Fucking Comics: Image Isn't Everything

Back in the late 80's there was a surge of popularity in comic books, and some of the "fresh faces" of the industry were becoming popular due to their "revolutionary" artistic style. And really when you look back at the whole "phenomenon" of that time, it wasn't so much that these artists were doing something unheard of. After years of everybody adhering to a "style" and "house method" of both art and story telling, the creative talents of the industry were probably tired of cloning the same style artwork for decades. So at the time anybody who drew things differently and gave their stories more "edge" soon became hot shit.

Notably, people at the time who became popular were artist/writers like Todd McFarlane, Rob Liefeld, Jim Lee, Erik Larson, and Marc Silverstri. All of whom were popular artists at Marvel. They soon became sick of the fact that other than their regular pay and some minor royalties, they didn't own any of their characters. Thinking this was a raw deal, they decided to form Image Comics. An comic book publisher that would give full creative and ownership control over the creator owned characters.

Now when Image exploded on the scene in the early 90's, it was hyped and sensationalized (thanks, in part, to a lot of the hype given to Image by Wizard Magazine. Go ahead and check out the first year of Wizard mags, almost every cover features an Image Comics character.) and people ate that shit up for breakfast. In fact, if the shit that Image Comics pumped out was literal, the entire comic book fanbase of the 90's would be fecalphaliacs Myself included, because at the time, I have to admit I was bit by the Image bug as much as everybody else. The only difference maybe that at the time I had a very limited budget (being an unemployed prepubescent with no allowance) so I'm one of the few people who collected comics in the 90's who probably doesn't have a huge collection of Image comics filed away in a filing box labeled "My personal embarrassment."

In retrospect, most Image comics were fucking shit, they were awful. Weak stories, one dimensional characters, and some very *ahem* liberal interpretations of the human anatomy. To coin a phrase: these comics fucking sucked. Main reason: Just because you're a "good" artist, doesn't make you a good writer. There are very few artists in the industry that also make good writers, good example of the writer/artist combo in book would be people like Frank Miller and John Byrne. And let me tell you, Rob Liefeld and Todd McFarlane are far from being Frank Miller.

While sometimes the art was nice, the over-all writing was fucking atrocious, and Image has become notorious for making plot elements that were used in the 80's and making them the cliché and much maligned characterizations that made comic books in the 90's so horrible: characters with mysterious pasts, big guns, women with huge tits and insanely long legs, cyborgs, and revealing costumes that were one step before nudity.

I think the going idea was that they wanted to make mature reader comics that were available to all audiences. I mean, why stop at all the sexual nuance and just show nudity? Why bleep out the swearing? I mean, Image Comics wasn't exactly a paragon to morality, when you could pick up any old issue of Spawn or Youngblood and see graphically detailed drawings of people getting limbs rended and organs ripped out.

But the taboos about swearing and nudity over censoring graphic violence that is popular in American culture will always be something that will elude me. I'll just satisfy myself with the fact that the concept is thoroughly fucked and move along...

Speaking of moving along, I'm supposed to be reviewing some fucking comics here, so I've taken the time to look back at three different Image Comics from my own collection and point out some of the assanine and stupid things they used to do for the sake of critical comedy. This time around we're looking at Todd McFarlanes Spawn (with issue #4), Dale Keown's Pitt (with issue #1), and finally Jim Lee's Gen 13 (with issue #1.) You'll notice that any work by Rob Liefeld is absent from this list. Because well... making fun of Rob Liefeld is so god damn easy, and really if I'm going to go at length at how fucking horrible he is, as a writer/artist/creator of anything, I'm going to devote it to a whole article. Giving credit where it's due, Rob Liefeld deserves more than just one page critiquing his own work.

But anyway, let's get this thing started by first taking a look at Spawn #4....

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