Why does Image Comics Still Exist?

So I was in San Diego a few weeks ago, and one of the artists I spent a good deal of time talking to was Eric Shanower, One of the truly under appreciated talents in the industry. The third volume of Shanower's fantastic Age of Bronze will be out shortly, and should be required reading for everyone that likes comics. His goal with this series- to retell the Trojan War in it's entirety, from the first rumblings to the aftermath- is mind boggling in scope. It's the kind of thing I wish more artists would do: find that one story they are burning to tell, no matter how massive, and do it.

Dylan Horrock's wonderful graphic novel Hicksville is essentially based on this idea. Horrocks imagines a town in New Zealand where great comic book artists go to create the stories they really want to tell, unfettered from the restrictions of the marketplace. In the library of Horrock's imagination lies Jack Kirby's completed New Gods, Gil Kane's continuation of His Name is...Savage, and perhaps Steve Ditko's full exploration of his Randian philosophy. It's all there, whatever you can think of, which of course makes Hicksville the imaginary place I most want to visit.

Fortunately, we are blessed to be in an era where artists have much more freedom to create their Magnum Opuses (Opusi?). I often think of the interview Kane gave towards the end of his life to The Comics Journal, in which he laments that the majority of his career was spent producing work he felt far below his intellectual and artistic capacity. Orson Welles also expressed the same lament, and I wonder how Kane (or Welles, for that matter) would fare as a young man in today's more diverse marketplace. But Kane's loss is Shanower's gain, for, while he would certainly be employed in the industry40 years ago (a claim not everyone can make), he wouldn't be doing Age Of Bronze.

But there was one question that I couldn't bring myself to ask Shanower; why the heck is he being published by Image Comics?

Now, I don't know anything about Shanower's deal with Image; nor do I know how many other publishers he talked to about Age of Bronze. What I do know is that Age of Bronze is so different, so out of whack with the rest of the material that Image publishes it's hard to imagine that either party really benefits from the association. It's like SpikeTV airing Masterpiece Theater.

Would Age of Bronze do better if it were published by, say, Fatagraphics? Dunno. But the book design would probably look a little better, since Image seems incapable of publishing anything outside of the traditional comics and trade paperback formats. And Age of Bronze should be published in a format that makes one think of Dan Clowes rather than Todd McFarlane. Moreover, brand identity is important; I know from past experience that Fantagraphics tends to publish cartoonists that I enjoy, and thus I'm more likely to buy one of their books. With Image, the inverse is true, and it becomes guilt by association.

To me, that big "I" on the cover on of an Image publication represents an industry dinosaur, a throwback to a time when "style" had won such a thundering victory over "substance" it could only be called a no-contest. Frankly, I can't for the life of me understand why Image even exists anymore, except that the remaining Founders are too damn stubborn to admit that their grand experiment has largely been a failure.

Let's take a look at the sales figures; for 2006, Image Comics had 3.72% of the direct market in terms of dollars, and 3.23% in terms of units. There were exactly 0 Image Comics in the top 100 for the year (a bit unfair, since the same could be said about any publisher not named Marvel or DC) and 6 graphic novels in the top 100 (five were Walking Dead collections; the sixth was an Invincible collection). For a bit more perspective, we look at the top 300 comics for June 2007, and see that Image has 5 comics in the top 100 for the month, the first being Spawn #168 at #85, with 24,152 units sold to retailers. Moreover, only 10 Image books for the month managed to break 10,000 copies ordered.

Now, this may not seem all that bad, relatively speaking. Dark Horse, for example, only has four books in the top 100. But one of them is the mega- selling Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which placed in the top ten with 102,000 units moved. Or four Spawn #168s.

What we can glean from this is that Image only has one book that could be called a hit, The Walking Dead, and a few others that do reasonably well. The old warhorses like Spawn and Witchblade still have their fans, but nothing like what they were selling in their heyday.

More troubling, though, is Image's lack of presence in the graphic novel field. Sure, Walking Dead is strong (very strong, in fact), but where's everything else? Again turning to the June charts for more perspective, we see that Image charts eight books-- need I tell you which title is responsible for four of them? Also, those old warhorses are nowhere to be found. Looking over ICv2's sales charts for the year so far, we find that Spawn manages to chart twice--The Spawn Collection V3, at #46 in April, and Spawn: Armageddon V2 at #65 in May. Witchblade? Does not appear anywhere. Savage Dragon? Does not appear anywhere.

Keep in mind that these are numbers for the direct market only; the picture is even bleaker in bookstores. According to Brian Hibb's analysis of Bookscan's top graphic novels of 2006, Image managed to chart one book--wait for it-- the latest volume of The Walking Dead. This last bit of information should be particularly troubling to Eric Shanower, since his work is tailor made for the book store market, which his publisher clearly has no idea how to penetrate.

For anyone, these numbers would be pretty bad. But for a company that's been around for fifteen years- particularly one that, for a good stretch of time, looked to be poised to break the Marvel/DC industry stranglehold- they're appalling. On the surface, they seem to be on equal footing with Dark Horse; but Image does not have the benefit of the revenue generated by manga, licensed properties, and collectibles as Dark Horse, not to mention the huge boost Dark Horse has received in successfully bringing their properties to Hollywood. No, Image only has a slice of one pie, the direct market, and it seems to grow smaller and smaller as more time passes.

I suppose that being published by Image does have one benefit-- great positioning in the Previews catalog. Of course, if your solicitation is surrounded by the likes of Freshmen and Hunter/Killer, it seems a poor proposition on the risk/reward curve. The truth is that Image Comics became an industry afterthought a long time ago; hell, if the sales charts are any indication, Robert Kirkman is the only one keeping the company afloat.

For most of us, Image is like the friend from high school that you long ago outgrew, yet for some reason he still keeps calling. Witness the bemusement that met the announcement that founder/whipping boy Rob Liefeld was returning to the fold. Although it did at least get people talking about Image again, which is certainly not something the rest of their books have done for quite some time (outside of The Walking Dead, of course).

The sad thing is that there are people that are doing good work under the Image banner. I hope it's not going unnoticed. I hope that the next volume of Age of Bronze does really well, because it deserves to be read by a lot of people-- an audience size that its' publisher seems unable to bring in.