Eclipse Comics was an American comic book publisher, one of several independent publishers during the 1980s and early 1990s. In 1978, it published the first graphic novel intended for the newly created comic book specialty store market. It was one of the first to offer royalties and creator ownership of rights.

Creators whose early work appears in Eclipse publications include Scott McCloud, Timothy Truman, Dan Brereton, James Hudnall and Chris Ware, while the publisher also produced creator-owned work by Don McGregor, Mark Evanier, Gene Colan, Alan Moore, Steve Englehart, Steve Gerber and P. Craig Russell.

The company was founded as Eclipse Enterprises by brothers Jan and Dean Mullaney – the sons of early electronica musician Dave Mullaney of the band Hot Butter – in April 1977. Dean Mullaney later claimed that he was inspired to create the company after learning of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's struggles to gain recognition for creating Superman in 1968, and that this led him to create a company with an ethos that respected creator ownership and royalty payments over the then-standard industry practice of work-for-hire. Jan Mullaney, a session keyboardist who had toured with the Bee Gees and Bad Company, put up the $2000 starting money.

The name was thought up by Sue Pollina, a friend of the Mullaneys, while the company's first logo was designed by Mark Gruenwald. The company was initially headquartered at 81 Delaware Street, Staten Island, New York.

Eclipse published one of the first original graphic novels, and the first to be sold through the new "direct market" of comic-book stores, Sabre: Slow Fade of an Endangered Species by Don McGregor and Paul Gulacy. Published on 30 September 1978 and previewed in Heavy Metal, the book was a success. This led to the Mullaneys being contacted by P. Craig Russell, McGregor's collaborator on Marvel Comics' Amazing Adventures. Eclipse published Russell's experimental Night Music 1 in November 1979, by which time the company had also released a compilation of Fred Hembeck's parody Dateline: @!!?# strips from The Buyer's Guide to Comics Fandom. Russell later created comic adaptations of numerous operas for Eclipse. A more sophisticated logo was also commissioned from Tom Orzechowski; it remained the company's insignia for the rest of its existence, minor alterations aside. The profits earned to date were used to fund publication of McGregor's Detectives, Inc.: A Remembrance of Threatening Green (with artist Marshall Rogers) and Steve Gerber's Stewart the Rat. In 1980, Mullaney moonlighted as co-editor of the brand-new hobbyist publication Comics Feature, produced by Hal Schuster's New Media Publishing, but left after a year to focus on Eclipse.

Not wanting to limit the company to graphic novels alone, the brothers devised Eclipse, the Magazine, a 68-page bi-monthly black-and-white anthology title with a rotating group of creator-owned characters. The first issue, dated May 1981, introduced the hard-boiled female detective Ms. Tree by Max Allan Collins and Steve Ditko's Static. The title later introduced Steve Englehart's Coyote, Trina Robbins' adaptation of Sax Rohmer's Dope, McGregor and Colan's Ragamuffins (which Mullaney later described as "perhaps the finest thing we ever published") and B.C. Boyer's Masked Man. October 1981 saw the publication of Jim Starlin's Dreadstar graphic novel The Price when the writer-artist was having contractual issues with Marvel. The success of the volume enabled Starlin to leverage a better deal with Marvel, and led to the creation of Marvel's Epic Comics imprint in 1982. Dean Mullaney later claimed Epic's name was purposefully picked to cause confusion with Eclipse. Another disgruntled Marvel creator to work for Eclipse was Gerber; Eclipse commissioned his Destroyer Duck series. Another anthology, it was partly motivated to allow Gerber to raise funds to sue Marvel over the ownership of Howard the Duck. The first issue of Destroyer Duck sold 80,000 copies and proved to the Mullaneys that color ongoing comics were viable; a Saber series started in 1982 and ran for 14 issues.

In December 1981 production of Destroyer Duck introduced Dean Mullaney to Cat Yronwode, then news reporter for Comics Buyer's Guide. At the time, Yronwode was working as an archivist for Will Eisner. Yronwode recalled that Eisner and his wife Ann "hosted a party for me with all these comic book men I was flirting with. All these men came up; they all wanted to meet Will. One of them was Dean Mullaney, the co-owner of Eclipse Comics, a small independent publishing house. He was the most flirtatious." The pair began a personal and professional relationship, though the former aspect was initially kept private. Yronwode rapidly became Eclipse's de facto editor-in-chief.

While Jan Mullaney remained based in New York to handle the economic side of the business, Dean Mullaney focused on the role of publisher and Yronwode that of editor-in-chief for Eclipse's growing number of titles, and the pair briefly relocated to Columbia, Missouri. After meeting Mark Evanier and Will Meugniot, Eclipse published their first superhero regular series, The DNAgents. It was joined by Eclipse Monthly, a color successor to Eclipse, the Magazine that continued Static, Dope and Masked Man as well as introducing further characters. Ms. Tree was spun off into its own title, while Yronwode rediscovered Will Eisner's lost 1948 story John Law, which was published for the first time. After the stopover in Missouri, Dean Mullaney and Yronwode established Eclipse's main offices in the small town of Guerneville in July 1983. In October 1984 Jan Mullaney opted to discontinue his involvement in order to focus on his music career, leaving his brother as sole publisher and Yronwode officially promoted to editor-in-chief. Eclipse's advertising copy flagged their stance on creator ownership, the maturity of the material and the individuality of the output