This Image Comics Series is More Important Than Ever Almost 20 Years Later

Image Comics is one of the most important comic publishers around. Since 1992, Image has allowed creators to put out books that they owned, making all of the money, and telling the stories they want. Image has published brilliant comics, and once upon a time gave starts to some of the greatest creators in comic history. Marvel poached heavily from Images in the late 2000s and early 2010s, getting a load of writers and artists that had cut their teeth at Image. One of these writers is now known as one of the greatest writers of all time — Jonathan Hickman. Jonathan Hickman’s work on superhero comics has gained him legions of fans, but there’s one Image/Hickman book that feels prescient in 2025 — The Nightly News.

The Nightly News is a six issue series that ran from 2006 to 2007. It was written and drawn by Hickman, and for fans who are more used to his sci-fi and superhero books, this is a very different experience. The comic itself is all about the Voice, a secret cult who targets the news outlets of New York City in an attack meant to change the world. The book has multiple twists and turns throughout its run, and its message is one that everyone needed to hear before they even thought about voting in 2024.

The Nightly News Is an Indictment of the Power of the Media and its Relationship with Government

The first thing that anyone notices about The Nightly News is the unique visual style. Hickman doesn’t really draw comics anymore, but his sense of design and page layout is, frankly, revolutionary. He eschews the panel structure of comics as much as possible, which gives the book a strange feel, but one that definitely helps to make its point. There’s a sense of chaos to the whole thing, which is something that cults use to indoctrinate their members; they are the antidote to chaos. Another thing that long time Hickman fans will notice is the usage of white and the infographics. This is the beginning of what is now the Hickman style, and it feels like a comic that is on the bleeding edge.

The infographics of the book are the key to the whole thing. Hickman meticulously researched the news media in the United State and the way it intersects with the government. The Nightly News is strangely apolitical in a lot of ways, something that is hard to find currently, but it does have a message — the media and the government have teamed up to control the American people since the advent of radio and TV. Hickman uses the infographics to show how the media has become smaller and smaller, with the majority of American media companies owned by just six entities. These six entities control the focus of the the people, and are able to manufacture public opinion, all while the government controls them. The Voice exists to fight them, as people who have been hurt by the media commit terrorist attacks to damage them.

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Looking at the political situation in the United States in the last few years, the stratification of the news media is a huge problem. The term “fake news” didn’t exist when Hickman did The Nightly News and the independent “news” market we have today hadn’t crystallized either. Hickman bases characters in the media on real people, and uses actual quotes to show the hubris of the media. The media in The Nightly News is a function of control; and while it may seem that the current state of the media, one where the people have more of a voice than ever, may be able to sidestep the problems of The Nightly News, it’s easy to see the same problems in the independent media as it is in the corporate media, as politicians and political appointees more actively control the media than ever.

The Nightly News isn’t just a story about the news media and why it can be a tool of evil, but also a book that warns of the power of cults. The Voice has a “noble” goal, breaking the power of the media and the government that controls it, but even that is shown to be false as the truth about the Voice is revealed. The twist feels exactly like the independent news media of today — one controlled by a sinister force trying to take even more power into their already powerful hands. The Nightly News is about the problems with the kind of power that media and the government had, and those problems have created the United States that we see on the TV and on our devices every day.

The Nightly News Predicted the World of Today

The lessons of The Nightly News aren’t much different than they were in 2007; back then, this was a polemic about the ways that the government and the powerful are able to control the public. In the last 18 years, a lot of changed with the news media, but one thing that hasn’t changed is the inordinate amount of power it has over the American people. Even with the media moving online and the power of anyone to report the news and give their spin, there’s still the same problem with the media in 2025 as there are in The Nightly News.

The Nightly News is a deep, thoughtful work, and because of that it would be easy for some people to take it the wrong way. Everyone knows that person who talks about why they don’t trust the “mainstream media” while also parroting the talking points of a slew of media commentators who get their marching orders from the same people as the mainstream media. They would read The Nightly News and never see what it says about the media they love. However, it’s a book that has predicted the way the electoral cycles of the last decade have went, as the government and the media have controlled the truth. Look at the news tomorrow; you’ll see exactly what The Nightly News warns us of. Image is responsible for some great works, as is Hickman, but few of them can stand with the message of The Nightly News.