Dennis Mallonee

Dennis Mallonee (born January 22, 1955) is an American writer and publisher of comic books.

He is best known as the writer of the Champions comics and the founder of Heroic Publishing.

Mallonee graduated from the California Institute of Technology with a degree in economics.

Dennis Mallonee entered the comics profession by suggesting story ideas to writer Bill Mantlo.

Mallonee and artist Rick Hoberg developed the format for Marvel's Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe series.

Marvel Comics published a Champions comic book series from 1975 to 1978.

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.

Mallonee, however, 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, Mallonnee, 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.

Shortly thereafter, Mallonee approached Hero Games, owner of Champions, to license comic book rights to the characters.

Hero Games was actually a licensee themselves, with the characters largely owned by their original players, but the company was able to work with the original creators to get Malonee the permissions he needed; the result was an Eclipse comic book series called Champions (1986-1987).

After the success of the Eclipse series, Mallonee decided to publish additional Champions comics under his own imprint – first called Hero Comics, then Hero Graphics, and finally Heroic Publishing.

Over the next six years, Hero Comics published about 100 comic books across several series – the most prolific of which were Champions, which centered on Hero Games' Guardians, and Flare, among the most popular of the Guardians.

As Hero Games became increasingly uncomfortable with later changes in tone (including becoming more centered on depicting attractive pinups), some of the characters' owners pulled Mallonee's licensing rights, although Gleen Thain and Stacy Lawrence allowed their characters – Icestar and Flare – to continue under Mallonee's authorship.

To avoid confusion, Hero Games removed creator-owned characters that were still being used by Mallonee from new editions of their products.

Meanwhile, Mallonee changed the names of other characters in his universe, due to these licensing issues; thus Bruce Harlick's Marksman became Huntsman and his Foxbat became The Flying Fox.

Over the years, Mallonee developed many original characters as well, slowly pushing his comics further from Hero Games' Champions universe.

Since 1986, Mallonee and his publishing entities have used the name "The Champions" for various comic book series adapted from the Champions role-playing game series.

In 1988, The United States Patent and Trademark Office ruled that Marvel abandoned its trademark of the name and could no longer use "The Champions" as the name of a comic book series.

From 2009 to 2012, Mallonee and artists Tim Burgard, Gordon Purcell, and Mark Beachum produced a Flare weekly newspaper strip, syndicated by Creators Syndicate.

Marvel later re-acquired rights to the trademark, publishing a new The Champions series in 2016.