Byers and first appeared in a self-published comic in 1985 chronicling the story of Kyoko Shiada, a female ninja in the United States working as a mercenary.

Byers drew Shuriken in the style of classic manga and was explicitly inspired by the great Osamu Tezuka, making this an early example of a manga-inspired comic book.

For whatever reason Byers chose to not just stop doing Shuriken but also sell the character lock stock and barrel to Malibu, who continued publishing a small set of Shuriken comics through 1991 though they still credited Byers and his co-writer Neil Vokes.

Meanwhile Malibu (still using the Eternity brand) continued with Ex-Mutants spin-offs, publishing titles like Shattered Earth, Solo Ex-Mutants and Wild Knights in 1987 and 1988. However things were not so great behind the scenes...

See, during the messy process of disentangling the Eternity/Wonder/Amazing/Imperial publishing, it seems Ex-Mutants co-creator David Lawrence wasn't paid and was disgruntled with the whole affair, and he took the property with him to self-publish...

As a result there's two different editions of several issues of Ex-Mutants volume 1 published under different publishers, and some issues which never made it to the Eternity brand at all.

However as you have probably surmised from the fact that Malibu/Eternity kept pumping out Ex-Mutants spinoffs through 1988-1989, this didn't exactly go well for David Lawrence. I will go into that further when we get further on.

With Ex-Mutants and its accompanying setting and Shuriken under their belt, 1988 saw Malibu publish what you could say was the first "Malibu" comic, Dinosaurs for Hire by Malibu founder Tom Mason and Bryon Carson

If Ex-Mutants was inspired by the X-Men and post-apocalypse and Shuriken was a martial arts book, Dinosaurs for Hire was a title truly in the lineage of TMNT, a weird dark comedy about dinosaur hitmen on modern-day earth filled with pop culture and moderate violence.

There were a LOT of independent comics about talking animals brandishing weapons in the second half of the 80s, but I will say that at least Dinosaurs for Hire fully accepted its role as a parody. The prominence of the triceratops may be the influence of the triceratons from TMNT

Also you may start to notice some of the names on the covers. Malibu and its various imprints provided early work for a LOT of future comics superstars such as Ron Lim, Dale Keown, Scott Benefiel, Ben Dunn, Evan Dorkin, Brian Pulido and Dean Haspiel, among many others.

1988 also saw Malibu solidify another staple of their early publishing - reprints! Starting with titles such as Cosmic Heroes (which reprinted Buck Rogers strips) this would expand considerably the following few years.

Since I already mentioned him, in 1988 Malibu took over publishing of the popular Ninja High School by Ben Dunn (another manga-inspired alumni) and continued publishing it into the 90s.

And yet another proud Malibu tradition that began in 1988 was extreme (for the time) violence, nudity and sex, all encapsulated in Scimidar by R.A. Jones and Andrew Val, the story of a secretive mercenary with a liking for disembowling victims and raunchy sex.

Scimidar ended up starring in various titles until 1991 with increasingly graphic content and later became self-published again after Malibu's demise. The title owed much to Frank Miller's groundbreaking work on Daredevil and Elektra, I feel.

(And yes that is future TAROT: WITCH OF THE BLACK ROSE creator Jim Balent doing covers!)

As you can see, Malibu had quickly established itself in a variety of genres, but there is one piece missing of the puzzle and that requires us to talk about a man who is to this day controversial, the final prominent figure of Malibu's early years - Barry Blair.

A Canadian, Blair worked for an air conditioning company called Aircel which went into financial problems in 1984. Blair famously retooled the ailing company... into Aircel Comics, a fledgling Canadian independent publisher.

A prolific creator himself, Blair gathered a number of young creators around him and Aircel published a number of modestly successful titles such as Elflord, Samurai and Dragonring, but already by 1988 Aircel was in financial trouble.

In stepped Scott Rosenberg. Blair sold Aircel to Rosenberg who made it another imprint of Malibu with Blair continuing on as creator but most of his other Aircel colleagues leaving to find new employers.

Most of Aircel's original output ended in 1989 with some lasting into 1990 but Blair was already working hard creating new properties like Team Nippon (89) to replace them. Even at this point Blair had a tendency towards sexual content and violence.

Though there had certainly been rumblings about business practices and breached contracts already, 1989 saw Malibu's first big scandal when they began publishing an adaption of Leiji Matsumoto's legendary manga, re-done by American creators Robert W. Gibson and Ben Dunn

The problem?

Malibu didn't actually have the license to adapt or publish Captain Harlock, and the comic was quickly shut down.

1989 also saw several other licensed comics such as Lensman, Charlie Chan and Sherlock Holmes which were presumably fairly cheap for Rosenberg to actually acquire.

1990 saw Malibu expand its range of licensed books with Alien Nation, based on the 1988 movie created by Rockne S. Bannon, future creator of Farscape...

...and Planet of the Apes, based on the venerable but at that point not very valuable sci-fi franchise. These titles saw the advent of a new imprint: Adventure Comics, along with a snappy new logo. The reason these were not published under the Eternity brand are unclear to me.

Under the Eternity banner Malibu also published more licensed or reprint titles in 1990 such as Cat Claw (by Serbian creator Bane Kerac), White Devil, Plan 9 from Outer Space and others.

But before we go into the most surprising hit of Malibu's early years, we need to take a step back and take a look at what was going on with Aircel and Barry Blair.

With most of his original titles gone, Blair found a new niche for himself in late 1989 in the form of... well. Porn. Starting with Leather & Lace, Blair began creating a large number of pornographic comics, often with accompanying graphic violence and language.

Given how prolific he was, this meant Blair could put out a huge number of comics for Malibu monthly, and their graphic nature put them on map (but perhaps not in a good way) with Leather & Lace becoming the new tent pole of the entire publishing venture.

Between 1989 and 1992 Blair put out titles such as Sapphire, Climaxxx, various Vampyre's Kiss series as well as ultraviolent titles like Gun Fury. The crude sexual content and often amateurish art made Blair rather infamous, but his titles old well in those pre-internet smut days

The sales of the Blair titles provoked much discussion both then and later about his personal preferences and whether his sexualization of young men and women was taking things too far or not. Regardless, Blair's name was tarnished by this period, as was the Aircel name.

In 1990 Blair created the infamous comic Ripper which Malibu/Aircel published and which contained extreme depictions of violence where a white protagonist slaughted his way through racist caricatures of black people, all portrayed as gangers, drug dealers and rapists.

I'm not sure if it was due to the negative publicity or not, but in 1991 Barry Blair left Malibu and Rosenberg closed down the Aircel imprint, likely to avoid future association with the Blair content. Blair died in 2010, still a controversial figure.

But violence and porn wasn't all Malibu published under their Aircel imprint. They also put out (only slightly raunchy) superhero comics such as Cat & Mouse aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand...

There was a little three-issue miniseries called Men in Black by Lowell Cunningham and illustrated by Sand Carruthers which told a story of a young man initiated into a top-secret government organization out to safeguard the ignorant populace from threats from beyond

Men in Black was a dark comedy about the agents fighting various kinds of mysterious threats using high-tech gadgets such as a memory-wiping light, and the series was popular enough to get a spin-off.

Naturally you are aware of the runaway success of the movie adaptions of the comic, which often borrowed elements from the series but remixed them, such as this moment of a bug-like alien encountering a farmer.

Some elements of the original comics never made it to the adaptions, however, such as the inclusion of superhero parodies like this Wolverine-looking fellow. The movies chose instead to focus purely on the alien aspect of the MiB's duties.

In the early 1990s there was a drop in demand for black-and-white independent comics which led to the closing of many smaller publishers, and Malibu end many of its longer-running properties in 1990 and 1991 such as the aforementioned closure of Aircel.

Still, 1991 saw them publish a few new properties such as the legendary Miss Fury (a golden age superheroine created by Tarpe Mills) in a new, violent, sexy modern incarnation.

They also continued adding third-string licensed comics to their publishing portfolio like Rocket Ranger, a very blatant Rocketeer ripoff originating in a 1988 computer game.

As a side note, the Rocket Ranger comic has to be a reprint of material from somewhere else because its broken up into smaller chapters each with a splash page, but I couldn't find info on where it was originally published.

The same year they also published a comic book adaption of the classic screwball roleplaying game Paranoia, set in a world ruled by a megalomaniacal supercomputer where humans are expendable and everyone is conspiring against everyone else.

91 also saw a few new series like The Mantus Files, the final new comic for Shuriken, and the final few releases for Alien Nation and Planet of the Apes.

Before we finish up 1991 we must also talk about this man: Charles Band.

Band is a bit of a legend in the horror movie genre, having produced and directed countless cult classic movies with his company Full Moon Features

In 1991 Malibu began publishing comic adaptions of many of Band's properties such as the vampire flick Subspecies. These featured a Full Moon Entertainment cover branding.

Malibu's association with Full Moon resulted in several short-lived titles and miniseries like Trancers, Dollman and Demonic Toys and lasted into 1992.

Finally, it would be remiss of me to leave out Brian Pulido's Evil Ernie. Also coming out in 1991, this comic with its rock-and-roll zombie aesthetic was clearly another attempt of Malibu to get into the horror genre.

Little did anyone know that a lesser supporting character in Evil Ernie would turn out to become a huge force of her own later in the 1990s when Pulido movied to self-publishing under the Chaos Comics banner. You may have heard of her? Lady Death.

This is the end of part one. Tune in next time for the tumultous period of 1992-1996, with the meteoric rise of Malibu, lawsuits, more smut and LOTS AND LOTS OF DEATH!

Thank you for listening to part one of my TED talk. It was cathartic to finally get some of this out of my system, even if there is far to go. What are YOUR memories of Malibu? Favorite titles, characters? Tell me about it, ask questions and as usual, thanks for reading.