The story behind the Image

I can remember where I was when big news events were happening, like the Challenger explosion, or the underarm bowling shenanigans, and I remember exactly where I was when I found out that Rob Liefeld was leaving Image Comics.

It was a few months after it actually happened, because there was no internet, and news about comic artists did not make the local papers or the six o'clock TV news. I only found out about it when I read the article in the latest Wizard magazine, a month or two after it happened. I saw the news while me and my mates were on a Christchurch mission, eating bread rolls and drinking chocolate milk beside the Avon River.

I know exactly where I was because I had been absolutely fascinated by all the stories behind Image Comics, far more than I was by the comics themselves.

I was certainly primed for Image - the Lee/Liefeld/Mcfarlane years at Marvel were all in my early teens, and I thought they were all magnificent - Jim Lee in particular made a huge impression. But I missed the boat completely when they all jumped ship and formed their own company - there was no comic shop near me, and the internet hadn't quite arrived, so all I knew about these comics were the articles in months-old magazines.

So the comics never meant much to me. I later bought the ones where they got someone like Alan Moore involved, but 95 percent of the Image output was actively off-putting by the time I saw them regularly on the shelves - they were some of the most rancid looking comics I'd ever seen.

I still think what happened at Image broke a lot of the arguments that the very smart people The Comics Journal had been making for years - that all creators needed was full control over their work and then they would produce heartbreaking art of staggering genius - and when that happened to the biggest artists of the day, they just added more guns and spikes and pouches.

So it's not like the comics meant anything to me, but the personalities behind them all were absolutely bonkers, and far more entertaining. The interviews I read with the Image founders might have been months old, but they were exciting and bold and brash.

When they ditched Marvel, it felt cataclysmic, in a way that was weirdly optimistic and earned. By then everybody knew how artists had been screwed over for decades, with the creators of Superman treated appallingly by a company that made billions out of their ideas. To see the power shift so dramatically was something to behold, and while it only lasted a few years before the big two companies reasserted their traditional dominance, this was something new.

When the first hints of them got through to me, it sounded fucking great. The trash talk of youth translated to my favourite medium. The artist taking on the suits, and starting a whole new line of comics. There had certainly been other comics publishers outside DC and Marvel, but most of them had vanished by the time the Image juggernaut got moving - Dark Horse hung in there with some excellent licensed comics - and none of them had the raw power that Image did.

All the optimism was soon tempered by generally dire quality of the comics, and the late books and non-arrivals, and the new talent they brought in to rush through the books who produced art that were mostly dire imitations of the superstars, artwork that satisfied nobody.

I bought a small handful of Image comics in the first few years, and they were pretty dull and ugly, but I never tired of that trash talk, and then some of them were sniping at each other, and then Liefeld was out, as I discovered on a Saturday afternoon by the river. The drama died down, and by the time Lee cut ties to go and do his thing at DC, most of the excitement around Image was gone.  

To everybody's credit, the company persevered and evolved over the years, and while it still makes some bone-headed moves, it has also produced a mountain of great comics in the past 30 years - less big cyborgs with guns, more heart-wrenching sagas with a very specific twist - and I've enjoyed more Image comics in the past decade than ever before.

Some of the comics are so good, I've even enjoyed them more than the stories behind the scenes, like the cheapness over a plane ticket that cost Marvel their superstar Jim Lee. But whenever a retrospective on that era is published, or one of those beautiful loudmouths gets on a podcast, I'm there to hear all the old stories of a seismic moment in the industry, when anything was possible. That potential might have failed to reach expectations, but it still gave us a hell of a lot of drama.