TALES FROM THE KRYPTONIAN: Whatever happened to Malibu's Ultraverse ?

Sunday, April 05, 2026

Whatever happened to Malibu's Ultraverse ?

Well, once again this is not the post I wanted to write. What's more it is one day too late. I was going to make a post Yesterday to commemorate the date ( if you know you know ) and since I have mentioned some of the comics Malibu Comics published in the first part of my series about Howard Chaykin's groundbreaking AMERICAN FLAGG series from First Comics and found the complete original artwork by George Perez for Malibu Comics ULTRAVERSE series ULTRAFORCE during the research for the post I thought I could do a BLACK AND WHITE post about the issue.

But that turned out more difficult than I thought because I don't know if it is because Marvel Comics bought Malibu Comics and then Disney did buy Marvel Comics ( at a time when Marvel Comics really did not need it because they had already recovered fully from bankruptcy so you know somebody in the bean counting department got a huge payday out of this ) so everything Malibu Comics published is now owned by Disney but apart from PRIME I could not find any scans from Malibu Comics books.

I don't know if PRIME has that many fans or if it has something to do with the art of Norm Breyfogle that it is still online but I came up empty when I was looking for the scans from ULTRAFORCE. And I am not sure if Norm Breyfogle's art is such a big factor in why you can still find PRIME online.

Don't get me wrong, I am a huge fan of this artist - as should be apparent by the number of tribute posts I did for him even when he was still alive - but there are also a lot of the issues to be found online after he left.

Anyway, as longtime followers as well as frequent blog visitors know I like to post the print version alongside the original artwork in my BLACK AND WHITE posts so not being able to do that was a really big problem.

Thankfully I found some scans on COMIC BOOK FAN AND LOVER which not only had a review about ULTRAFORCE issue 6 but most of the issues of the series as well as a truckload of reviews about the Ultraverse. The only problem was that while there were scans form the issue - and in english which is lucky for my readers since it is a spanish blog written in spanish so the scans could have been from the spanish issues - naturally he did not include all of the pages. So I decided to put that post on the backburner for a while in hope of finding the rest of the pages I need.

But at that point I had already found a lot of pages from ULTRAFORCE, PRIME and - what may be their most successful comicbook series because it was adapted a tv show which lasted two seasons ( although at that time it was a Marvel Comics property ) - NIGHT MAN I decided to delve into the Ultraverse. And before turning my attention to the individual series we are going to talk a bit about the series Malibu Comics published because unlike with AMERICAN FLAGG I actually read a lot of the books.

The first one was ULTRAFORCE and as it should come as no surprise to anybody who has visited this blog over a longer period of time it was all because of George Perez. While a lot of people will tell you that the 90s was the worst decade in comicbooks I don't think that is true - as you can see in the many posts I wrote defending that decade or featuring comics from that period - and subsequently there has been a lot of appreciation of 90s comicbooks lately. True, a lot of that has to do with nostalgia and also with the sorry state the comicbook industry is in right now but what you can't deny is that the 90s had an explosive expansion of publishers that wanted to cash into the big boom caused by iMAGE Comics arrival.

So there were a lot of options available to comicbook creators beside the big two or other well established independent publishers like Dark Horse Comics, Fantagraphics or Kitchen Sink. And George used this opportunity to do series like ISAAC ASIMOV'S I - BOTS or Malibu Comics ULTRAFORCE.

As for me there were already a lot of options available to get american comicbooks in Germany so that while it was difficult finding series not published by the big two it was not impossible. Although truth to be told it was quite some time after they were first published that I managed to get all of the issues by George Perez. Plus as I already mentioned there were spanish translations of the ULTRAVERSE comicbooks so whenever I was on vacation in Spain I bought any I could get as I already was buying more mainstream american series back in Germany and so was looking for series off the beaten path for my holiday comicbook entertainment.

Also Spain has always been way ahead in comparison to Germany when it comes to publishing american comics so that I usually first encountered the more independent american material while being on vacation. Since my homebase back then was Germany I brought tons of spanish comics to old Deutschlande and later on I wished I had left them in Spain. Then they would have been still here when I was forced to relocate to Spain.

On the other hand a lot of the comicbooks that I still had here in Spain were lost when we moved so who knows. In any case, I had at least all of the ULTRAFORCE issues by George Perez either the original US comics or the spanish translations. I don't think there are any german translations.

And that's where we will wrap things up for Today as it is already late at night and if I don't stop now I can't include any pictures until Tomorrow.

And like I said this post is already one day late. But don't worry we will continue this topic in our next post which will be either about PRIME or George Perez ULTRAFORCE - even if I don't have a lot of coloured pages.