Image Comics
Image Comics is an American independent comic book publisher and is the third largest direct market comic book and graphic novel publisher in the industry by market share. Its best-known publications include Spawn, The Walking Dead, Kick-Ass, Invincible, Jupiter's Legacy, Witchblade, The Maxx, Savage Dragon, Descender, Saga, East of West, Monstress, Radiant Black, and Stray Dogs.
It was founded in 1992 by several high-profile illustrators as a venue for creator-owned properties, in which comics creators could publish material of their own creation without giving up the copyrights to those properties. Normally this is not the case in the work-for-hire-dominated American comics industry, where the legal author is a publisher, such as Marvel Comics or DC Comics, and the creator is an employee of that publisher. Its output was originally dominated by superhero and fantasy titles from the studios of the founding Image partners, but now includes comics in many genres by numerous independent creators.
History
Founding
In the early 1990s, artists Todd McFarlane, Rob Liefeld, and Jim Lee broke successive modern sales records at Marvel Comics with Spider-Man #1, X-Force #1, and X-Men #1 respectively. However, the creators became discontented. Liefeld worried that their success actually made their positions at Marvel precarious. "We had become too big for the system," he said in 2000. "Marvel didn't want a star system." McFarlane and Lee, on the other hand, felt undervalued at Marvel, where they were not paid when their art was reused for merchandise such as t-shirts.Malibu Comics agreed to publish a creator-owned title by Liefeld in 1991. In July that year he announced plans to publish an independent comic called Youngblood and in September advertised a title called The Executioners to be published by "Image Comics." Although Liefeld shelved plans for The Executioners after Marvel threatened to both sue him and fire him from X-Force, the incident only further motivated him to pursue independent publishing.
Liefeld soon invited Amazing Spider-Man artist Erik Larsen, Guardians of the Galaxy artist Jim Valentino, and McFarlane to join Image Comics. McFarlane then recruited Jim Lee at the Sotheby's auction in New York in December 1991. Wolverine artist Marc Silvestri, who was also in town for the event, was also invited. Lee invited Uncanny X-Men artist Whilce Portacio shortly after. These seven creators became the original founding partners of Image Comics.
Image's organizing charter had two key provisions:
- Image would not own any creator's work; the creator would. Image itself would own no intellectual property except the company trademarks: its name and its logo.
- No Image partner would interfere—creatively or financially—with any other partner's work.
Early years
The first Image comic published was Liefeld's Youngblood #1 in April 1992. Pre-orders for the book reached 930,000 copies, beating the previous record for both the top selling creator-owned comic and top selling independent comic of all time. The second Image title, McFarlane's Spawn #1, debuted with a print run of 1.7 million copies in May 1992. Larsen's The Savage Dragon, Lee's WildC.A.T.S, Valentino's ShadowHawk, and Silvestri's CyberForce followed, all with strong sales to comic shops.
Within a few months, Malibu had almost 10% of the North American comics market share thanks to Image, briefly exceeding that of industry giant DC Comics. In early 1993 Image left Malibu and established itself as an independent company, hiring Tony Lobito as full-time publisher. Image became the first publishing company to challenge Marvel and DC's dominance since the establishment of the direct market.
Portacio was the only founder not to deliver the first issue of his own series in 1992. Initially, Portacio was reported to be working on a title called Huntsman with Chris Claremont, but opted instead to create his own title called Wetworks. However, work on the series was significantly delayed due to the death of Portacio's sister and he decided to resign as an Image partner. In 2022, former Incredible Hulk artist Dale Keown said that he was approached in 1992 about taking Portacio's place, but declined because his criminal record made it difficult to travel outside his home country of Canada. Keown still became the first non-founder to publish a creator-owned title with Image. The first issue of his series Pitt sold more than one million copies to comic shops. It was originally scheduled for November 1992 but shipped several months late.
Image continued to expand in 1993 with new titles from both founders, such as Liefeld's Bloodstrike and Lee's StormWatch, and non-founders, including Sam Kieth's The Maxx, Larry Stroman's Tribe, Keith Giffen's Trencher, and Mike Grell's Shaman's Tears, and 1963 by Alan Moore, Steve Bissette, and Rick Vietch.Tribe became the largest-selling African-American-created comic, with more than one million copies sold to comic shops. Moore went on to work on several Image series, including Spawn, WildC.A.T.S, The Maxx, and Supreme.
Also in 1993, Image and Valiant Comics began publishing the inter-company crossover Deathmate, which comics historian Jason Sacks described it as the first major comic universe crossover since the Marvel/DC crossover The Uncanny X-Men and The New Teen Titans was published in 1982.
Some of the founders' studios came to resemble separate publishers, each with several ongoing series set in a shared universe. The use of freelancers to write or illustrate series that were owned by the Image partners led to criticism that some of them had reproduced the very system they had rebelled against, but with them in charge instead of a corporation.
Many Image series quickly fell behind their intended publishing schedule. In response, retailers cut orders to reduce their risk. In August 1993, Image cut back its line, citing lateness and a desire to focus on books by the founders. The company announced it had canceled Shaman's Tears, Stupid, Trencher, and Tribe and that several mini-series including 1963 and Pitt would not become ongoing series. Moore's Enemies of Mankind and Frank Miller's Big Guy were "indefinitely postponed."
In late 1993, Image hired Larry Marder, an independent cartoonist and former marketer for Chicago comics retail chain Moondog, to act as "executive director" for the publisher, ranking above Lobito and reporting directly to the partners. McFarlane told The Comics Journal that the founders had ignored Lobito's advice in the past, even when he was correct, because they didn't have confidence in his guidance due to his age and relative inexperience.
Despite the scaleback in 1993, Image continued to publish creator-owned comics by a variety of creators. Though many Image titles sold more than 500,000 copies per issue in 1992 and 1993, by mid-1994 only the top-selling titles reached 250,000 in sales. Marder determined that Image needed to publish at least 30 comic books per month to stay in business. "And if the partners did not provide those books, I had to get those books wherever I could find them," Marder explained in 2007. Titles added in the mid-1990s included Hellshock by Jae Lee, Groo by Sergio Aragonés, Bone by Jeff Smith, A Distant Soil by Colleen Doran, and Astro City by Kurt Busiek, Brent Anderson and Alex Ross. In 1996, Lee founded a new sub-imprint called Homage Comics under his WildStorm Studios label. Described as a "home for creator-owned material as well as a safe haven from an increasingly challenging comic book market," the initial line-up consisted of Astro City, Terry Moore's previously self-published Strangers in Paradise, and a new title called Leave it to Chance by James Robinson and Paul Smith.
The Image founders also continued to produce new top-selling series, such as Gen13 from WildStorm Studios in 1994, and Witchblade and The Darkness from Silvestri's Top Cow Productions in 1995 and 1996 respectively. In 1998, WildStorm launched the commercially successful Cliffhanger sub-imprint to showcase created owned titles from a new generation of popular artists, starting with Humberto Ramos, J. Scott Campbell, Joe Madureira.
Speculative bubble burst
After a peak in early 1993, the comics market experienced a steep downturn as the speculative bubble burst. Around 20% of all comic book stores went out of business in 1993, industry analyst Mel Thompson estimated, compared to the typical attrition rate of around 10% in prior years. Many comics industry professionals blamed speculators for the market downturn, but many retailers cited Image's erratic publishing record as a key cause of fiscal strain for stores.Every single Image comic scheduled to ship in the first quarter of 1993 shipped late. In April 1993, only 15.3% of the company's titles shipped on time, compared with 90.1% shipped on time by DC, 79.2% by Marvel, and 100% by Valiant. Some titles ended up shipping out of sequence. For example, the first issue of Liefeld's on-going Brigade series shipped before the concluding issue of the Brigade limited series, and Spawn #21 shipped before issues #19 and #20. Deathmate Red, Liefeld's portion of the inter-company crossover with Valiant Comics, became emblematic of Image's problems. The book shipped four months late, well after the release of the series epilogue.
Retailers typically order comics two months in advance, on a non-returnable basis. Late books create cash flow issues for retailers, and in many cases, fans lost interest in late books by the time they shipped. Retailers estimated that late shipping could affect sales by as much as 60%, according to The Comics Journal. Late books also make it harder for retailers to plan purchases, because they have to order the next issues in a series before they see how well the earlier issues sold. "When books start shipping late, you end up ordering four, five, six issues before you see sales, and that's where the greater danger is," Hanley's Universe owner Jim Hanley told The Comics Journal in 1994.
Todd McFarlane told The Comics Journal that the blame for the market collapse should not be pinned entirely on Image. He argued that the company shared responsibility with other publishers, distributors, and retailers alike, saying that Image shipping books on time wouldn't "stop retailers from being stupid." In a Comics Retailer interview, McFarlane blamed the industry downturn on greed, saying he hoped that retailers who over-ordered popular titles, including Spawn, went bankrupt.
Based on public orders and shipping data, The Comics Journal and Thompson concluded that because Image titles accounted for such a large percentage of both late books and dollars spent, the company was more culpable for the situation than the Image partners were willing to admit.
In 2007, comics journalist George Khoury wrote that Marvel's decision to distribute its product exclusively through its own distribution subsidiary beginning in 1995 had a bigger long-term impact on the comics industry than Image's business practices. Diamond Distributors founder Steve Geppi told Khoury that Image helped expand the market for comic books, and Mile High Comics proprietor Chuck Rozanski pointed to the return of Superman less than six months after the Death of Superman, as the moment the speculative bubble burst. Khoury concluded that everyone in the industry was to blame for the comics market crash, including publishers, speculators, readers, retailers, creators, and editors.
"Many consider Deathmate the comic book that singlehandedly put an end to the industry's prosperous times and the biggest reason why so many comic book stores closed its doors for good," comics historian Jason Sacks wrote in 2018. "In truth, there was plenty of blame to go around."