Chaos! Comics
Now an imprint of DYNAMITE COMICS, Chaos! was originally a company co-owned by Brian Pulido and the late Steven Hughes. The writer and artist pair began publishing their cult-favorite Evil Ernie & Lady Death in the early 90's and ran independently until about 2003.
Origins
Following the success of Evil Ernie with Eternity Comics, Brian Pulido and his comic book artist friend Steven Hughes set about crating their own publishing company to expand on their vision for the genocidal maniac and the cast of characters that flowed from his adventures.
The gamble was worth it as Evil Ernie took off and the company expanded with Lady Death. Her break-out story The Reckoning marked her as the first in a generation of Bad-Girl comic book characters in the 1990's. New characters, such as Purgatori, Chastity and Cremator, were born organically from the stories of pre-existing characters and given their own titles that both stood alone and crossed over with other books. By tying new characters to the origins of popular ones, Chaos! ensured that readers were always invested in the new characters when they branched out.
Chaos! intertwined all its biggest characters in each other's storylines. There were few stories that had absolutely no connection to the others, or that did not directly affect the other characters in some way. This was always done with care to establish and maintain a coherent timeline, a system that paid off with the long planned Armageddon story arc that saw multiple arcs converge to create a new central core storyline that led up to January 1st 2000.
Chaos! was also well known for the company's wide array of variant covers, ranging from leather and velvet to cloth and premium jeweled editions, many of which remain highly sought after today.
Ownership Rights of Chaos! Comics Characters
After the company filed bankruptcy in 2002, Brian Pulido took their flagship character, Lady Death, to CrossGen Comics and published "Lady Death: A Medieval Tale." However, CrossGen also went out of business mere months later, leading Pulido to take Lady Death to Avatar Press. This move has proven fruitful with a split storyline of a more classic Lady Death tale and a continuation of the Medieval tale being produced side by side. Lady Death eventually found a home with her own imprint, Boundless Comics. In Late 2014 she moved Brian Pulido's Coffin Comics which exist as the sole producer of Lady Death books.
The rest of the Chaos! characters were won at auction by the comic retailer, Tales of Wonder, who then sold some characters to Devil's Due Publishing. DDP had at one point begun several series using Chaos' characters, also using Chaos! Comics as an imprint.
In 2012 Dynamite Entertainment acquired its first Chaos! Comics character with Evil Ernie. It wasn't until 2014 when Dynamite acquired Chaos! Comics that it started printing under as Chaos! Comics (Chaos! Dynamite) imprint. The only character that does not fall into that ownership rights is Lady Death. Lady Hel was created to fill the void of Lady Death.
