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Pacific Comics
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Pacific Comics (PC) is best known as one of the independent comic book publishers that flourished in the early 1980s, but was also a chain of comics shops and a distributor. It began out of a San Diego, California comic book shop owned by Bill and Steve Schanes. They, along with First Comics and Eclipse Comics, moved to take advantage of the growing direct market. PC managed to attract a number of writers and artists from DC and Marvel with creator-owned titles, which, as they were not subject to the Comics Code were able to contain more mature content.
971, the Schanes brothers co-founded Pacific Comics, which started out "as a mail-order company, selling to consumers via ads in the Comics Buyer's Guide.
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Pacific Comics (PC) is best known as one of the independent comic book publishers that flourished in the early 1980s, but was also a chain of comics shops and a distributor. It began out of a San Diego, California comic book shop owned by Bill and Steve Schanes. They, along with First Comics and Eclipse Comics, moved to take advantage of the growing direct market. PC managed to attract a number of writers and artists from DC and Marvel with creator-owned titles, which, as they were not subject to the Comics Code were able to contain more mature content.
Foundation
In 1971, the Schanes brothers co-founded Pacific Comics, which started out "as a mail-order company, selling to consumers via ads in the Comics Buyer's Guide. This led to advertisements inside some Marvel comics, and ultimately to tangible retail stores. The first Pacific Comics store opened on Cass Street, P.B. in 1974, and business was soon doing so well that the brothers realised they "couldn't get merchandise" for the stores, and so set up a distribution system, which was soon supplying neighbouring stores also.
The move from newsstand distribution to the "direct market", non-returnable, heavily-discounted, direct purchasing of comics from publishers happened in the 1970s, in large part due to the work of Phil Seuling and his East Coast Seagate Distribution company (founded in 1974), as well as a number of individuals including the Schanes brothers and Bud Plant. The direct-market went hand-in-hand with the creation of specialist comics shops to cater to the collectors who could then buy back issues months after a newsstand issue had disappeared. By the late 1970s, thanks partly to the success of films such as Star Wars and Superman: The Movie, comics were selling well, and Pacific expanded its distribution system nationwide, "raising $200,000 by closing its four San Diego retail locations and selling off inventory," rising rapidly to the top of the new distribution system.
In the six years between 1974 and 1980, "comic or fantasy-related specialty shops" rose from numbering 200-300 to around 1500, while Pacific was "operating out of a office-warehouse on Ronson Road in Kearny Mesa," with "500 wholesale accounts." According to elder-brother Steve, the company "grossed just under a million dollars that year", soon doubling it's floorspace.
Pacific Comics publishing
In 1981:
- "rival distributor Capital City launched its own black-and-white title, Nexus, a futuristic superhero series by Mike Baron and Steve Rude," and distributed it through their own system.
The Schanes brothers took note, and decided to follow suit, even though they "were still paying off debt from a $300,000 bank loan taken out in 1979 at 25 percent interest." Steve - who, with a degree in sculpture had a background in art - handled negotiations with creators, while Bill "took on the nuts-and-bolts aspects of business and accounting." Deciding that they ought to make a splash, the brothers turned to an individual that they had befriended through the years: Jack Kirby.
Jack Kirby
Steve Schanes recalls:
- "I figured if you want to get people's attention with a new comic book, who better to do it with than the King of Comics, Jack Kirby! We were already friends with Jack. We used to send him free copies of comics he'd drawn for other publishers because they never sent him any! So I just went ahead and called him on the phone, and he turned out to be a nice guy, completely accessible...we negotiated a whole detailed publishing deal between the two of us. No middlemen."
The Schaneses asked Kirby, who had effectively quit comics in 1977, for only the publishing rights, assuring him that could keep full ownership and copyrights, and suggesting that they would "even help him license characters for use overseas or in television, film, or other media." Thus, Pacific claims to have became the first company to pay Kirby (who co-created almost the entire Marvel Universe with Stan Lee in the 1960s, as well as numerous characters before and after, including Captain America and DC's Challengers of the Unknown) royalty payments. Kirby provided Pacific with Captain Victory and the Galactic Rangers, which was finished by "Pacific staffers and freelancers inking and coloring the artwork," and published bimonthly from August, 1981, selling well and helping Pacific to ever higher profits.
Kirby then let Pacific publish his Silver Star, and the brothers:
- "began to envision a line of comics... [not the] black-and-white low-print-run underground comics like those being self-published by Robert Crumb and other West Coast contemporaries in San Francisco and L.A., but full-color titles that emulated -- maybe even competed with -- the mainstream superhero comics from Marvel and DC."
Before long, they had attracted interest from talented individuals from both main publishers, including Mike Grell (who recalls that he was actually the first to sign with Pacific by a couple of weeks, but that Kirby's work was published first because he "delivered his first.") who had planned his Starslayer to appear from DC, but after it dropped from the schedule, the Schaneses approached him with regards to publishing it.
The Rocketeer
Another invitee was then-aspiring artist Dave Stevens, who purchased comics from Pacific's shops, and had met the brothers at the San Diego Comic-Con in 1981. After Mike Grell's "second issue [of Starslayer] was shy a few pages... they had to fill those pages with something," so Stevens was asked for "two installments of six pages," and ultimately devised The Rocketeer.
Experimentation and expansion
For various reasons (Steve Schanes suggests "partly because we didn't know any better"), Pacific Comics began to print on upgraded paper with higher quality ink, ultimately producing comics which "ended up looking far superior to what Marvel and DC were putting out." With the various advances in direct market comics, Marvel set up their own creator-owned line (Epic Comics) under longtime editor Archie Goodwin, and both DC and Marvel began to flood the market with ever-more glossy comics.
Pacific continued to distribute and publish comics, running both operations from a warehouse at 8423 Production Avenue, off Miramar Road, to which they'd moved in July 1982. They also purchased:
- "a firehouse in Steeleville, Illinois... near World Color Press in Sparta, where the majority of U.S. comic books were printed. Pacific converted the firehouse into a distribution hub. It was also operating warehouses in L.A. and Phoenix at the time."
Printing "about 500,000 comic books" every month, the Schanses "employed around 40 people at their San Diego operation alone," and were grossing over $3.5 million per annum, and fully expecting to make $5 million in 1983.
The brothers hired their father, Steven E. Schanes as financial vice president and their mother (Christine Marra) as office manager. Elder brother Paul "Pablo" worked in the financial records department, "and sister Chris, an L.A.-based attorney, provided counsel on legal affairs."
Later output
Pacific's published output contained editorials by David Scroggy, who had started as a comics retailer in 1975, and risen to general manager of Pacific's four San Diego shops by the late 1970s, proving himself as "a great go-between in working with often temperamental and almost always ego-fragile creators," and "helping to bring to Pacific one of comicdom's most reclusive artists, Steve Ditko, co-creator of Spider-Man and Doctor Strange."
Ditko's Pacific offering The Missing Man was previewed in Captain Victory #6, and then featured in issues of Pacific Presents. His work was scripted by Mark Evanier. Meanwhile, Pacific was not limiting itself to publishing comics. It also "published a magazine-sized black-and-white reprint of Rog 2000 stories that superstar Marvel artist John Byrne had done in the '70s for long-gone Charlton Comics," as well as a number of titles under is parent company "Blue Dolphin Enterprises." It also welcomed Bruce Jones to the company, and Sergio Aragonés and Mark Evanier's Groo the Wanderer.
3-D, Elric and falling sales
By 1984, Steve Schanes decided to bring back 3-D to comics, a fleeting trend in the 1950s that had then been stymied by poor printing separations. Contact between the Schaneses and the best man for the job - Ray Zone - occurred after Zone had converted a Jack Kirby image for Honeycomb cereal, which led to him submitting a costed proposal to Pacific in 1983. Steve Schanes decided the book would be Alien Worlds 3-D, featuring the first published work of Art Adams, alongside John Bolton, Bill Wray and others. Sales on the expensively-produced comic, however, were poor, and sales all round were following suit. One-shots (by Jim Starlin and Arthur Suydam among others) became more common, and tolerable sales on Elric of Melniboné (by Roy Thomas, P. Craig Russell and Michael T. Gilbert), stumbled when First Comics acquired the rights, putting Pacific in the awkward position of continuing as distributor on a comic from a rival publisher that they had helped promote.
Competition and collapse
After organizational difficulties pushed back the release of Starslayer by several months, Mike Grell decided to take his creator-owned property to First Comics, and a domino effect began to occur as "the loss of a high-profile title to a rival publisher engendered bad industry PR," leading other creators to "wonder what the problems were and whether they should also be talking to alternate indies."
More importantly, the distribution arm of Pacific was suffering serious problems, due in part to overly-generous credit extensions to retailers, which was not paid back as quickly as it ought. Thus, Steve Schanes explained, although:
- "Most of our comic books still made money hand over fist... there was a big problem in distribution. We extended too much credit to retailers who didn't pay us on a timely basis, and we were already working on a minuscule profit margin, maybe 5 percent to 8 percent. We didn't push hard enough to get the money from receivables, who owed us hundreds of thousands of dollars. If you had to boil down the single biggest reason we blew it, that would be our poor cash management on the distribution side."
Pacific's publication arm was also attracting competitors, and Pacific found itself distributing titles (from publishers including Kitchen Sink Press, Last Gasp and Rip Off Press), which were in competition with its own titles. With this in mind, other publishers (including "Capital City (whose Nexus comic outsold several Pacific titles), Comico, Aardvark-Vanaheim, Educomics, Quality, Eagle, Eclipse, First, Vortex, New Media, Fantagraphics, Mirage) "feared that having Pacific, a rival publisher, as their distributor could result in their being cut off from comic shops." This likely played a factor in the multiple alternate distributors who came into being to compete with Pacific, and by Pacific's clients, until "[n]early a quarter of Pacific's 800 or so comic-shop accounts defected to alternate distributors in 1984, skipping out on paying Pacific for upwards of three months' worth of comic books."
To make matters worse, some of these rival distributors were purchasing stock from Pacific in order to push Pacific out of the market.
At the same time, Pacific and parent company Blue Dolphin Enterprises found themselves the target of lawsuits, including some dealing with foreign rights and royalties for Pacific-published, but creator-owned titles. Ultimately, the company sank too far into debt to recover, and in August 1984 the Schaneses informed their staff that they would all be out of work by September.
After Pacific
After the collapse of Pacific, many of its creator-owned publications moved to Eclipse Comics: Bruce Jones' Twisted Tales, Alien Worlds and Somerset Holmes; Dave Stevens' Rocketeer Special and Evanier/Aragones' Groo were all continued by Eclipse.
As Pacific went into liquidation in September 1984, Phil Seuling (who passed away in 1984)'s distribution company Seagate - "the distributorship that had pretty much launched the direct market" - also closed down. Pacific's distribution centers and warehouses were purchased by Bud Plant Inc., and Capital City Distribution, who also opened "an expanded facility in Seagate's old space in Sparta, alongside the comic-book printing plant."
Steve Schanes and his wife, Ann Fera, subsequently founded Blackthorne Publishing, and Bill Schanes now works for Diamond Comic Distributors.
Legacy
- "In many ways, Pacific formed the template for Image Comics, today's most successful San Diego-based comic company. Image began in 1992 as a publishing imprint where creators could own and profit from their characters. It was founded by Todd McFarlane (who'd made his name drawing Spider-Man and the Hulk), San Diego illustrator Jim Lee (known for an acclaimed run on the Punisher comic), and several other mainstream Marvel artists. Others joined up to form a staff of creators, including Jim Valentino, who'd once worked as a shipping clerk at Pacific's San Diego warehouse... Sales of Image titles, such as Spawn and Wildcats, quickly rivaled Marvel and DC in numbers that nobody before them, not even Pacific, had ever managed to pull off. Once again, the Big Two were forced to play catch-up with an upstart new indie publisher. Reportedly over a million copies of Todd McFarlane's Spawn #1 were printed and snapped up in multiples by eager comic consumers who made Image comics the best-selling independent titles of the past quarter century."
Titles
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