Comeback #1 (Image)

writer: Ed Brisson
artist: Michael Walsh

(from comicbookresources.com)

In the twenty years since its founding, Image has become the go-to indy publisher of the comics industry.  This may or may not be a problem, since it has also become the go-to publisher for indy projects.  What I mean may be best explained by analogy.  Imagine comic books like the movies.  Granted, this has become much easier in the past ten years, since superheroes completely went mainstream.  But the movies I'm thinking about aren't superhero movies.  (Image itself hasn't really been about superheroes for about as long, although titles like Spawn, Savage Dragon, and Invincible keep that tradition alive to an extent.)  I'm thinking of the indy movies that make far less money than mainstream Hollywood blockbusters (usually).  They're usually quirky, distinctive, but still have a hard time finding the same kind of audience as the movies everyone knows before they even see them.  Some of these indy movies star the very same stars featured in the blockbusters, but still don't make the same kind of money.  It's not really an issue of awareness.  Usually indy movies engage a different part of the brain than blockbusters.  They have different cerebral cues.  You have to care a little more about certain elements.  With blockbusters, the hook is simpler to digest.  With an indy project, high concept is more than just what the project is about, rather how it's presented.  There are some blockbusters that can get around this, but more often than not, it's the indy movies that tackle that kind of project.

Image is very much like that.  In the past ten years it's become increasingly common for the company to publish its creator-owned titles in more of the indy vein than mainstream material.  Part of this is because in the beginning, twenty years ago, the Image founders were mostly artists, and most reactions to the resulting comics centered on the art.  Image seemed to take this to heart, first by heavily courting Alan Moore, and then looking to newer creators to bring writing to the forefront.  It's no surprise that Jonathan Hickman rose through the comics ranks with Image.

Comeback illustrates my point beautifully.  It's a lot like last year's film Looper in that it's incredibly high concept (and also deals with time travel) and doesn't particularly care if it's easily accessible.  Looper built its advertising campaign on the fact that Joseph Gordon-Levitt was playing the younger version of Bruce Willis, and that they were eventually going to have a confrontation between them.  If it had only talked about the story (and the huge twist that involves Emily Blunt's role), even the relatively small amount it made in theaters would be much smaller, because far fewer people would have been willing to invest their time in trying to figure the movie out.  It needed a hook, much like Christopher Nolan's Inception, which happened to be Christopher Nolan himself and the fascination audiences had with his work after The Dark Knight.  Looper, then, rested on Gordon-Levitt and Willis and not so much the interesting situation they find themselves in.

Comeback is Looper without the actors as a draw.  It's very much the same concept, agents contracted to handle complicated time travel issues (in this case attempting to exchange large sums of money for families reuniting to avoid a tragedy that would otherwise have torn them apart), but instead of having a draw other than the concept, it's just the concept.  It's an indy project through and through.  I'm always looking for and hoping to find a dynamite new comic to follow, something that I can becomes a cheerleader for.  Image is a good place to look, as fans of The Walking Dead or Chew, Saga or Peter Panzerfaust will happily tell you.  The problem is that Image floods itself with this kind of material, and while it may look like so much gold to the company, it starts to look anonymous to observers.  There will always be standouts, but if the goal is the same with every project, to be the little indy that could, it starts to make the projects that don't stand out look like they're vanity projects, either on the part of the creators or Image itself.

Now, part of the problem is that any comic book company (or any company in general), believes that quantity will always trump quality.  A company like Image will assume that it has both, and very probably it does, but the already limited appeal of indy projects brings everything down when all the projects are indy.  The Walking Dead is red-hot right now, partly because we're a franchise culture, it has a lot of trades out right now, it's been running for a good long time (with a lingering promise of resolution), and it's the source of a popular TV show.  But that's incredibly rare.  Incredibly rare.  Image recently started a revival of a lot of the superheroes titles (ones originated by Rob Liefeld) that helped shape its reputation in its first decade.  Many of them, notably Prophet, have been reshaped as still more indy projects, which is great for nuance, but perhaps not great for business.  Of course, Top Cow maintains a reliable pocket of superhero titles, but it's an imprint that's very much the exception to the rule.

It's projects like Comeback that dominate the company.  Again, this is not necessarily a bad thing, but it's incredibly limiting.  Comeback is actually pretty good, and certainly interesting.  It's The Walking Dead as a mini-series (five issues, in case you were wondering), same kind of art, same kind of general intrigue.  Yet there's no Rick Grimes here, and that's what I'm saying.  Other than the concept, there's no hook.  And with some of the other comics Image publishes, it's a hook with no concept.  For the projects that succeed, or at least stand out, Image finds both.  But with too many of its titles, it's one or the other.

I almost wish I could spend more time reading Image comics, to see if I could disprove my own theory, present an ongoing record of its efforts here, see if greater exposure might result in more differentiation.  Well, one solution would be for someone to throw money my way, or free comics.  I'm just saying.