I’ve a friend who until a few weeks ago refused to buy Image books on a matter of principle. His reasoning was that Image had been billed as a comic line apart from the mainstream offering a more mature take on the comic book medium. But he felt rather than that they had seemed to be offering books that seemed to be a little too over excited at being able to run around with their friends like over sugared kids, in an unsupervised playground and the results were often less than satisfying. Lots of girls, guns and gore but lacking in a certain substance.
He may well have a point. Until very recently few of their titles really jumped off the shelf at me. 2009’s Back To Brooklyn was a stand out, as was Olympus. Sure there were the obvious marquee titles, but none of these occupied a particular place in my affections. And they were few and far between. Given it’s a publisher approaching its twentieth year of existence, I found it puzzling so few books were able to hit the mark. Its early history was littered with big boobs and over the top action, and the company itself marred by internal division and well publicised splits. After successes in the nineties, the new decade saw its light fade like a 10 year old glow stick.
It was Vertigo that I looked to for a hit of more adult entertainment (not that type…) and for the most part it was paying off. Recently books like Zanadu, The Unwritten, and Morrison’s Joe the Barbarian stood out and obviously there was more than just a few aces in the hand with a back catalogue unmatched by any publisher in the mature reader’s game. However it has seemed over the past couple of years to be playing cautious, and with a change in the way it remunerated its creators there were questions as to if it would be able to continue to produce books, the like of which had earned the DC imprints place at the top of the “grown ups” comic book hierarchy.
But in the last few months Image seems to have gone from a few stand out books, to offering a staggering array of brain-spinning books, that not only satisfy the mind of those seeking something that expands genres, or pushes the envelope of the medium to the limits, but also has some mass market, commercial appeal. It’s a tough tightrope to walk, and there are now several books not just walking down it, but turning cartwheels with it’s trousers down, sticking its fingers up to the big two.
To my mind it started with Chew, the amazing stand out success of this title seems to have been just the start of a storm front of quality, which is starting to put real pressure on both my wallet and standing order.
Next up was Nick Spencer’s Morning Glories. On the surface a colourful teen drama, but in fact is a dark tale of evil supernatural goings on, in a school full of imprisoned children. If that wasn’t enough hot on the heels of that book came the eye popping challenging, and intelligent Infinite Vacation. A collaboration with Christian Ward who last made my head spin when on art duties on the aforementioned Olympus. The last month or so has seen a sudden glut of books all of which could well have been contenders in my book of the year for several years to come. It’s like I’ve suddenly been spoilt for choice.
Non player by Nate Simpson is just a stunningly beautiful book. A subtle story about on line lives in the near future, it has already received a great deal of buzz prior to release, the first issue delivers in terms of well written and superbly realised storytelling that feels like the start of a very special story. Blue Estate by Viktor Kalvachev is the off beat tale of a Spillane style geek gumshoe, in a stylised modern pulp setting. It seems so unlike other crime books available presently, and is another book which leaves me fidgeting in my seat waiting for the next issue. Green Wake is a book that has caused Ryan over at Weekly Crisis and CBR to excitedly contribute to the MOMBcast to evangelise about the quality of this book. From Ryan this is high praise indeed and enough of an endorsement to ensure this is a future favourite of mine.
For me the real diamond in the recent glut though it Joe Casey and Mike Huddleston’s – Butcher Baker, The Righteous Maker. A mad gonzo take on the superhero myth, a dystopian tale of a retired superhero, leading a life of all American hedonism, dragged back for that action classic the “one last mission”. It crackles with every page turn, and slaps the reader about the face relentlessly with its bright bold brilliance. Sharp stylish dialogue and scripting with eye popping art, make it an outstanding title.
All of these books are of course, very new, and yet to deliver anything other than an amazing first issue or so. However, if these last few months are indicative of what direction Image are taking, I see no reason why they shouldn’t cement a position first in the queue nipping at the heels of the big two. But more importantly compared to the mature output of Vertigo, Dynamite, Dark Hose et al, it seems well on course to be the number one in it’s niche, and may I modestly suggest, become the publisher it always seemed it could be.
“Become the publisher it always seemed it could be” WTF!
Have you not heard of…
Walking Dead
The Darkness
Invincible
The Astounding Wolf-Man
Rising Stars
PVP
Strange Girl
Rocketo
Popgun
Elephantman
Comic Book Tattoo
Madman
Powers
The Nightly News
Dead Space
Fear Agent
Fell
Amazing joy Buzzards
Well, James and I don’t necessarily agree on the finer details of this theory, but I think that particular statement stands.
In the past, books like the ones you mentioned have been rare shining moments in an Image output otherwise swamped by weak dilutions of formulas that were set down when the Image guys first decamped from Marvel. Your list – and I don’t agree that everything on it is great, but it’s a good list – is largely made up of a lot of one-off titles that have been scattered among almost 15 years of output. Even when Image first formed, they had a truly unique and wonderfully made piece of comic in The Maxx, but it was always the exception to the norm.
Since the formation of Image, but more deliberately since Jim Valentino’s start as publisher, they’ve had a mandate of having a diverse creator-owned line. The problem is that despite his advocacy of the more interesting, unusual and ground-breaking side of comics, the publisher has always primarily been dominated by the output of those studios that still remained from it’s formation, and that has meant that the cool creator-owned stuff, including a lot of the books you mention, has had to fend for itself.
The model has always previously been – and I actually think it’s a great one – that creators of the Image Central line of creator-owned books – the people like Kirkman, when he started there, for example – got to be published by Image, but they had to sort out the promotion themselves, and they didn’t really get paid until their book saw a profit (I might be misremembering this, and am happy to be corrected).
There have always been great, ground-breaking Image books, but they weren’t really the publisher’s bread-and-butter, or even particularly something you’d hear about except by accident, most of the time, until Eric Stephenson became publisher, and Robert Kirkman became one of the partners. The landscape changed a little at that point, largely because The Walking Dead, one of those awesome and unusual books we’re talking about, had become the nearest thing to a real and genuine success Image had had in a few years.
This created a sea-change in the way they seem to do things – Image’s main business seems to be about creating comics now, rather than the nearly two decades of creating money-and-merchandise-factory intellectual properties that had gone before – and the wave of new titles that James is responding to in this post are really the first time that the cool and interesting stuff has eclipsed the copy/paste stuff from before.
(And not for nothing, but you’ll notice that despite the will always being there during Valentino’s tenure, things didn’t really change until a couple of their indie/alt books became bigger successes for them than that other stuff.)
It’s worth noting that if Wikipedia is to be believed, and it was Valentino’s direction that got Image through the door at bookstores and libraries, he’s got more to do with this shift in the publisher’s direction than it seems. Books like Walking Dead, Comic Book Tattoo and The Nightly News are comics that sell to the reading public. Books like Spawn, Rising Stars, and Witchblade sell to the comic-reading public, and that’s a demographic that isn’t as reliably easy to isolate as it was twenty years ago.
But the original Image creators left Marvel under the auspices that creators who were bringing in new stuff to comics should get paid for bringing new stuff into comics, and then proceeded to publish the same old crap as they had at Marvel, often under embarrassingly thin new skins, to the point that within twelve months they were creating studios of artists working under pretty much the same work-for-hire conditions that they were supposed to be opposed to. They had the potential to be what they’re now finally becoming – a genuinely exciting publisher whose focus is making great comics, instead of those occasional great comics being a fluke among the same profit-whoring that the mainstream publishers have always relied on.
Thanks for the comment, though! You can’t really test and develop a point of view without hearing opposing views, so it’s welcome!
Nice post, James! Thanks for filling me in on all of these great-looking comics. I wasn’t familiar with the underlying concept of some of the newer titles (especially Butcher Baker and Blue Estate), so I’d sort of gotten into the habit of tuning people out whenever they say “This is the best comic ever! Read it!” without any kind of explanation. I love that everyone at MOMB is able to speak openly and objectively about the comics they love — it makes what you say far more persuasive than most!