League of Champions

The League of Champions is super hero team based in San Francisco and published by Heroic Publishing.

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.

...
Wikipedia