My post about how Groo migrated from Pacific Comics to Marvel's Epic line brought the following question from more than one reader. I went eenie-meenie-minie-moe and picked Al Blackman's e-mail to quote here…
OK, so Groo moved from Pacific to Marvel but in-between, there was a special issue from Eclipse Comics. How did that come about?
I'm glad you and all the others asked that, Al. Pacific Comics was in some amount of financial trouble and they weren't able to get all their books published. I forget if it was Steve Schanes or Bill Schanes but one of the Schaneses who owned the company called me and said they wouldn't be able to publish Groo bi-monthly for a while. And I forget if it was his idea or my idea but we decided to suspend doing the regular comic but to assemble a one-shot 48-page special that they could publish.
It was advertised in Groo the Wanderer #8, which we didn't know at the time would be the last issue that Pacific published. Then Sergio and I whipped up this special, we turned it in and it was sent off to Murphy Anderson and…
"Murphy Anderson?" Comic book devotees are probably startled to see that name pop up in a historical note about Groo the Wanderer. Murphy Anderson was a fine comic book artist who worked for years for DC Comics on books like Hawkman and The Spectre and The Flash and The Atom and he drew a wonderful strip called "The Atomic Knights" that ran in Strange Adventures and he inked Curt Swan on Superman for many years…
…and he was a very nice man who, at that moment, wasn't doing much artwork for comic books. He had set up a company that was doing color separations for various publishers and I guess I need to explain what color separations are or were…
It's all done by computer now but a few decades ago, comic books were hand-separated, meaning that someone would prepare the book for printing via overlays. Murphy's crew would make a red plate which would indicate the areas on each page that should be solid red, the areas that should be a 50% red dot pattern, the areas needing a 25% red dot pattern, etc. They'd do this for each color for each page and then the printer would be able to print the comic on a four-color press.
No sooner had that call ended when I got one from Murphy checking to see if I'd heard and asking me, pretty please, if we took the Groo Special to some other publisher that we remember he had a full set of separations done for it. He was hoping they would be used and that he could be paid for them…certainly a reasonable request. Then I called whichever Schanes I'd just spoken with and said something like, "Hey, you want me to get that Groo Special and Murphy's bill off the list of things you have to worry about?" He said great, fine, thank you.
By this point, we'd made our deal to do Groo with Marvel so I called our editor there, Archie Goodwin, and asked if they wanted to publish the Groo Special along with the regular Groo comic that was soon to commence. He asked, "Why wouldn't we?" and I told him that I didn't think the content of the special made it a great introductory, jumping-on space for whatever new readers we'd pick up there. But if they wanted to publish it, it was theirs, providing they use Murphy's seps and pay him along with us. Archie said, "I'm not sure we can use his seps. Let me call you back."
He checked with whoever he checked with and called back to tell me the problem: Murphy had configured the color separations to the specifications of the printer that Pacific used. This was not the printer Marvel used. Theirs had different specifications and the seps Murphy had done weren't right for their presses.
Archie and I agreed I should find another place for it and I did. The company that printed Eclipse Comics was set up to use Murphy Anderson color separations and, in fact, already did. I called Dean Mullaney at Eclipse and he was more than happy to put out the Groo Special. And that led to him picking up a few other Pacific Comics that were left homeless and that's a long answer to a short question but, hey, you asked. (Well, some of you did…)
