Webmaster’s Note: For all the people who asked about posting something so things would be a bit calmer around here– little did you know this was the next column in chronological order to be published.
February 21, 1992
I must admit…I’m a bit spoiled.
To backtrack–people within the industry had been hearing the “buzz” (just as the press release says) about Image comics for some weeks now. A group of friends banding together to form their own business (friends and business; now there’s a volatile mix. I hope everyone’s got good lawyers going over the contracts) and produce their own comics.
And it wasn’t just that they were creating their own titles. It’s that, to varying degrees, they were walking away from Marvel, citing an assortment of reasons, none of which was particularly flattering to that publisher.
This is nothing new, of course. Any number of creators have become disenchanted with one or both of “The Big Two” and moved either to already-existing independents or self-publishing.
That’s where the part about my being spoiled comes in.
Creators such as Wendy and Richard Pini, Frank Miller, Alan Moore, Dave Sim…these are people with talent and vision whose muses have produced titles whose subject matter doesn’t fit in with the Marvel and DC universes. Alan Moore did not cite disgust with DC’s business practices and go off to develop a new character named “Muck Monster.” He did “Big Numbers.” The Pinis had so much confidence in their elves that they were driven to produce “Elfquest” themselves, which thrives to this day while Marvel’s own “take” on elves, “Weirdworld,” vanished without a trace a decade ago. (Ironically, Marvel’s “Epic” imprint later reprinted “Elfquest.”)
So when a creator boldly announces that he’s off to start his or her own line, my presumption and hope is that it’s going to be something new and visionary. It doesn’t have to be highly marketable. Indeed, Marvel and DC’s main flaw is that titles are expected to draw significantly higher sales than an independent would reasonably expect for his piece of the market pie. So “Hard Boiled” doesn’t have to sell like “X-Men.” No one expects it to.
If Todd said, “I’ve been dying to do a good romance comic,” I’d be thrilled. If Erik said, “My life’s goal is to produce a solid western,” I’d be impressed.
So what’s Image publishing?
Superheroes.
Young superheroes. SWAT Team superheroes. Young freelance superheroes. A group of superheroes.
I mean…haven’t we got Marvel and DC for that? Why have X-Force clones when we’ve got X-Force?
I haven’t seen them yet, of course. Perhaps there will be some startling vision that makes us see superheroes in ways we’ve never seen them before. It’s possible. After all, not all superheroes are alike. “New Warriors” and “Watchmen” are nominally both about super teams, but are just a tad different in tone and style.
Can we get any idea in advance of publication as to whether the creators involved can pull it off, based on their previous work? Judging from their own press release, no, we can’t get an idea. Why? Because of the rather alarming sentiments voiced by both Rob Liefeld and Erik Larson. (And let me make it clear that I like both the guys personally; it’s what’s said in the press release that I’m reacting to.)
“I think that in many ways we’ve been holding back,” says Erik. “Most of our best creations have yet to be seen and will be seen under the Image imprint for the first time.”
Excuse me? Holding back?
Am I the only one stunned by this comment?
If you’re unimpressed by Erik’s recent work, don’t worry. If you can barely remember such characters of his as Shrapnel, take heart. It has nothing to do with lack of ability or talent. By his own admission, Erik’s just been dogging it. “Holding back,” as he says. Withholding his full imagination until a better opportunity came along.
Unless I’m inferring incorrectly here, the concept that fans are plunking down good money while figuring that a creator is giving it his all, every time out, doesn’t factor in. “Oh, this villain I just thought up is too good for Marvel readers! I’ll hold back!”
Rob echoes the sentiments. The release states that Rob “confirmed that his enthusiasm for the new line of comics has him bursting at the seams.” (What a concept. “Rob, are you bursting at the seams?” “Why yes I am, thanks for asking. These 501s are tight.”) And Rob goes on to add, “Not only do we get to share with fandom our finest creations, but we get to own them as well. What better incentive to do your best work.”
Well, gee…lemme think. Pride in workmanship? Commitment to a creative ideal? Are the retailers and fans who bought millions of copies of “X-Force” being told that their support was insufficient incentive?
It gives me the same queasy feeling that I get when I see one of those detergent commercials, wherein Woman X says to Woman Y, “What, how can you still be using Dayglo on your clothes? Don’t you know about Dayglo Plus?!” And she proceeds to tell us how wonderful the new product is, in comparison to the old and clearly inferior product. Which makes you wonder why, if the original product wasn’t all that hot, you were ever buying it in the first place. You feel like a fool because you supported the initial detergent. And you start to wonder if you’re simply being taken to the cleaners.
I keep trying to determine what the guys might actually mean rather than what they’re saying. Perhaps they mean that pride of ownership is what they take the greatest joy in. But again, here’s where my selfish viewpoint kicks in. I happen to think that some of my finest creations, purely in terms of merit and the effect they had on the audience, are works involving characters I did not create. So it saddens me a bit that the guys seem to feel that lack of ownership is a stumbling block to full pride in their work.
Or perhaps it’s just all hype, the same way as when Stan Lee would say, “Marvel Comics, the greatest works since Bill Shakespeare discovered the pen!” Now does Stan really, truly believe that Lee/Kirby “Thor” or “FF,” as good as they were, are on par with, say, “Hamlet?” I tend to doubt it. I doubt anyone really thinks Stan believes it. But quality hype is stuff that’s so over-the-top that you know to take it with a grain of salt.
Furthermore, quality hype should not denigrate the previous work of those people whose work you’re now trying to sell. Those “fans and retailers” being offered a chance to “get in on the ground floor of an exciting new comics universe” thought they were doing that when they bought into the newly revitalized Marvel mutant universe, or the new “Spider-Man” title…and are now being told that the creators themselves don’t consider that to be work reflective of their best efforts.
Speaking of Stan and Jack, I can’t pass up Erik’s claim that Image is “The most exciting thing to happen to comics since the creation of the Marvel Universe.” Oh, honestly, Erik. Has it occurred to you that if Stan and Jack and Steve had likewise been “holding back,” there wouldn’t have been a Marvel universe to bring you the measure of fame you now enjoy?
But you can point out that people like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko did their best work for Marvel (and Seigel and Shuster for DC) and have not shared proportionately in the monies generated by their creations.
You would be correct.
The troubles of the various creators in those instances, and many others, have been well-documented. No one covered themselves with glory. On the one hand, creators complained about perfectly legitimate deals that, with 20-20 hindsight, they wish they hadn’t made. They wanted a bigger piece of a pie to which they weren’t legally entitled. On the other hand, corporations came across as heartless, inconsiderate, boorish and ungrateful to the people whose imaginations created the six-figure incomes some executives enjoy, the millions of dollars in licensing fees filling the company coffers.
It used to be that the only business considerations of comics were held by publishers. No more. We have a readership base that is made up, in large measure, of people who see comics not as entertainment but as investments. And it would seem that we are also developing a creative base that is wising up, as it were. Who owns the story is becoming as great, if not greater, a consideration than what the story is actually about.
If Rob said, “I’m planning to do a series about a team of hermaphrodite bisexuals, and in the first issue they go back in time and discover Jesus was a vampire,” my feeling would be, “Yup. That sure wouldn’t have flown at the Big Two.” But there’s no discussion of subject matter that would have run afoul of corporate standards. Instead the release talks of cross-over storylines, team-ups and a shared universe…all stuff that not only is S.O.P. at Marvel and DC, but occasionally gets flack over being a mere marketing ploy.
Instead the main reason that the guys seem excited, according to the release, is that they own the characters themselves and, if there’s money to be made with those same filthy business considerations that people use to castigate Marvel and DC, then by gosh, the guys are going to make that money.
This is a significant consideration. Some headway has been made in the Big Two for creator consideration, but not enough. For example, all those Spider-Man and X-Force t-shirts…Todd didn’t get a dime off those. That, to my mind, has been and continues to be unfair. But if there’s a “Spawn” t-shirt comes out, the money goes to Todd…I presume.
Malibu publisher Dave Olbrich discusses the business end in the press release, stating that the deal, in addition to creative freedom, provides “better earning potential for artists and writers than ever before. Malibu is proud and privileged to help pioneer this new relationship from which the creators will clearly profit as much as the publisher company.”
Profit indeed. Sources said that Malibu was offering Image anywhere from 70 to 95 percent of the line’s net profits. In a separate conversation, Dave confirmed that the numbers were indeed “In that neck of the woods.”
Now Eddie Murphy has commented (not to me, mind you) that an offer of sharing in net profits is “a monkey deal”…meaning you’d have to be as dumb as a monkey. (Putting aside that an infinite number of monkeys working for an infinite period could produce the works of Shakespeare…although probably not an issue of “Thor.” Hey, maybe Stan was right after all.)
The point Murphy was making is that net means nothing. Gross is where the action is, and numbers can be crunched very easily so that when it comes time for the net profits, you wind up with nada. Hollywood bookkeeping is legendary for this (remember that “Coming to America,” one of Paramount’s big summer hits, was still in the red when Art Buchwald won his lawsuit).
Dave Olbrich, however, promises better things for Image. “I’m thinking in the long term,” he told me. Although obviously a few months of non-existent net profits would benefit Malibu, it would most probably alienate Image, and Olbrich pointed out, “When you do things in the long term perspective, you have to keep that in mind. There’s no long-term profit in violating trust.”
Furthermore, Malibu and Image are agreeing ahead of time as to what type of expenses qualify as documentable costs, to reduce or eliminate the chances of unpleasant surprises. This is, of course, only a partial solution, since actual dollar amounts can’t be predetermined. On the other hand, it eliminates the possibility of the sort of trickery in which movie studios engage. To make an outrageous example, Image isn’t going to have to worry about going to Malibu and saying, “What’s this part of the gross, where you took out $20,000 for limos,” to which Malibu replies, “Oh, that’s a legitimate expense. We hate to walk to work.”
The bottom line for Olbrich is, he told me, that he’s making every effort to deal in good faith since he’s “not interested in winding up in a worse position than when I started.”
I’m left, then, with only a couple of final thoughts. First, I can’t wait to see what happens if one of the creators has a falling out with the other guys and wants to take his character over to, say, Dark Horse. Can he guest-star characters he helped co-create for Image? What happens to licensing, particularly if the split is acrimonious.
Secondly, Image is going to boil down to the question of: What’s really selling? Is it the specific creators? Or is it actually the books that the creators are on? It seems the guys are attentive to the monetary bottom line. If that’s a major consideration, then what’s going to generate more money in the long run for Rob Liefeld: “X-Force,” which he doesn’t own, or “Youngblood,” which he does. Which will bring in more for Erik: royalties on “Spider-Man” or “The Dragon?”
With the Marvel titles, they’re backed up by thirty years of Marvel’s aggressively cultivated audience base, distribution, promotion, marketing and editorial power, all of which helped to push the masterminds of Image to the forefront of fan attention. But fan attention is notoriously fickle. They’ll be counting on that selfsame audience base to support their solo efforts, without the benefit of one of the Big Two pushing them. The fact that “Youngblood” sold 300,000 copies is meaningless. Sold to distributors does not equal sold to customers. Just ask the retailers at the recent Great Eastern convention who had “X-Men #1” in their 3 for a dollar boxes.
To a degree, I see Image right now as a skier just hitting the upward ramp of a jump. Hurled upward into the air by forces of which he is only a part, he glories in the freedom that is his.
Then he looks down.
The question is whether Image is going to wind up looking like Jean-Claude Killey, or the guy who tumbles ášš-over-teakettle at the beginning of “Wide World of Sports.”
As always, the fans will be the ultimate arbiters of that. Will the fans follow their faves? Or will it be like the movie actor who leaves Hollywood, goes to Broadway for a year and wins a Tony Award, only to return to Hollywood and discover that, as far as everyone there is concerned, he’s dropped off the face of the earth for twelve months. Thus far, it’s seemed as if Marvel and DC are Hollywood, and if you’re not working there, then to many fans, you’re out of work.
I, for one, am certainly hoping they succeed. Any guys who are nervy enough to go head-to-head against the Big Two in precisely the same genre that Marvel and DC have had a hammerlock for three decades certainly deserve the best wishes of anyone in a creative endeavor. It’s been a long time since Marvel and DC have had any serious competition from anyone other than each other.
I will be very interested to see whether Image develops into a portrait…or a silhouette.
(Peter David, writer of stuff, also hears there will be a title called “Wildcats.” How nice. I love Goldie Hawn movies.)
• 
I know that this BID was written in 1992, and is therefore literally almost fifteen years out of date, but there are any number of parts of this entry that made me chuckle with my own 20/20 hindsight.
The mention of Simon and Schuster getting screwed by their own deals is interesting because of the new lawsuit; the “Spawn” offhand, effectively about owning characters and deserving the profits of the creation, makes me just wonder about the passage of time; but my favorite was this:
…the movie actor who leaves Hollywood, goes to Broadway for a year and wins a Tony Award, only to return to Hollywood and discover that, as far as everyone there is concerned, he’s dropped off the face of the earth for twelve months.
I don’t think I need to explain why, do I?
I know that this BID was written in 1992, and is therefore literally almost fifteen years out of date, but there are any number of parts of this entry that made me chuckle with my own 20/20 hindsight.
The mention of Simon and Schuster getting screwed by their own deals is interesting because of the new lawsuit; the “Spawn” offhand, effectively about owning characters and deserving the profits of the creation, makes me just wonder about the passage of time; but my favorite was this:
…the movie actor who leaves Hollywood, goes to Broadway for a year and wins a Tony Award, only to return to Hollywood and discover that, as far as everyone there is concerned, he’s dropped off the face of the earth for twelve months.
I don’t think I need to explain why, do I?
I know that this BID was written in 1992, and is therefore literally almost fifteen years out of date, but there are any number of parts of this entry that made me chuckle with my own 20/20 hindsight.
The mention of Simon and Schuster getting screwed by their own deals is interesting because of the new lawsuit; the “Spawn” offhand, effectively about owning characters and deserving the profits of the creation, makes me just wonder about the passage of time; but my favorite was this:
…the movie actor who leaves Hollywood, goes to Broadway for a year and wins a Tony Award, only to return to Hollywood and discover that, as far as everyone there is concerned, he’s dropped off the face of the earth for twelve months.
I don’t think I need to explain why, do I?
Wow. Reading this ten, twelve years after the fact… that hindsight’s a real bìŧçh.
I’ve been out of comics on a regular basis for almost ten years, so I really don’t know how Image has fared in the interim (other than they appear to still be doing well, while Malibu has gone TU). Would anyone be willing to fill in the temporal blanks at all? Thanks.
I bought the collected BID a bit ago and enjoyed reading it while I was sick, but I’m actually glad to see them being posted here, too, for the chance at dialogue.
Reading this, the most interesting thing that comes to mind in the whole hindsight thing is the clash of who owned characters that happened between Todd and Neil. I admittedly didn’t follow the lawsuit as closely as I could have, choosing to only read what Neil revealed in his blog, but still… kind of funny, in that sadly ironic way, when you consider that and read the snippets of press release in this BID.
-Kelly
(friends and business; now there’s a volatile mix. I hope everyone’s got good lawyers going over the contracts)
PAD just needs to admit already that he’s psychic. 🙂
What strikes me is my impression of Image when it came out, and my reaction to the whole idea. I loved it…more books to buy, from some of the hotest artists of the time, and totally controlled by them…nothing edited or censored by the publisher. At the time, I saw it as the little guy breaking away from the controlling big guy.
Now, I just see it as some talented guys wanting a bigger cut of the profits. Granted, they took the risk of failure. But they weren’t “little guys,” in the sense I thought of them as. Each of them was a successful professional, with enough cash to front a start-up company (or enough cred to get investors), and all they were really doing was emulating the big guys, except with them at the top of the food chain. The dispute between Todd and Neil later only shows just how much the new guys cloned off DC and Marvel.
Which is neither good nor bad…just interesting.
Ahhh memories….. I remember reading this article when it was first published and being very mindful of the smirk that it brought to my face.
I also remember reading about the infamous debate with Todd that followed. Fun times for CBG readers.
Wow. That really takes me back. This article came out just when I was really beginning to get into comic books, and I just couldn’t comprehend what was going on at the time. It took me years to fully understand the situation.
Has PAD ever done a follow up on this column? I think it would be fascinating to see if the Image of today is any closer to what he was originally hoping for from the Image of 1992.
Great column. However, this was a rare instance in which I disagreed with Peter over a position he took with regard to Image. Specifically, I think he took the “I think that in many ways we’ve been holding back,” comment WAY too seriously. Yes, I think you did infer incorrectly, Peter, I was not stunned by it, and yes, I think it was just hype. Being able to own and determine the fates of your own characters, and to be the main profiteer from them is a great thing for a creator. Thus, I took Erik’s “holding back” comment as just metaphorical, that this new venture had them revitalized compared to their past work, and not that they were literally holding back their best work. Indeed, when you work under the editors of Marvel and DC, you are being held back in some respects—–by the editors. The forced yearly crossovers that took up anywhere from a fourth to half of the book’s storylines for the years, the silly censorship of things that should not be censored, etc. That abortion storyline you wrote in X-Factor comes to mind. So it is not surprising that Erik noted how having total creative freedom meant that he had fewer restrictions keeping him back.
But again, this was a rarity. The rest of the column was dead-on, as were all of your columns on Image.
I didn’t take the “holding back” to mean they weren’t giving a good effort for the Bullpen. I actually took it more to mean that they were being held back by the constraints you mention, Luigi.
I mean, let’s be honest…If Youngblood #1 represents Liefeld’s best efforts (and I just scanned through his work on Executioner’s song…actually better than I remember him being) then he actually got worse when he unleased the full potential of his ability.
Regardless of how some of the Image founders turned into mini Marvels or DCs, the system they set up to allow others to share in the big pie by producing their own creator owned books through Image with only a flat fee up front and no interference with any rights ever … that’s just amazing. For all the crap that Liefeld or McFarlane or Silvestri ever put out, it’s worth it to have gotten Age of Bronze, the ABC books, Powers, and so many others.
Image Comics are what made me get out of comics in the 90s. I’ve been going through all my boxes and came across my Image box and wanted to hit myself for spending the money. I fell for it. And now no one reads Image or any of those creators anymore. They took a big check and ran. And with it, they took the comic industry that suffered for a decade.
I agree with some of those sentiments, Matt. About the only thing I’m keeping in my collection that’s Image right now are the early Spawn, and that’s because it’s stuck in my head that they are worth something. I may have kept some of the lesser known minis. I think Jerry Ordway did a 4 issue Shadowstar or something…
But you can’t totally blame the Image guys. Look at their name…they didn’t pick Content for a reason. They didn’t really create the investor craze of the 90s…poor saps like you and I did. Maybe some comics should come with a a warning label? “Warning, this Variant/Holographic/shiney embossed cover image my be deterimental to the comic industry. Please consult an adult before buying all 6 versions.”
Now see, here I’m trying to recall if I bought any Image comics other than anything Alan Moore did for them. I’m pretty certain I did not. That said, I’d still like to know how solid an enterprise they are nowadays. I’ve always been a “writer first” kind of comic buyer, so I’ve never fallen for their stuff (which would also explain why I like PAD’s books so dámņ much) and am definitely not their target market.
Image nowadays is basically three different entities. McFarlane and Silvestri run their own lines. They’re not too terribly different from what you would expect them to be. Silvestri’s Top Cow very, very occasionally publishes something potentially worth checking out like Midnight Nation or Rising Stars or Wanted.
Then there’s what is loosely termed Image Central, which was run by Valentino for the longest time but is now run by Larsen. There is no universe there and it’s mostly a collection of random singletons owned by whoever is working on them. This is the part of Image that produces worthwhile books. Here you’ll find anything from Savage Dragon to Age of Bronze (Trojan War retelling) to Walking Dead (zombie/horror) to Flaming Carrot to PvP (gamer webcomic).
Liefeld quit or got kicked out depending on who you ask. Lee sold WildStorm to DC.
On the whole, Image doesn’t sell books like they used to. They hover around 3-5% of the market. Dark Horse is a little higher and Marvel and DC combined make up an astronomical percentage of the direct market.
Matt says, “And now no one reads Image or any of those creators anymore.”
Whatever happened to that Jim Lee guy anyway? 😉
Yeah, Image comics had/has some issues, but there were still titles I bought and still buy. Witchblade and PvP are all that remain, but I did hang in for the duration of Tomb Raider and Gen 13. Too bad the online Gen 13 fandom’s gone the way of the dodo.
Knuckles, once they actually had themselves set up in a manner that allowed creators to come in and print under their label, when said creators paid for their costs, they began to produce some real quality stuff. Some of the books that immediately come to mind that I found to be very solid are Invincible, Walking Dead, Powers, the Gift, TELLOS, Black Forest, (along with other Neil Vokes 1 shots). Terry Moore had Strangers in Paradise under the Image label for a short time and Bone was as well.
There is potential there, but many tails have come out since Image took off, including Gaiman’s experience and headaches, Terry Moore’s departure from Image soon after moving there, and an interview I recently read of Bendis’ story about his final encounter with Todd McFarlane that left me more convinced than ever that much of what was said during the initial hype was simply said out of a desire for publicity and perhaps the original group being swept up in the initial excitment of this new label and a lack of any real thought of how to do it.
My bad. I do buy an Image book, now that you remind me. Life wouldn’t be the same without the Flaming Carrot.
Stupid baloney gun.
Image Comics made me kick my comic book habit in the early 90s. I was a writer-first, old school sort of reader, raised on Jim Shooter’s Marvel. And even before Image was founded, the guys who would become it’s founders were already re-shaping the Marvel Universe into something I abhored.
Apart from PAD’s Hulk, and New Warriors, there weren’t many Marvel comics that appealed to my tastes anymore. And then, these guys formed Image and became sort of the standard everyone would be measured against, or so it seemed at the time. Everybody seemed to jump on their bandwagon. Made me puck and give up on comics.
And, irony of ironies, what made me return to comics some years later was a book published by Image. But as unlike the Image founders kind of book as could be. It was Kurt Busiek’s Astro City.
I eventually even came back to Marvel around 1997 or so, when the Imagey style had mostly died down.
So, I’d agree that, even though Image gave raise to some of the crappiest superhero comics the world has ever seen, it was worth it to build a haven for other creators who were diametrically opposed to the Image Founders own style of comics.
As near as I can tell, most of Image’s books are no longer superhero books. They are, I think, in the minority of what they publish.
Audiences were certainly becoming more creator-conscious in those days. Today, instead of reading our favorite heroes religiously, we tend to jump from book to book following our favorite writers/artists. Many of us will abandon our favorite characters without hesitation if the creators move on to other projects. I think it’s because, on some level, we recognize that the characters under a different creator are actually different characters. (Right now I’m currently adjusting to the switch from Waid to Straczynski on Fantastic Four. It’s like a completely different book.)
I still have problems reading Teen Titans, because I haven’t been able to make the transition from Young Justice. These Titans are so darn serious all the time!
“tails”? ugh… tales.
Image was (this statement seems to pop up lots) the thing that caused me to leave comics. Hulk, New Warriors, Astro City, Ranma 1/2 and a few one shots by good writers kept me from going cold until Marvel dumped PAD on Hulk and the New Warriors went through creative changes. After that? Not much for a long time.
The Image style became THE style for so many books in the 90’s that you almost couldn’t escape it. That was a bad thing if you didn’t like the Image style. Jim lee, for my tastes, was the best artist of the group in both art style and layout. His style I liked. But even I got sick of the 90,000 Lee clones in Image, Marvel and DC.
The Image format ($1.95) wasn’t bad until everyone else got glossy envy and hiked up to that standard as well. My budget got hit when the price of most books dámņ near doubled and the choice became them or food and rent. A funny side note memory was an interveiw with Todd that I read about three years after Image launched. In his never ending quest to trash talk Marvel and DC while placing Image on the Comics God level he said something that was so stupid (even for him) that it was funny. He pointed out (in Hero Illistrated I think) how “everybody else” were jacking their comics’ prices up and ripping the readers off and that Image hadn’t raised their price one cent in all that time because they respected their readers sooo much. Funny bit was that “everybody else” had brought their format and price up to the “Image standard” that Todd and other Image members had made the normal format and price for their books, stated were the best for the artist, the reader, the quality, etc and had therefore finally came up to the same price as Image. Todd never gave an answer to some readers question of if that meant that he had been ripping off the readers from day one or not. All of that may have come about without Image but it was Image that did it.
I think my biggest gripe with Image is that they became (how fitting for the 90’s) the Bill Clinton of comics. Lots of talk that turned into hot air, lots of promises that went unkept, lots of promise that was never met and a general feeling that so much greatness was wasted on the most base stupidity of human nature.
Jerry:
>I think my biggest gripe with Image is that they became (how fitting for the 90’s) the Bill Clinton of comics. Lots of talk that turned into hot air, lots of promises that went unkept, lots of promise that was never met and a general feeling that so much greatness was wasted on the most base stupidity of human nature.
Wow, replace George Jr. and the current world circumstance and I agree 100%, but why turn this into a political thread? 😉
>and an interview I recently read of Bendis’ story >about his final encounter with Todd McFarlane
Got a link or a summery?
C’mon, Peter, that Image prediction was like shooting fish in a barrel. Why not reprint a BID column that shows you were just wrong, wrong, wrong? Anyway, enjoy your fourth.
Scott:
>>and an interview I recently read of Bendis’ story >about his final encounter with Todd McFarlane
>Got a link or a summery?
It was from the Comics Journal #266, Feb/Mar 2005. A really solid interview with Bendis that I’d recommend to any who are interested in tracking said issue down. As far as his experience with Image and McFarlane, Bendis stated that his experience had been wonderful and that Todd had given him complete freedom with no conditions except “make it better”. Bendis was offered Ultimate Spider-Man and informed McFarlane of this. Without warning, he received a call a few days later. It was Todd firing him from Sam & Twitch without explanation. Bendis agreed to work on spider-Man and gave up McFarlane’s other book “HellSpawn”, because he didn’t feel that he was clicking on the title and figured that he would focus on the other books he was doing. McFarlane, called and told him that he “didn’t want him working here”. Bendis later came to the conclusion, after speaking with someone else, that McFarlane was upset that he had accepted work on the character of Spider-Man and, according to Bendis, McFarlane considered this to be “f*cking his girlfriend”.
As I said a very interesting interview providing BMB’s early work in comics, influences, how he rose through the ranks, and provides much insight on the guy. Worthwhile and much more readable than my recap.
Fred
Looking back into my collection, I started getting seriously into comics around 1985. It seemed like, at that time, there wasn’t a lot of shifting around of teams on books. You’d have fill-ins, but I was more focused on the characters and the storylines than who was creating them.
Flash forward to the end of my serious comic collecting life, probably around 2001. I had favorite writers and artists, and I’d either flip through new things they would do, or at least note when they got new assignments. But radical shifts in teams on my favorite books shook me out of my collecting fever (that, and the increasing cost of the hobby, combined with limited storage space). As Scott I mentioned above, a new team often meant a different take on a character, or at least a change in tone. I was an avid Batman collector, but when the creative teams all rotated, my interest fell. I didn’t want things shaken up. I was enjoying them the way they were.
Sticking with a Batman theme, it’s like looking at the various movie versions. You can recognize them all as Batman, yet the Adam West version is nothing like the Burton/Keaton version, which is vastly different from Kilmer and Clooney’s take. All of which are different from the Batman we see in Batman Begins. I’d love to see more Bale Batman films….I don’t even want to watch re-runs of the Schumaker versions. I enjoy the Burton Batman in an Elseworlds kind of way. All are different…not all appeal equally to everyone. And some just flat turn them off so much, they leave the franchise alltogether.
What I remember best about Image was the sheer quantity increase in product we got through the warehouse doors every week. We had to beef up at the distributor level and all I could think about was this huge amount of additional comics was going to the same stores with the same customers. Few new customers would come in to pick up Image books, so retailers faced a huge problem: Sell more books to current customers, demanding more cash outlay from them than ever before (they weren’t going to so much displace other titles from the Big Two as they were just adding to the pull orders).
Retailers looked at the books, saw how bad they were, and didn’t know what to do. Eventually the customers would wise up and quit buying Image. It created a huge cash flow crunch, an ordering headache (assuaged by advanced pull orders only a little), and, in my opinion, contributed mightily to the retailer implosion (though Diamond’s consolidations also contributed mightly, as well).
Of course, saying all that, it takes a lot of guts to launch Image. I’d always hoped Defiant would outstrip them with better writing, but no such luck.
I couldn’t resist to post a second time.
Man, I’m so happy to read this BID column. I’m so happy Image, as it was originally conceived, is just a memory. I feel all tingly.
Nowadays, fanboys bìŧçh about Bendis, about Millar, and Warren Ellis, and JMS, and I just smile. At least these guys are WRITERS. Writers are again the leaders of the industry, as it should have always been.
I can’t find it in my heart even to hate Chuck Austen.
The nightmare is over. The nightmare that made me forsake ten years of comic book collecting in 1991-1992. For a while there, it seemed like the future of the comic book industry was these non-stories that were half-MTV videoclips, half-brainless blockbuster action movies, designed for the express purpose of crafting splash pages with interchangeable characters posing simply for visual effect.
Yes, I know that Jim Lee is still “hot”. But now he is just a hot name among other hot names. He isn’t the God that would remake the whole industry in His own “Image” anymore.
Like Jerry, Image was one of the factors that got me out of comics. I started reading Marvel stuff in the early 80s (Avengers, X-Men, Thor). The joke at the time was that the brandname said it all: Image – great art, little story. You combine Image with the Marvel twice-a-month X-Men and the DC “Death of Superman” marketing and it was all too obvious that stories were secondary.
I think the final push was the “Death of Superman”, though. Most of the local comic shops were selling it ABOVE retail price. There were one or two retailers who were above board about it – they were the ones who had been in business in town for 15+ years. The new retailers were in it for the money, and it showed.
I will say this about comics, though, it taught me a lot about the laws of supply and demand in the collectibles market 🙂 Most of the books that I thought would be “worth something” aren’t.
“Wow, replace George Jr. and the current world circumstance and I agree 100%, but why turn this into a political thread? ;)”
Sorry. That’s not really what I was trying to do. It’s just the matter of timing between the two, my own political junky nature and how I’ve always looked at and referenced Image since about 1997.
Image started in 92. Clinton was elected in 92. Both made some great promises and I, despite my misgivings about some aspects of both, gave them my support. Both became somewhat disappointing by 95. Both were successes of a sort by 2000 but you looked at the overall prior eight years and saw a lot of wasted potential and a legacy that was flushed away by stupid garbage.
Like I said; not exactly trying to do the political thing. Just my nature and how I always thought they ran so parallel in my eyes.
I disagree…ideally, it should be a blend of writer and artist. If only the writer mattered? We’d just read books. No, the artist is quite important, as is the writer. And that was the flaw of Image, the creators did not get the importance of writers. They thought that was the easy part. It is strange to me that people would consider one really important and one not so. I mean, I don’t care how good the writing, after awhile, bad artwork hurts the eyes and ruins the experience. Great art can’t mask lousey writing. In comic books, both are important…I don’t get why people don’t see that in discussions about Image and the 90s.
I also would argue that many of the things credited to Image were not the fault of image…Marvel and DC were doing variant covers and Marvel had the cult of the artist going before Image existed. Fact is… the “Image style” really was the Marvel style. Image deserved a lot of the criticism they got…but blaming them for variant covers, cult of the artist and the speculator’s market, that stuff started before them…it continued with them, but they are not guilty of creating that abysmal aspect of the 90’s comic scene.
btw, my disagreement was with Rene’s assertion that “Nowadays, fanboys bìŧçh about Bendis, about Millar, and Warren Ellis, and JMS, and I just smile. At least these guys are WRITERS. Writers are again the leaders of the industry, as it should have always been.”
It’s a combination of the two, neither should be the “leader of the industry”.
Thom,
Surely, the “Image Style” started at Marvel, after all the Image Founders worked there before going away to do their own thing, but I think it’s very unfair and misleading to call it the “Marvel style”. Marvel was around for 30 years (50 if you count the Golden Age) before Jim Lee or McFarlane did anything professionaly.
And in those 30 years I don’t remember any “cult of the artist” surfacing at Marvel. Are you perhaps refering to people like John Byrne, Frank Miller, and Walt Simonson? These folks are as much writers as they’re pencillers.
Surely the “Image Style” was a style that came to dominate Marvel for a brief period of it’s history (1990-1996 or so), and if you want to call it the “Early 90s Marvel Style” I won’t be so opposed to it. But just calling it “Marvel Style” is misleading. Even so, I feel “Image Style” is the more proper name for it, as it was under that label that it came to flourish and attain it’s maximum expression.
The penciller certainly is important, but ultimately the comic book starts with the writer. The writer is the one who first has the idea. The penciller converts it into graphic form. It’s in this way that I said writers must be the industry’s leaders. The pencillers exist to make the writers idea happen in graphic form.
When this natural order is inversed and the penciller comes first, we get… well, we get Image Comics, when the writing seemed to be just a afterthought to justify all those “kewl” little pictures.
Do I blame Marvel for the abysmal 90’s scene? I certainly do. Marvel seemed to lack editorial direction when Jim Shooter left, and when the Image crew left to fund their little club, Marvel did their best to emulate what Jim, Rob, and co. were doing at the time, except they produced comics that were even worst than the “originals”.
But as much as blame Marvel somewhat for it, it would be insane to say Image itself was not to blame, and wasn’t to blame to an even greater degree than Marvel. It’s like to assign all the blame to bumbling pathetic Mussolini and saying Hitler was a sweetie.
the BID tpb had little PAD written blurbs where he commented on the article reprinted…how things had turned out and so forth…I’d love to him comment on these from today’s persepective.
This article is interesting…Like others, I’ve always felt PAD took the “holding back” line too seriously. And in some parts he was on the money (the friends and business…lots of strife with Liefield being forced out…Silvestri actually left too for about a week at the time. Lee seemed to seperate ok, but I seem to recall McFarlane had issues with that…as we’ll see in future reprints)…Early Image didn’t really show anything new….but it did lead up to stuff. Jim Lee and WildCats could be traced as one of the big influences on today’s books. Would we have Identity Countdown Crisis (when to xovers start to be named like What The!?! parodies?) and Dissasembled, and Ultimates if not for Authority which came from Storm Watch which came from WildCats?
And Image to grow to do some good stuff, mainly because of Valentino.
One other result of this collumn, is the eventual revealing of Eric Larson as the Arnold Horshack of comicdom.
“Would we have Identity Countdown Crisis (when to xovers start to be named like What The!?! parodies?) and Dissasembled, and Ultimates if not for Authority which came from Storm Watch which came from WildCats?”
Sure, Image ended up producing a lot of cool stuff “indirectly”. Stuff A that came from stuff B that came from stuff C, etc. We could add another layer there and say WildCats came from X-Men…
But ultimately “Authority” was the brainchild of writer Warren Ellis. Not of Jim Lee.
I too would love to read Peter’s latest observations on “Image” as well as other independent companies that spun off from it like Top Cow and the ones that were absorbed by DC like Wildstorm and ABC.
I bought the collected “But I Digress” when it hit the shelves at Borders Books, but I was already out of comics before the 90’s “implosion” due to increased prices caused by the “Prestige Format” titles and the high-quality paper comics that were already changing the face of collecting for those who “left their parents’ basements” and lived on their own, as I did in the 80’s.
In retrospect, I find it interesting that AFTER Image started running into controversy after this entry hit The Comics Buyers Guide that the “targets” of the attack and the fans who supported them conveniently ignored the fact that Peter wasn’t “anti-Image” so much as legitimately confused over the fact that it’s human nature for some people to trash what they did before in order to justify what they’re doing now, which I think the “Image Guys” were doing, possibly without realizing it. Peter also said IN PRINT that he hoped that they SUCCEEDED, despite his hesitancy to give them his UNCONDITIONAL ENDORSEMENT due to not really knowing what their long-term plans were (possibly because they didn’t have any at the time) and, as he said, they weren’t doing what the Pinis, Frank Miller and even Moebius did before THEM: tell NEW stories in less popular markets instead of re-packaging OLD ones in the same markets that Marvel/DC already had a stranglehold on, thanks to them. I guess it’s easier to bad mouth a “friend” for NOT UNCONDITINALLY supporting you than it is to acknowledge that they could see the BIG PICTURE better than you could and knew that the emperor was wearing Underoos.
I really can’t understand the venom some people have for Image. It’s like people wanted them to fail and hold them is disdain for daring to strike out on their own.
Wow, Todd and Neil Gaiman have had a legal disagreement! Is this really so unlike Alan Moore’s battles with DC and other such instances with the Big Two.
Instead of having Lee, McFarlane and Liefeld strike out on their own for more creative control and a bigger piece of the pie, would you rather they get dismissed like Dan Jurgens did from “Superman”, without so much as a thank you note after writing the character for years? Is the way Cockrum, Infantino, Finger and others got screwed more noble?
And I really don’t understand how anyone can begrudge Erik Larsen. He has just wanted to tell his stories his way and he has never deviated from that.
Jerome,
I don’t think that it really has anything to do with all the “noble” stuff you mention. There have been many creators who struck out on their own to do their own thing that are well loved (by even the internet fans) and spoken quite highly of. What put Image (most of ’em) in the PR toilet was the mouths on most of the creators themselves.
Those guys started to come off as seeing anybody who wouldn’t mindlessly support them as against them and badmouthed pros and fans alike for no really good reasons. They also did more then dámņëd near anyone I can think of early on to screw up retailers and sales people with books that shipped late or not at all, books that didn’t match the pre-sales description of what it was or what it was about (andt Image then refused to correct or allow returns on them), books that were renumbered out of order because they couldn’t get them out after presales and didn’t want to deal with the problems they created like grown ups, etc, etc, etc…….
The reason I later on got ticked with Image one last time though wasn’t really their fault. I just hated the art style they made popular and then everyone else aped, badly, for years. But it was that one tiny straw added to the giant bale that they had already made.
It isn’t that I think Image is blame free for the crap of the 90’s…but they are not the only guilty party. Without Marvel, Image could not have happened. Marvel was the bloated beast that gave birth to Image. Image continued what Marvel started. Yes, Marvel is guilty for “Cult of the artist”. Marvel has always been more popular for it’s artists. I have heard the statement “You go to Marvel for Art, DC for Writing” at conventions, in comic shops, etc for years. Outside of Stan Lee and a select few writers that followed (Claremont, David, etc), Marvel was the place that generated talk of the artists. That goes back to the 60’s. It may have hit a pwerful peak in the 90’s, but the seeds were planted years before. Again, Image could not have happened-it never would have happened- without Marvel. Marvel bears as much blame as Image for the flaws of the industry in the 90’s. Marvel bears the blame for the early days of Image itself.
But it was Marvel that made them superstars. It was Marvel that gave them books. It was Marvel that told us the new McFarlane Spider-Man would be the best in the world and we had to buy it.
Marvel created the cult of the artist…Image just carried on the tradition.
For all that any publisher can carry the blame for the 90s, and the fallout of the 90s, there’s an even more responsible party…us. Comic buyers. Any one that has ever purchased more than one copy of a book because it was going to be “hot” someday. I played my part. And when I realized that 90% of what I was buying was crap, I dropped them from my pull list.
Then the 10% that was remaining got cancelled, because it wasn’t selling enough.
Marvel may have been writing the checks that paid for the creation of Image, but it was us, the comic consumers, that gave Marvel, and the Image boys, the incentive. Take away the huge amounts of money we put into the industry at the time, and you don’t have an Image.
>>Marvel has always been more popular for it’s artists. I have heard the statement “You go to Marvel for Art, DC for Writing” at conventions, in comic shops, etc for years.>>
Certainly. I’ve heard it for years, ever since the very late 80s. That’s more than 15 years, certainly enough for it’s being around “for years”. And it started with McFarlane, Jim Lee, etc.
But before that? Most of writers and artists from the 70s and on have worked in both Marvel and DC. What made Marvel different from DC were certain editorial practices, perhaps, but where is this supposed domain of the artist as compared to a supposed domain of the writer at DCs, before the late 80s?
As I said before, guys like John Byrne, Walt Simonson, Frank Miller, Jim Starlin, are artists who also can write, all of whom begun at Marvel and have worked at DC too. Are you refering to them?
Roy Thomas, Jim Shooter, Steve Gerber, Gerry Conway, Marv Wolfman, Roger Stern, Denny O’Neil, David Micheline, J. M. deMatteis, Bill Mantlo… all writer guys that either managed to gain some modicum of acclaim at Marvel and/or that went to work at DC, and/or that started at DC.
Tell me, who are these DC-only writers that make for DC’s reputation as “writers-first” house? The clique of Perez-Byrne-Miller that remade DC’s icons post-Crisis came from Marvel…
Except for that, I agree with most of your post, in saying that Marvel also has much to blame for the dreadful 90s. And that, after 1989 or so, Marvel became “hot artist” house. But that was soon before Image begun and carried this torch. So I don’t think it unfair to associate the cult of the artist more with Image than with Marvel.
>
That is exactly it. They tried to pass themselves as something nobler, better, and they were actually just like the Big Two. That is called hypocrisy.
But I don’t really care about that. They’re a business, like any other. More power to them. My gripe was with the content of their books.
The final bit of my last post was to answer to Jerome, specifically to this:
>
That is exactly it. They tried to pass themselves as something nobler, better, and they were actually just like the Big Two. That is called hypocrisy.
But I don’t really care about that. They’re a business, like any other. More power to them. My gripe was with the content of their books.
I want to apologize if my last couple of posts were rude. Anyway, just to elaborate it a little more and try to continue it in a more civilized way.
I must say that I never heard the “You go to Marvel for Art, DC for Writing” motto before about 1988. Both Marvel and DC had many notable artists, but throughtout most of their histories, I don’t think Marvel’s art was substancialy different from DC’s.
But talking to fans and reading the lettercols of the comics from the 60s, 70s, and 80s, and it wasn’t the art that made one a Marvel fan or a DC fan. It was, rather, a different style of writing. I can’t even say that Marvel’s writing has been uniformily better or worse than DCs. Just that Marvel seemed to belong in a slightly different subgenre and had a very distinctive writing style.
Angsty heroes, long soap-operish subplots, continuing stories, tighter continuity and interconnected titles, a bit more realism and violence, those were the elements that made a Marvel comic different from a DC comic, rather than any kind of preponderance of art over writing in any of the two houses.
Even in the case of Marvel’s writer-artists, like Byrne, Miller, Simonson, Starlin, it was clearly their writing that made them notewhorty. For instance, when Byrne was merely drawing the FF under Wolfman’s writing, the reaction to the comic was lukewarm. So it couldn’t be just his art that would make him a superstar. It was only when Byrne began WRITING it that he really made his name on the comic. The same can be said of Frank Miller and Jim Starlin.
Approaching this from another angle, we can consider the Avengers. Though John Buscema and George Perez (among others) are highly praised, when Marvel zombies talk about the Avengers, now and then, it was almost always “Roy Thomas’s Avengers”, or “Steve Englehart’s Avengers” or “Jim Shooter’s Avengers” when talking about the different runs the team had. There was clearly a difference of sensibilities between these different runs, a distinctiveness that is a trademark of the writers.
This is a stark contrast to the post-1988 Marvel, when you had “Todd MacFarlane’s Spider-Man” or “Rob Liefeld’s X-Force”, when the artist’s name is mostly associated with the creation. For instance, when people talk about Spider-Man’s premier 80’s villain, the Hobgoblin, they talk about him as writer Roger Stern’s creation, I almost never hear him described as artist John Romita Jr’s creation. By contrast, Spidey’s premier 90’s villain, Venom, is mostly considered a Todd MacFarlane creation, instead of writer David Micheline’s creation.
Certainly, Image shares the blame of helping the cult of the artist to continue…but it started with Marvel, and Marvel helped build them egos that went out of control.
Personally, I just found it crazy that the first thing they did was create a shared creator owned universe. Like that wasn’t setting things up for a fall.
Good points about Marvel and its writers, Rene. (And glad to hear that people still remember Roger Stern’s Hobgoblin – and acknowledge him – despite the other Hobgoblin stuff – Macendale, Demogoblin – which followed.)