The Complete Pacific Comics Re-Reading Blog Series presents:

Totally Pacific

Hi!

My name is Lars Ingebrigtsen, and last year I re-read all the comics Eclipse Comics published in the 80s and wrote a blog about it.

Yes, I know, it was a silly thing to do, but it was fun to (re-)read all those comics. Some of them were even pretty good! So I wanted to explore 80s indie comics a bit more, and the natural choice would be to have a look at Pacific Comics.

Eclipse and Pacific are often mentioned together whenever anybody’s writing about 80s American comics. It’s not difficult to see why: When Pacific went bankrupt in 1984, Eclipse took over their entire line; not just comics already in production, but also projects in the pipeline, which changed the tenor of Eclipse’s line radically.

But Eclipse published around 1200 comics, and Pacific published around 110 (and around 40 series). Eclipse published a number of series that had a significant reach (Zot!, Miracleman, David Chelsea in Love), while Pacific had… Captain Victory?

The entire Pacific Comics output fits into a shortbox. (That’s actually not all they published; since I covered Alien Worlds/Twisted Tales and some other books that were taken over by Eclipse in the Total Eclipse blog; I haven’t bothered to root them out again.)

I think it’s interesting that Pacific is still remembered and talked about in the degree that it is — if you just look at the publishing history, it’s a bit difficult to grasp just why that is.

Perhaps re-reading the comics will make things clearer.

Another reason to write a blog series about Pacific is that I already have virtually all of the comics, so I didn’t have to buy a whole lot of them to get a complete set. If I remember correctly, after Pacific went bankrupt, Mile High Comics ended up with a significant portion of the backstock? In any case, they were pushing them hard in the catalogues they published, and they were really cheap. (I think. This is over 30 years ago, and I was like 14 at the time, so things are kinda misty.) So I bought them all, and if I remember correctly, I thought they were all pretty good? I think? But nothing really memorable?

Except Twisted Tales. There are stories in that one that can’t ever be forgotten.

OK, that’s enough of a Mission Description. I’m aiming for one blog post every two days, so this should be over in a couple of months and then we’ll see whether anything of interest was achieved…