Image Comics: You’ve Come a Long Way Baby

Shiny!

I maintain a sordid, lovehate relationship with Marvel Comics, but back in the 1990s, there was a time when we kind of sort of broke up. That is to say, I cheated on Marvel. With Image Comics. I know I know, but you have to understand that I was young and naive and easily swayed by the shiny!

I followed my favourite X-Men artists, Jim Lee and Marc Silvestri over to Wildstorm and jumped head first into Cyberforce and WildCATs. Some intelligent part of me was aware that these books were just X-Men with shinier costumes and bigger boobs, but I persevered, picking up other titles like GEN13, Wetworks and Witchblade. I became a Disciple of the Blade, I moderated Top Cow message boards for Fathom (RIP Michael Turner), designed outfits for Pez and I was (am) hopelessly smitten with Ian Nottingham.

But eventually, I grew up.

The thing is, so did Image.

Over the past few years, I’ve slowly been getting back into the comic book scene and more often than not, Image books are popping back up on my radar. Long gone are the days of extremely perky nipples and spine-adjusted women. Image now boasts Eisner Award winning titles. A friend recently stubbornly spoke about how he’d never read another Image comic after he too had woken up from the foil covered ’90s. But when my friends and I started listing off some of the fantastic titles Image has been pushing out for the past while, he realized he’d been reading and loving Image Comics all along.

A lot of credit goes to their push for creator owned comics. A lot of comic companies accept original submissions, but I doubt you’ll ever see that happening with DC and Marvel. Image has opened its doors and as a result, we’ve gotten some really amazing and off the wall books. Not all of them are good, but all of them feature some fantastic ideas. Yes, even Ziggy Marley’s Marijuana Man has its merits. Here are just a few of the goodies that we’ve reviewed here at The BiblioSanctum.

Not to mention Saga, Mind the Gap, Fatale and a little something called The Walking Dead. These days, its hard not to make a list of critically acclaimed comics and not find a few Image titles on there. Image still has some of its old titles like Witchblade and Cyberforce, but even those books have matured. I’ve not read the new versions yet, but I definitely want to.