What’s Going On At Image Comics?

Something came across my Twitter feed recently: Doesn’t Image Comics feel very quiet these days? For a few years there, they were grabbing up comics superstars, putting out fan favorite books, and making headlines with their every release.

But lately — ? It feels much quieter.

This isn’t the first I’ve seen this question. Various forms of it have floated around for the last couple of years.

The conventional wisdom seems to always be that Image is throwing everything against the wall in the hopes that something would stick and be the next “The Walking Dead.” It hasn’t happened, and now they’re “unfocused” and “flailing.”

I hate conventional wisdom.

Honestly, I haven’t followed Image closely enough in the last year and a half to have an authoritative answer to the question. (I’ve been neck deep in European comics.) But I can understand the question. It does seem quieter. Eric Stephenson’s regular interviews and keynote speeches that would put the rest of the industry on blast seem to be in hibernation. Headlines on the popularity of certain books have gone quiet.

I do miss those days when Eric Stephenson would tell his truth and the internet would freak out, particularly since I agreed with him more often than not.

Have we had an Image Expo style launch event lately? Did the number of titles that never shipped prove to be a challenge too big to overcome? Is the comics market so soft now that creators can’t take the risk of launching their creator-owned comics? Did the move to Portland change the company to the degree where they’re hunkering down and keeping to themselves more? Was there a change in personnel behind the scenes that led to this? Maybe the brasher people didn’t make the move to Portland?

I don’t know. Those are all possibilities, I suppose.

But this “The Walking Dead” thing irks me. It reminds me of Apple. There are a lot of people who think Apple is doomed because they haven’t invented anything as big as the iPhone in the last ten years.

This is ludicrous since something like the iPhone is a once-in-a-lifetime change in the way humanity works in its day to day life. You’re never going to repeat something like that on that kind of scale on a schedule. You can’t drum up an industry- and world-changing product on deadline. Those things never happen like that.

The same is true of Image Comics. “The Walking Dead” is a once-in-a-lifetime event. A unicorn. It’s an independent book whose creator had to lie to the publisher to get it published in the first place, and whose sales went up for a hundred issues after that, launching a mainstream television blockbuster and single-handedly propping up the Direct Market with its book sales.

It’s also afforded Robert Kirkman a production company of his own, basically, and an open door to any network or movie company looking for new properties.

You can’t schedule the next “The Walking Dead.” You can’t throw 100 independent titles into the market and expect any one of them to repeat that success. It’s a lottery system whose payoffs depend not on random number generation but on the whims of taste and timing and quality.

Stop faulting Image for not publishing a second unicorn when you thought it would be out.

I think Image is still successful at publishing works that nobody else would, thus getting ideas and creators out into the open marketplace. Image provides the chance people have been begging the rest of the industry for. It comes with its own set of pros and cons, but it is a one of a kind “publisher” that’s still doing its thing, though perhaps under slightly dimmer a spotlight.

There are also still creators at Image who are having success in other media or at other publishers at the same time. Rick Remender’s name immediately comes to mind — he’s been producing lots of great books through Image and now one is a SyFy series. You can see similar things happening with Jeff Lemire, Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, Matt Fraction, and Kelly Sue DeConnick. And, of course, let’s not forget Brian K Vaughan.

I think this is the normal ebb and flow of energies in this industry. Image might seem quieter now, but it only takes one or two titles to hit or one or two creators to reach a new level of popularity, and things will swing right back. Maybe there’s another disruption to the Direct Market that’ll provide a new crack for Image to slip through and wake everyone up again.

Again, I don’t know. I can only think out loud.

Post Script

Comic readers are stronger people than television viewers. I can’t tell you the number of people who think the “Walking Dead” TV show “jumped the shark” when Negan killed too many people. Comic book people read the same scene, gasped, enjoyed the emotional surprise of the whole thing, and couldn’t wait for the next issue. It re-energized the book for many comics people.

TV people are wimps.

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