The Rise of Image Comics
Partial Cover Reveal
The Rise of Image Comics is a book that I’ve had in the back of my mind since I finished The World vs Todd McFarlane. When that one was done and published, I was asked a lot of questions about McFarlane and Neil Gaiman, as expected, but I also fielded questions about Image Comics itself. Nothing that I couldn’t answer, but then one person asked me this, ‘Why did Image Comics happen?’
I thought about that one long and hard. Why did it happen. The more I mulled it over, the more I realised that Image Comics, in some form, with the right people, was always going to happen. And it was preordained right from the start of the industry.
The events surrounding the purchase of Superman by DC Comics and subsequent treatment of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster set the wheels in motion for Image Comics. Siegel himself had the idea back in the 1940s, not Image as such, but a similar concept where he, Shuster and Bob Kane would grab a few others and form their own company to take on DC Comics. Of course, any plan with Bob Kane involved was always doomed, so it never happened.
But it could. The more I studied, the more I realized that there were ample opportunities for an Image Comics to happen from the 1960s onwards. They all failed, for various reasons. I then looked at what had been written about Image Comics - none of them mentioned the past. Only the immediate past. Not one has ever mentioned the industry as a whole, how events throughout the previous fifty+ years before 1992 all came together to form Image.
I started to tie it all together. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s all there, plain to see.
The book is now being edited and, hopefully, whittled down from the 400+ pages that it’s currently sitting at. It’s easily the largest comic book related book I’ve done, and, after it’s finished, I think I’ll be done.
In the meantime, a book is only as good as its cover, so here’s a portion of the cover, as drawn by Adelaide based artist Steve Lehmann. Steve has done an incredible cover, one that captures the Image feel without using any Image characters.
Go and check out Steve’s art. He’s easily one of the best.
In the meantime, here’s the Table of Contents as it currently sits.
When it’s ready to go, I’ll be letting you all know!!! Hopefully people will find it as interesting to read as I did researching and writing it.
More to come about this book in the coming weeks.