League of Champions

Background

At a 1985 San Diego Comic-Con International panel featuring Champions RPG creators Steve Peterson, George MacDonald, and Ray Greer, an audience member asked when the Champions characters were going to be adapted into comic book form. The RPG creators had no plans for such a translation at the time. However, Dennis Mallonee, who was already writing several Champions supplements, was in the audience and spoke up that he would be willing to write a Champions comic. Following the panel, Mallonee, Peterson, and MacDonald discussed terms for the series; among the key points were that all the characters would remain fully creator-owned, and that Mallonee would have creative control of the comic book.

The series needed a publisher, and having heard from Mark Evanier that Eclipse Comics was looking to publish another team book, Mallonee pitched the series to Eclipse co-founder Dean Mullaney and editor-in-chief Catherine Yronwode. They were receptive to the idea, and so Mallonee picked out six characters he wanted to use for the superhero team and sent out requests to the characters' creators for permission to use them in the comic book. He obtained permission to use five of the six:

The sixth character he wanted to use was Gargoyle; creator Mark Williams refused permission because he had other plans for the character. However, he allowed the comic book to mention Gargoyle, an option which Mallonee made use of, since he had already come up with a backstory for Flare which Gargoyle had an important part in. Other Champions who were mentioned in the series, but not shown, are Transpower, Dove, and Nightwind.

Mallonee's original plan for the series called for six issues of short solo stories which would develop the backgrounds and characters of the individual Champions, and in a subtle manner lead into the giant-sized Champions #7 and 8, in which the five heroes would unite as a team to battle the forces of DEMON. However, Eclipse Comics felt this scheme ran contrary to their desire for a team book, and rejected it, telling Mallonee to instead write a six-issue series dealing solely with the team's conflict with DEMON. Mallonee added one of his own Champions characters to the comic, a wheelchair-using man who had been a hero under the name of Doctor Arcane, solely as someone who would explain all the essential DEMON backstory that would have otherwise been covered in the short solo stories.

Publication history

Champions #1 sold extremely well, but sales hit a sharp decline in other issues, and this convinced Eclipse to leave Champions as a six-issue limited series. However, issue #2 introduced penciller Chris Marrinan and inker Dell Barras to the series. The trio of Mallonee, Marrinan, and Barras would prove to be the title's longest-running creative team.

Mallonee founded comics publication company Hero Comics (later Heroic Publishing), and included an ongoing Champions series in its launch lineup, with the first issue dated September 1987. Hero also spun off the character Flare into her own comic. Membership of the Champions (before it became the League of Champions) expanded in the seventh issue (Vol. 2, March 1988) with the addition of Flare's sister Sparkplug and Icestar's sister Icicle.

The team was also used as the example superhero team for the first three editions of the Champions role-playing game, but creative differences caused a rift between Heroic Publishing and Hero Games, leading to the role-playing game using a different team in later editions, and several of the characters in the League of Champions being retconned to change names and other details because they had originated with creators associated with Hero Games. ("Rose" became "Psyche"; "Marksman" became "Huntsman"; a villain originally named "Foxbat" became "The Flying Fox".)

In 1992, The League of Champions teamed up with the Southern Knights (originally published by Comics Interview) for a multi-part story called "The Morrigan Wars".