image, old comics, etc.

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Staying at my mother's house on weeknights of late, I've been sorting through my old comic collection (and just assorted childhood/college-era junk in general) in an effort to pare things down to the bare essentials, to figure out what I want to keep forever and what I want to trash/give to charity (mind: I had this ridiculous indie belief that bags and boards for comics were lame lame LAME back in my collecting days, and as a result my comics ain't worth a tinker's damn now).

What stuns me is how horrible and imitative and unabashedly worthless a lot of Image stuff was in the early 1990s, and how much I blew my allowance on. Like, I'm stuck with like 50-60 lame-ass overpriced books that ape Liefeld's already shitty style or McFarlane or Jim Lee or whoever. One-shots that never should have been drawn or published, limited series that never concluded for no apparent reason. So many Cable ripoffs. So much bright, vibrant color hung on skeletal story and weak writing. Ads for books that never appeared. Muscles and T&A and blood blood BLOOD galore for their own sorry sakes. I want to name names, but I can't even recall a lot of the titles (and am at work), even though no-one would remember them anyway. Plus most of them are stupid. There was some lame Lobo ripoff that didn't pretend to be anything else. Angela, more lame T&A.

Some of started out great, then lost me altogether: Wildcats. Spawn's a perfect example of this - after the first 20 or so issues I stopped caring. I actually NEVER got tired of the Savage Dragon, but life and money woes killed my fandom around ish 100 and I never was able to get back in the groove. Maxx actually ENDED - that book and its spin-offs held my attention constantly, I think I have every issue. Trencher was fun (as was Punx but that's a diff. company and I love Giffen, so). Tribe looked promising but disappeared after a few issues. Stormwatch spun out into a world of crap the writers started jumping around into different points in time and burying readers with associated mini-series. Wildstar was fascinating, the two mini-series I have, anyway.

Has Image improved much since? I realize this is a broad question, and I don't know that I have any real points to make here, have just been thinking about this a great deal lately and felt like piping up.

Stuff I'm definitely holding onto, for sure, it's totally comix gold:

Doom Patrol (up until Morrison left)
Eightball
Hate
"Joke" League America (and ANTARCTICA!)
"Joke" League Europe
Legion of Super Heroes ("Five Years Later" era, up to around ish 60 or so, though it started losing steam around 45 i think)
Love & Rockets (incomplete, scattered issues and collections, all great)
Maxx
Punx
Savage Dragon
Spawn (maybe not, has aged badly)
Suicide Squad
Uncanny X-Men (200 to 303 or so)
West Coast Avengers
Wildstar
Wonderman
X-Men (up to ish 30)

scattered issues of a number of random series, like Walt S.'s Fantastic Four where they were zipping through time and alt. dimensions with Iron Man and or Thor (borrowed from library as a kid and never returned)

― Raymond Cummings (Raymond Cummings), Wednesday, 4 October 2006 18:49 (nineteen years ago)

forgot, also keeping:

new mutants
x-force
x-factor (selected runs, as both series got pretty dire at a certain point)
mutant x
shade the changing man

― Raymond Cummings (Raymond Cummings), Wednesday, 4 October 2006 18:52 (nineteen years ago)

Some of those Image comics are painful to look at today. But Marvel and DC both started introducing that 'style' so who knows why, but it sold. I seem to recall that Lobo rip-off making an 'appearance' in Lobo's own comic (somewhere in the first 2 or 3 I think) and having the shit beaten into him. His name was Bloodsport or Bloodfist or Bloodstool or something. And did I read a Lobo/Trencher story somewhere?

― Eyemelt (Eyemelt), Wednesday, 4 October 2006 20:28 (nineteen years ago)

Image seems to have turned into some kind of quasi-indie publisher now with an incredible variety of titles, I always feel a bit guilty for not actually reading any of them (tho I did start on Age of Bronze).

I feel Image gets a bit of a raw deal - unlike some of the other superhero comix their stuff NEVER claimed any kind of literary merit and rarely deviated from the mission of providing garish cheap-thrill power-fantasies for young boys in whatever the hot art style was.

Also I think their ideas were good! Or at least they hit on a couple of trends that touched something in their audience and made their comics feel as well as look more modern, i.e.

- Superhero characters as covert and militarized - this is something Marvel and DC could never and have never credibly done, and with Wetworks, Wildcats, Stormwatch, Team One, etc Image created characters that resonated with the post-Cold-War early 90s and an audience into (for instance) FPS games.

- Goth superheroes, or Vertigo with FITE SCENES - Spawn, Witchblade, Darkness - again Marvel and DC completely unable to compete with this in content terms as well as hott art.

I didn't like Image much but I was 5 years too old for it at least - I certainly don't think it should be dismissed.

― Tom (Groke), Thursday, 5 October 2006 09:52 (nineteen years ago)

Superhero characters as covert and militarized - this is something Marvel and DC could never and have never credibly done

Suicide Squad would seem to have done it before, and The Ultimates done it better (admittedly based on post-Image Stormwatch)

Goth superheroes, or Vertigo with FITE SCENES - Spawn, Witchblade, Darkness - again Marvel and DC completely unable to compete with this in content terms as well as hott art.

I think that Marvel and DC realised that it was very difficult to do, hence all those books being dreadful.

Also this moral relativism will be the death of ILC: the art was TERRIBLE! Maxx as always excepted.

Also shocking in industry terms - hammering the multiple variant covers like there was no tomorrow, and an initial utopia ("we want creators rights that we didn't get at Marvel") which turned south incredibly quickly (all those Liefeld-owned books he never lifted a finger on).

I agree they shouldn't be dismissed, but in a "never forget, never forgive" manner :)

― Andrew Farrell (afarrell), Thursday, 5 October 2006 10:24 (nineteen years ago)

(admittedly based on post-Image Stormwatch)

But not based in any way that matters, so please to ignore this parenthesis.

― Andrew Farrell (afarrell), Thursday, 5 October 2006 10:28 (nineteen years ago)

Suicide Squad sold 2 copies a month though - and those were superVILLAINS innit!! Actually the most Image-ish thing in SS was Team Argent which were dealt with in one annual and then forgotten.

Liefeld is kind of an exception to all this - he did trad superheroes and he did them very poorly, plus he was also the worst offender on the variant this, new series that, comics never coming out.

― Tom (Groke), Thursday, 5 October 2006 10:44 (nineteen years ago)

It was Bloodwulf, I think. And the irony there is that Lobo himself was a parody of Marvel's grim, gritty, kick-ass heroes of the era.

― Raymond Cummings (Raymond Cummings), Thursday, 5 October 2006 10:47 (nineteen years ago)

The Ellis Stormwatch was completely awesome, I thought. I liked the concepts behind WILDCats and Gen13 but never really got into either of those books; conversely, DV8 was totally and fully my bag for at least the first 10 issues.

Tom is totally OTM re: "big on ideas, poor on execution"; even Liefeld's abortive suckfest was a decent enough idea that people adored when Milligan did it ("What if the X-Men were media-whore mercenaries?").

― Young Fresh Danny D (Dan Perry), Thursday, 5 October 2006 20:53 (nineteen years ago)

Agreed on Youngblood, Dan. As much as I've come to loathe Liefeld's drawing style since, I think the book would have benefitted from him consistently writing and drawing for a long period of time and setting up a story people could care about BEFORE farming his duties off to other people and splintering the series into a bunch of related spin-offs (and leaving Image to launch one abortive crap series after another thereafter).

Gen13 felt like a sillier New Mutants to me; twas fine when it came out, looking back, well...let's just say I ain't keeping what I have of it. Wasn't there a spin-off from Gen13 that was all "Hellfire Club Kidz redux"?

Stormwatch had an interesting premise but got too convoluted too quickly.

On another note, may I just say that the first 20 or so issues of The Punisher unlimited series - drawn by Jim Lee - KICK ASS?!?

― Raymond Cummings (Raymond Cummings), Friday, 6 October 2006 10:50 (nineteen years ago)

You mean Punisher War Journal, don't you? I have fond memories of them, too (esp. the Wolverine team-up / slap-fight).

Image is definitely a catch-as-catch-can publisher now, but WITH A TWIST. From what I've heard (in most cases), they're simply the middle-man between the creators & the distributors. The writer / artist / colorist / letterer / etc. straighten stuff out on their own, Image gives the book a high-profile slot in the Diamond catalog, and they (the creators) (and Image, too) lose or make money accordingly. I'm pretty sure Robert Kirkman writes his Image books (Invincible, Walking Dead) for free, and any profits go to the artists, for example.

Recently, a lot of higher profile books have jumped ship to greener pastures (most notably Powers & Kabuki, as well as soon-to-be-starring-Johnny-Depp Rex Mundi), but just as many have smaller books jumped on board (Rocketo, True Story Swear To God). I'm not sure what the Top Cow / Image deal is, but Desperado Publishing (home of the Negative Burn anth, & lots of other seemingly cool old-skool & newish indie books) have a deal worked out. Image also had some distro deals w/ other mid-level indie publishers - I remember they had a relationship w/ the Devil's Due guys for a while?

What this all means: Fell and Casanova are awesome.

― David R. (popshots75`), Friday, 6 October 2006 11:27 (nineteen years ago)

Wasn't there a spin-off from Gen13 that was all "Hellfire Club Kidz redux"?

Yeah, that was DV8; Warren Ellis took Gen13's nemesis peer group and made them fucking AWESOME (esp Frostbite, Copycat and Sublime). I got a letter published in issue #3! Um.

― Young Fresh Danny D (Dan Perry), Friday, 6 October 2006 13:05 (nineteen years ago)

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