Thursday 2 February 2017

Image Comics

Image Comics launched twenty-five years ago, creating a new sort-of-connected superhero universe of creator-owned characters. Some of the characters looked somewhat familiar from the creators’ work at other comics companies, and it being the early 90s several were into covert ops that didn’t quite mesh with charging around in costumes shooting lasers.

Some series ran smoothly, some paused and stuttered and some never appeared. Several creators went back to Marvel and DC, others came in, the company began to publish standalone and non-superhero comics, and these days the company’s biggest series is The Walking Dead, not part of their superhero setup.

Along the way we got some shakeups in how comics creator ownership works, a pretty revolutionary toy company, some animated series, a Spawn movie, and lots of comics, highlights including Alan Moore getting free rein to rewrite Silver Age Superman in Supreme and Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch making The Authority the biggest superhero action movie on the page.

The Authority also got its own RPG, though the rest of the Image universe wasn’t invited along for the ride, with only the WildStorm subsection it was part of getting coverage. (That section was later folded into the DC Universe with the New 52, and Warren Ellis is back on a new version of it...)

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