The Name Said It All: Image at 25 / R. W. Watkins

The Name Said It All:

Image at 25

An objective analysis of Image’s four original flagship titles 25 years (or so) later

R. W. Watkins

I must admit, from the outset in 1992, my interest was not exactly piqued upon hearing of the launch of Image Comics. I certainly appreciated the talented likes of Todd McFarlane, Erik Larsen and Jim Lee, but I thought that the last thing the world needed at the time was yet another line of grotesquely over-muscled superheroes to complement the already-muscle-ridden Marvel, DC and Dark Horse universes. Obviously, enough people out there didn’t share my pessimism.

I must also admit that I outright ignored Image comics on the racks for the first twelve months or so. An article in Comics Values Monthly, unveiling the oversized/over-armed title characters and detailing the new line’s anti-corporate setup with Malibu, certainly did nothing to whet my appetite. The promotional images and early reviews didn’t stir my interest in the output of the initial ‘Big Four’ (Todd McFarlane, Rob Liefeld, Jim Lee and Erik Larsen), and I thought frankly that McFarlane and Larsen should return to their allotted Spider-titles at Marvel as soon as possible. Regardless of their battles (well, actually McFarlane’s battles) over editorial control, I thought the ‘self-titled’ Spider-Man and Larsen’s run on Amazing were possibly the best and gutsiest stuff Marvel had put out in over a decade.

It wasn’t until mid ’93 that I actually read an entire comic from the upstart line, when I discovered SuperPatriot No. 3 in a favourite drugstore. There wasn’t much of interest left on the shelves that day, so I decided instead to purchase my first—and for a long time thereafter—only Image comic. I think the fact that its cover featured no immediately recognisable character or artist had a big influence on my decision – I had seen and heard enough about Spawn, Youngblood and Rob Liefeld already. I actually don’t remember opening the comic until I’d gotten it home, later that night. The first thing I noticed were the credits on the inside front cover. As much as it may have been implied that these newly aligned Image artists frowned upon collaboration and compromise, no less than seven individuals and a colour separation team were credited upfront. I thought that quite ironic and hypocritical; I still do. Turning to the actual story—or rather what was being passed off as an episode in a four-part story—I could immediately appreciate the company’s purpose, focus, and certainly namesake. The word Image said it all: I found myself reading—or rather viewing—the overwhelming visual equivalent of a sequence of loosely connected television ‘sound bites’.

Other than one or two early Savage Dragon issues and the inaugural issue of Youngblood—all one-dollar flea-market and charity-shop discoveries—that was the last I ever read of the Image brand from that day to just recently. Given my ignorance of the company’s over-hyped early output, as well as the more obvious fact that Image Comics is celebrating its 25th Anniversary in 2017, I thought it might be interesting if I sought out those early issues by Image’s founding artists and offered up my objective 2017 opinion of them. In order to patch the gaping holes in my print ‘collection’, I tracked down online files of the Savage Dragon mini-series and the first four issues each of Spawn, Youngblood and WildC.A.T.s. Given the obvious talent involved and the artist’s Spider-Man affiliations, it seemed only appropriate to begin my analyses with the most famous of the ’92 Image creations.

The first four issues of Spawn comprise a story arc called ‘Questions’. (Whatever happened to the twelve-page origins story with its account of the hero’s exploding home planet or the tragic demise of his parents or fatherly uncle?) McFarlane’s writing skills, which had been developing gradually during his truncated tenure on the ‘adjectiveless’ Spider-Man, were set back a full two years by this ‘introductory’ tale, quite frankly. His slightly Ditkoesque art is one thing—McFarlane’s sketching skills are never called into question—but his storytelling stands as an inverse justification for having a Stan Lee looking over one’s shoulder at the drawing board. Let me be honest: if I hadn’t been already aware (by virtue of the reviews and hype) of Spawn’s supernatural origin, I’m not sure I would have understood exactly what the deal was with the devil in No. 1. In fact, Spawn himself doesn’t fully understand at the start of No. 2. Something tells me McFarlane didn’t understand, either.

Whatever the case, ‘Questions’ is basically a supernatural origins tale that revolves around a high-ranking African-American Marine, Lt. Colonel Al Simmons, who was instrumental in “saving” President Ronald Reagan during the 1981 Hinckley incident, and who was killed under dubious circumstances in 1987 while participating in covert government task forces overseas. Simmons has been resurrected by Satan five years later so that he might again see his beloved wife, semi-socialite Wanda Blake, in exchange for his soul. In the process, he has been endowed with supernatural abilities and a fancy costume to boot (Hades must have a helluva seamstress). We see these abilities put to genuine superhero usage on only one occasion during ‘Questions’, in Issue 1, when he saves a young lady from a vicious gang rape. The rest of the time, this ‘Spawn of hell’ ruminates from rooftops and searches for his ‘estranged’ African-American widow. When he finally tracks her down (in No. 3), he greets her as a Caucasian (the sole visage his underworldy powers can muster up), only to discover that she has married his best (black) friend and borne him a child. What sheer irony! Meanwhile, in the background, the hearts are being literally ripped out of hit men and bigwig mobsters by another dubious denizen of the pit, The Violator, who looks like a cross between the clown from Stephen King’s It—transforming into a skeletal demon with the head of the Motörhead logo when he feels like maiming and murdering—and ’90s pro wrestler Doink the Clown’s midget sidekick, Dink. In Issues 3 and 4 he wears a t-shirt bearing Image’s lowercase ‘i’ logo. (And people thought ’60s Marvel was being crassly commercial and self-referential when Johnny Storm was pictured reading an old Sub-Mariner comic.) When Spawn and The Violator finally do battle (in Nos. 3 and 4), Old Scratch intervenes, and we learn that he has been using them both as pawns (surprise, surprise). “It’s either the depletion of your power,” the horned one tells him, “which leads to your death—which leads to you losing your soul to the darkness ... and simultaneously killing the so-called bad guys, which helps build my army that much faster... OR ... you do nothing! Just stand by and let the evil and ugliness prosper here on Earth, while your emotions grow colder as you justify to yourself why you needn’t do anything to those who prey on the innocent.” On this contrived note, our hell-bound hero wanders off into the Manhattan night, his widow Wanda awaking from a dream of him somewhere in Queens. Thus concludes the Spawn origins tale.

Confession: by the end of this initial story arc, I still wasn’t even sure what Spawn’s superpowers actually are!

It appears these first four issues were largely the results of improvisation – McFarlane seems to have known where he wanted to go with this story, but wasn’t sure how to get there or how long it would take. The first five issues of his Spider-Man (‘Torment’) come to mind. I recall that McFarlane (like other Image artists) had trouble meeting deadlines in that first year or two. That’s understandable when you are primarily an artist who now suddenly also has to ink, plot and script the stories—not to mention attend the comic conventions, do the television appearances, invest your millions, etc. Whatever the exact details, ‘Questions’ is understandably meandering as a story.

Dubious writing abilities aside, it was the basic concept of Spawn that was the biggest stumbling block for me, actually. Right from the get-go back in ’92, the idea of a superhero being essentially a demon spawned by the mythical underworld, complete with the Judeo-Christian conceptions of Satan and hell, struck me as rather antiquated and out of step with the post-modernist times. Remember, this was the early to mid 1990s, the era of ‘heroin chic’, grunge rock and ‘Rock the Vote’, and gritty secular reality was the thing amongst us Gen-X’ers. The supernatural during this period was largely confined to ‘slipstream’, extraterrestrial and cryptozoological elements. We’re talking Twin Peaks, The X-Files and Eightball comics. With hindsight, I guess we should have seen Spawn coming, given the voodoo and vampiric elements of ‘Torment’ and ‘Masques’ (Spider-Man Nos. 1–7); but a story like ‘Questions’, built on the premise of an afterlife deal with the devil, simply did not jive well with a lot of us in 1992, and the 21st century certainly hasn’t done it any favours.

Nevertheless, the story does have some cultural relevance inherent in its sociopolitical commentary. The underlying conspiracies and state corruption that appear to have cost Lt. Colonel Simmons his life; sleazy C.I.A. agent Billy Miller and his exploitative relationship with secretary Linda (imagine J. Jonah Jameson and Betty Brant taken to a 2017 extreme!); the three television pundits who provide their various ‘takes’ on the intertwining subplots at intervals throughout the four issues – such aspects obviously draw on the government and celebrity scandals, cover-ups, and associated media coverage of the day.

As I’ve said, McFarlane’s artistic abilities are never called into question in these early issues; his deployment of those abilities, however, is another story. Full-page ‘panels’ and two-page spreads abound, as do panels within panels, and slender vertical or horizontal ‘windows’. The results are visuals that often more resemble the back glass of some post-1970s pinball machine than what they do pages of a comic. Also rather extreme and commonplace are the instances of expressionistic lettering and panel-styling. Readers of McFarlane’s Spider-Man would have certainly seen these sorts of things prior to 1992; it’s just that in Spawn they became... ubiquitous.

The argument has often been made that, increasingly since the late 1960s, mainstream comics artists have provided less bang for the reader’s buck by drawing the panels larger and larger. The same criticism can be certainly made here. McFarlane often cheats, though, in the sense that he tends to make it appear that a page has a multitude of panels by ‘inserting’ several smaller ones within a larger or (usually) full-page example. These smaller images are only panels in the broadest sense of the term, however, for they usually employ no dialogue or narration, and function merely as ‘visual slivers’ that detail and emphasise elements of the larger image that contains them, or provide it some degree of literal or symbolic commentary in their juxtaposition. As far as the artistic side of comics goes, they are the panel equivalent of an appositive phrase, relative clause, or superficial non-sequitur.

A nine-panel page by Ditko in ’63 (left) and a (at least) ten-panel page by McFarlane in ’92; sometimes more is actually less

When you put it all together, Spawn Nos. 1 through 4 have an effect not unlike being caught in a bad yet very vivid dream – madness with high production values.

High production values also play a significant role in Erik Larsen’s initial Image output, but the madness is largely replaced with an appealing sense of the ridiculous. The three issues that comprise the Savage Dragon mini-series demonstrate that Spider-Man’s other artist during the late ’80s and early ’90s had skills that Mr. MacFarlane didn’t possess at this point. As I discussed in the article ‘Spider-Man in the Alternative Era’ (The Comics Decoder No. 5), McFarlane may have been the auteur at the helm of Marvel’s groundbreaking new title (Spider-Man), but Larsen was the better artist on Amazing Spider-Man, bringing aesthetically fitting elements to the magazine that none of his predecessors—including McFarlane—had brought before. It was a similar story at Image, particularly when it came to storytelling.

The Savage Dragon mini-series tells the tale of a nameless humanoid who finds himself in a Chicago hospital with amnesia following a large fire of unspecified origin in a vacant lot. (The character was actually a childhood creation of Larsen, and was first publicly featured in the self-published Graphic Fantasy No. 1 in 1982.) Green-skinned á la Hulk and with a large fin-like appendage atop his head Mohican-style, he is befriended by investigating police officer Lieutenant Frank Darling—a middle-aged African-American—who finds him work at his cousin Fred’s shipyard and beseeches him to join the overburdened Chicago Police Department. The ‘Dragon’, as he is now being called, initially declines, but when the shipyard goes up in a fiery blast at the hands of vengeful super-criminals—killing Fred in the process, he shows up (naked!) at Lt. Darling’s door, ready to take him up on his offer. Once on board and in uniform, he does a dandy job of helping rid Chicago of its gangs of super-powered mutants known as ‘super-freaks’, who have already killed ageing superhero Mighty Man and crippled his contemporary, SuperPatriot. Along the way, The Dragon is serendipitously assisted and/or hampered by other superheroes, such as Star and a bumbling cybernetically ‘rebuilt’ SuperPatriot. Interestingly enough, The Dragon eschews and avoids using deadly force. The more organised of the super-criminal element are known as the Vicious Circle, and are led by a figure who calls himself ‘Overlord’ (what else?!). When Overlord cuts a deal with SuperPatriot’s support team, Cyberdata, to have SuperPatriot eliminate three of Overlord’s ambitious henchmen who are supposed to be eliminating Dragon in a staged hostage crisis, things screw up all around: the aged cyborg hero lands Dragon in the hospital, and two of the henchmen, Hellrazor and the shark-headed Mako, live to be taken captive by the police. Following a lengthy and pointedly ridiculous battle between the recovering Dragon and (Rob Liefeld’s) Youngblood member Bedrock (who’s testing him to see if he’s qualified for his own flashy hero outfit), the series ends with shipyard bomber Skullface telephoning Lt. Darling in a rather contrived attempt at blackmail. “Seems that tip about your cousin Fred’s warehouse being ripe for the plucking came from you,” he lies. “You must have wanted the green man on the force pretty bad, Franky, that you’d sell out your own cousin.”

Compared to McFarlane’s meandering tale of origins in hellfire, Larsen’s writing on Savage Dragon holds up remarkably well. In fact, for my money, the writing would have held up remarkably well in any mainstream context circa 1992. (Admittedly, mainstream comics were not exactly a showroom of great writing by 1992, but that’s another essay.) Unlike in Spawn, there’s not a whiff of the supernatural, and any sense of resurrection is established through the scientific realm of cybernetics (e.g., the rebuilding of SuperPatriot). Larsen’s dialogue is less awkward than that of McFarlane, and his panels stand up to a lack of narrative captioning better than what the Spawn artist’s do. Also, his sense of pacing is more traditional and therefore more conducive to a less confusing, if not always linear, reading experience. Larsen had a pretty good idea of where he wanted to take The Dragon in this ‘trial outing’, and so there are fewer signs of ‘floundering’ and improv to be found than what are apparent in ‘Questions’. Where Savage Dragon really excels in comparison to Spawn, though, is in the humour.

With his green skin, Mohican fin and monstrous physique, Larsen’s flagship hero for Image is not exactly an undistinguished figure of meekness to begin with. His kooky appearance sets the tone for a title that is by no means lacking in comic relief. Savage Dragon is a magazine that doesn’t take itself too seriously in regards to mood and concept, and it benefits tremendously from it. The grotesque figures and quippy dialogue contribute quite a bit to the laughs, of course, but it is satire that is utilised to the greatest degree in this mini-series; and, like McFarlane, Larsen enjoys taking aim at the dubious state of late twentieth century America. Larsen’s satire is considerably more humourous than McFarlane’s, however, and it is certainly more brazen. For example, his labelling of the mutant criminals as ‘super-freaks’ is undoubtedly a not-so-subtle reference to Rick James (1948–2004), the pop-funkster who scored a 1981 hit with ‘Super Freak’, and who, along with his future wife, was charged in 1991 with holding a 24-year-old female hostage as a sex slave during a week-long crack-cocaine binge. Larsen is also more inclined to skewer the icons of his own industry, reimagining Spider-Man, for example, as an It-like arachnid that feasts upon abducted children in a sewer system. Less scathingly, towards the end of Issue 3, an elderly woman who bears a striking resemblance to Aunt May Parker falls before her television set at the sight of The Dragon, exclaiming, “Rodney... You’re alive!”; a photo of a young Caucasian with a green Mohican haircut resting on her nearby mantel. As well, Larsen has modelled Overlord after the Doctor Doom / Darkseid / Darth Vader line of tyrannical villains, while the ill-fated Mighty Man and SuperPatriot are obvious parodies of World War II-era superheroes Captain Marvel (Shazam!) and Captain America – characters whom the Image artists saw as pilfered from their exploited creators. And that shark-headed villain, Mako? He has to be a take-off on Hanna-Barbera’s Jabberjaw! Larsen’s satire isn’t confined to the competition, mind you; even his own Image partners and their creations are fair game. Not only is an entire sequence of panels from Spawn No. 4 emulated in No. 3, but when Liefeld’s Thing-like Bedrock attacks The Dragon in a clichéd attempt to determine his worthiness to join the glamourous Youngblood team, the green-skinned one lectures him on the shallowness of excessive merchandising and profiteering. After a lengthy battle that entails thousands of dollars in collateral damage, Bedrock defends his actions by pointing out that such a thing “happens in Marvel Comics all the time”! The Dragon promptly arrests him as a result, and two of his Youngblood colleagues have to bail him out of jail. Take that, Terry Stewart!

Artistically, Larsen’s work on this mini-series may not have the eye-catching finesse of McFarlane’s work on ‘Questions’, but what Larsen lacks in detail and experimentation he compensates for in his aforementioned pacing and economic use of panels. To put it another way, McFarlane draws the better picture, but Larsen draws the better overall story. In this regard, one may even venture so far as to say that it is actually Larsen who is the more ‘Ditkoesque’ of the two. Yes, Larsen has his full-page ‘panels’ and two-page spreads like the rest of the Image crowd, but he puts them to much better use; generally reserving them for key action scenes (á la Ditko in Amazing Spider-Man No. 33) as opposed to moments of mere contemplation or conversation (as McFarlane tends to use them). I should also add that Savage Dragon contains pages with up to (count ’em!) fifteen panels, but unlike the ‘magnified details’ often found in Spawn, each of Larsen’s panels is genuinely essential to the narrative and, more often than not, employs dialogue. Image title or not, this is effective comics plotting of the old-school variety.

“Savage Dragon was a super-powered police officer,” explained a grinning Larsen recently in the ‘Declaration of Independents’ episode of Robert Kirkman’s Secret History of Comics (2017). “He was just a guy who kicked ass. That’s all I wanted.” And that’s all a cartoonist really needs if he or she has any real knowledge and control of the dynamics of their chosen medium. It seems obvious to me that at least one of the people involved with Image in ’92 had a pretty good idea what he was doing.

I wish I could say the same about Rob Liefeld. ‘Poor’, foolish, ridiculous Rob Liefeld. With hindsight, how ‘appropriate’ and telling it was that his Youngblood No. 1 should be the first bull out the Image gate.

Given the piss-poor plotting, the lame excuse for writing, and the sheer lack of narration captions, explaining exactly what transpires in the first four issues of Younglood is no easy task. From what I can glean from this unbelievably juvenile mess, there appears to be two or three half-baked generic plots lurking beneath the exaggerated muscles, jagged lines and garish colours in Issues 1 and 2; they conveniently, if not logically, converge into something resembling a story by the end of Issue 3.

Not the sort of event that could be deprived of a good gimmick in ’92, Issue 1 was published as a ‘flip-book’, with Youngblood’s ‘home’ team featured in the narrative comprising one half of the magazine, and its ‘away’ team featured in the narrative comprising the inverted other. The home team—consisting of Shaft, Bedrock, Vogue, Photon, Chapel and Diehard—are assembled when two oversized mutant members of ‘The Four’ attempt to bust the other half of their villainous team out of a Youngblood transport vehicle en route to prison. In the process, Shaft has to break a shopping date with his assistant-D.A. girlfriend, Shelly. And that’s the ‘story’. Meanwhile, the away team—namely Brahma, Riptide, Combat, Psi-Fire, Sentinel and Cougar—are off on a covert task force mission to the Middle East, to eliminate Saddam Hussein, er, ‘Hassan Kussein’, and put an end to his occupation of Israel. Following an aerial assault involving all obscure manners of super-power and no parachutes (the power of flight is ubiquitous amongst these mutants, it seems), Psi-Fire brings about the mustachioed dictator’s downfall when he causes his head to explode by means of telekinesis (or something). The invasive “rebels” surrender to armed forces, and Kussein’s death is passed off as a suicide in the media. For better or worse, there are no ‘spider-holes’, lengthy trials or controversial gallows footage in the ’92 Image version, people.

The second issue’s ‘Prophecy’ is “dedicated respectfully” to Jack Kirby, and begins just as abruptly as what the home team’s untitled tale in Issue 1 ‘ends’. The opening prologue takes place “otherwhere” (where- or whenever that is), and introduces yet another super-team, the Berzerkers (?!). Led by a cigar-chomping Kirby look-alike named (what else?!) ‘Kirby’, the Berzerkers appear to be all that stands between one evil Lord Darkthornn and his evil plans for... I don’t know... world domination, maybe? A few pages in, we join Youngblood’s away team in a secret Berlin lab, where the cryogenically suspended body of ‘super-soldier’ Joe Prophet is being revealed to them. The results of World War II-era experiments by a certain Dr. Wells, Prophet bears more than a passing resemblance to Captain America. As luck (and bad writing) should have it, Cougar presses the wrong button on the ‘time capsule’ (“Ooops..!”), accidentally awaking “the sleeper” (sound familiar?). At this point, all hell breaks loose. First, Prophet mistakes the muscle-bound Youngblood members for Darkthornn’s Disciples, and a major demonstration of fighting strength and endurance ensues. Then, the (android) Disciples themselves come bursting in ever so serendipitously, giving Youngblood and Prophet pause as they rip the presiding professor to shreds with bullets. Finally, the Berzerkers come roaring into the complex with all guns a-blazing, looking more ridiculous than Youngblood, the Disciples and the West Coast Avengers combined. “It’s berzerkin’ time!!” exclaims Kirby in an unwarranted salute to The Thing as Issue 2 comes to a merciful end. The stage is set for an escalation of violence in Issue 3, and—sure enough—we join the battle already in progress, with Prophet continuing to fend off attacking Disciples while the majority of Youngblood and the Berzerkers lie stricken on the tile floor. The scene quickly shifts to a maximum security vault at the Pentagon, where Shaft and Bedrock are visiting Strongarm, a member of the now-imprisoned Four, introduced in Issue 1. Interestingly, this oversized behemoth is being held with his arms and legs spread-eagled by no visible mechanical means. A short time later, some unidentified female mutant orchestrates The Four’s breakout, leaving a horde of ninjas to tangle with the Youngblood members in hot pursuit. Meanwhile, in a spaceship circumnavigating the Earth, a search party from the planet Katella are scouring our planet for their former military officer and suspected traitor, Lieutenant Khm’bt—or Combat, as he is now known as a member of Youngblood. To obfuscate matters, Earth ambassador Photon—who appears to have flames emanating from within her head at all times—actually persuades the Katellans of her fellow member’s guilt. The issue ends with Diehard informing the others that they’ve received a distress signal from the away team in Berlin. Reassembled at the genetic engineering institution in the German capital, the home team joins forces with Prophet, who explains that the Disciples are the results of “futuristic science” and are arriving on Earth via wormholes called “crash tunnels”. Bedrock and Diehard dive into the crash tunnel leading to the institution and come face to face with Lord Darkthornn. Diehard, an expendable android, ‘perishes’, but Bedrock returns to the genetics complex a slave of Darkthornn, who demands that Youngblood turn over Prophet or else they all become his mindless servants. It is at this point that Liefeld pulls the rug out from under us, informing us that we must tune in to (read: purchase) his Brigade No. 4 if we want to read the conclusion to this convoluted ‘story’. New company or not, old Marvel habits die hard, it seems. Liefeld chose instead to devote the remainder of Issue 4 to introducing Dale Keown’s hideous alien/human hybrid, Pitt.

The real Mr. Kirby couldn’t be reached for comment

You know a comic is off to a bad start when, only a few pages in, you come to realise that a member of the home team is included as a member of the away team in its introductory profile on one of the inside covers, and a member of the away team is included in the home team’s profile on the other. Even its own creator got confused by all the characters, it seems. To put it bluntly, Youngblood is simply a writing and plotting catastrophe. In fact, Liefeld himself considered the first four issues a disaster within a year of their publication, having shown scripter Hank Kanalz the door after Issue 1. (Check out the panel in No. 1 where Shaft’s girlfriend is pictured laughing contentedly while Kanalz’s speech balloon has her warning the hero, “Jeff! Be careful!”) Needless to say, ‘loose ends’ abound throughout these four issues, which amount to a Mickey Mouse War and Peace for the young and indifferent – with such a cast of generic super-team heroes and villains in all manners of gauche costume, there’s no way any sensible reader can simply jump into these... narratives and make any real sense of things. Without titles, page numbers or even an ‘End’ or ‘To Be Continued’ caption, the two ‘stories’ that comprise Issue 1 are like short films with the opening and closing credits cut off. With names like ‘Vogue’ (Rogue) and ‘Psi-Fire’ (Cyclops), and designs like those of Cougar (Wolverine), Combat (Thor) and Bedrock (Thing), it’s obvious as well that the cast of Youngblood owes more than a thing or two to the X-Men, the Avengers and the Fantastic Four. Such blatant imitation suggests an immature outlook, and at several points throughout these comics, one has to stop and wonder just how seriously Liefeld takes the creative process, how old is he really, and why McFarlane dragged this fella along for the Image ride in the first place. Wrote R. Fiore of Youngblood No. 2, “I don’t see why people call Todd McFarlane illiterate while this guy’s around; Liefeld makes McFarlane look like Moliere” (‘Funnybook Roulette’ column, The Comics Journal No. 152, August 1992). Indeed, it is somewhat ironic that Liefeld should pay tribute to Kirby in Issue 2, for the ‘writing’ is vastly more awkward than anything Kirby has ever been criticised for doing in his Fourth World titles; e.g.: “It has been foretold. The prophecy will not come to pass.” Liefeld’s spelling is not always the most reliable either; hence references to ubermesch (sic), “...your eminent (sic) defeat...”, “my existance (sic)”, a “read out”, etc. “I discovered long ago,” wrote R. Fiore, “that ‘so bad it’s good’ is even rarer than just plain good, but this I will say for Liefeld and no more: he does pass the test.” Frankly, I’m not so sure he does. From where I stand, these early issues are like Plan 9 From Outer Space without the unintentional humour—but plenty of profits. Youngblood proves outright that Ed Wood could have been highly successful in a different medium in a less fussy era.

But there’s always the redeeming quality of Liefeld’s art, right? I mean, he was in huge demand at Marvel, having worked on The New Mutants and the quadzillion-selling X-Force. Hell, Scott McCloud even referenced him in Understanding Comics. Well, I’m sorry, but I’m simply not able to grasp the significance or appeal of Liefeld’s art, let alone why it’s deserving of those vertical two-page spreads that he’s so fond of. I’m sure he’s a great little guy who pees with the bathroom door open and remembers listening to ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ as he sat down to draw Youngblood in the winter of 1991-92, but—Robert Kirkman’s nostalgic documentary aside—Liefeld’s panels in these early Youngblood issues are something of a monstrosity, frankly. For starters, the sheer grotesqueness of his figures demonstrates no regard for anatomy, real or imagined. And people thought Jack Kirby’s musculature was exaggerated and his heads oblong, I kept thinking as I read Nos. 1 through 4. R. Fiore pointed out how Liefeld’s characters are so inhuman that they have little slits rather than eyes. He also noted how their mouths have been limited to a series of frowns and snarls, and their feet reduced to a ridiculously disproportionate size (a lot of people aged eight and up noted that). I share Fiore’s annoyance with such idiosyncrasies and inadequacies. All those pointless horizontal and diagonal ‘tiger’ lines—across faces, trousers, backgrounds, etc.—don’t sit well with me either. Creating tension through the use of line is one thing; attempting to be ‘the van Gogh of action comics’ is another matter entirely. Liefeld also gave little consideration to perspective and proportion in general, judging from some of the group ‘poses’, in which Combat and Bedrock suddenly appear to be four times their regular size. Similarly, his backgrounds are often non-existent, giving Youngblood an ‘unfinished’ look. To top if off, colourist Brian Murray has made sure that Liefeld’s drawings get that mid ’80s ‘pastel’ treatment like they deserve, with lots of soft pinks, greens and blues to match the sweaters and acid-washed trousers that the Image lot were still wearing at this point. All in all, the visuals do not redeem Youngblood an iota, and I am left wondering why any self-respecting young comics fan wanted signed Liefeld posters on his bedroom walls in the early to mid ’90s.

And then there was Jim Lee’s WildC.A.T.s – easily the most overlooked or outright forgotten of the original four flagship titles. Like Youngblood—and unlike Spawn and Savage Dragon—the WildC.A.T.s series didn’t make it out of the ’90s intact. This should probably tell us something.

From what I can glean from the often nonlinear, largely implicative, and caption-challenged narrative, WildC.A.T.s focusses on an X-Men-like super-team of mostly alien and hybrid origins. (The ‘C.A.T.s’ portion of the title is an acronym for Covert Action Teams – the series’ subtitle for the first twenty issues.) The team is led by one Jacob Marlowe, a cigar-chomping dwarf who also happens to be the billionaire CEO of a major corporation. We learn in Issue 1 that Marlowe is a semi-reformed drunk who was rescued from skid row in 1990 by some sexy angel-like entity named Void, who seems to have been born out of some strange orb discovered near an American research station in Antarctica in 1980. Void—or Adrianna, as Marlowe likes to call her—has visions of the future, and informs Marlowe that he is actually a ‘Kherubim’ known as Lord Emp, and must lead the fight against the Cabal. (Confused yet?) Based on Void’s psychic dreams and counselling, Marlowe organises a team of “gifted ones”, which also includes Spartan, Warblade and Maul. The Cabal appears to be an interplanetary Illuminati of sorts, a conspiratorial organisation hellbent on world(s) domination. It is led by Helspont, a ‘Daemonite’, who looks like the devil of Judeo-Christian tradition. There is also a character known as The Gnome, who tends to cut deals with Marlowe and traitorous members of the Cabal. When Marlowe does The Gnome a favour by having his inchoate team protect a ‘gifted’ hybrid stripper named Voodoo from the clutches of Cabal agents and a member of the Coda sorority, they encounter Grifter and his scantily clad mentor, a Kherubim known as Sister Zealot. Voodoo is a valuable pawn in everyone’s game because she has the ability to see a Daemonite within the human host it’s possessing. Undaunted by the opposition, the Coda agent turns suicide bomber and levels herself, the strip club, and seemingly the team. The good aliens and hybrids live again in Issue 2, however, owing to Void having manipulated time, effectively bringing the new covert team back from the dead. Reassembled at a safehouse owned by Grifter near Quantico, Zealot explains to Voodoo how Kherubim explorers and Daemonite marauders found themselves stranded on Earth “eons ago”, and how the two alien races have held a balance of power on this planet ever since. In turn, Voodoo draws the team’s attention to a computer monitor and the image of Vice President Dan Quayle, whom she identifies as a Daemonite mole for the Cabal. Meanwhile, in Virginia, a more official covert team known as International Operations (I/O) are keeping an eye on Marlowe and his team’s “rogue” activities. Elsewhere, Helspont is plotting with a certain M’Koi (whose human body was present when Void materialised in Antarctica years earlier) in a bid to obtain the largest in a series of mysterious orbs, which will “energize a gateway back to Daemon”. The vice president (as possessed by B’Lial) is behind the funding for this ‘Reunification’ project, and it is he who is to deliver the orb to the project’s facility with none other than those “media hounds”, Rob Liefeld’s Youngblood, as his bodyguards! By this point in Issue 2, the plot is becoming so increasingly complex that the reader teeters on the edge of utter confusion.

Ironically, by the time Lee and co-writer Brandon Choi have gotten down off their high horse and added more explicative captions to the narrative, in Issue 3, the plot has been reduced to little more than a series of brutal brawls and explosions! Three WildC.A.T.s and Youngblood go at it tooth and nail, the android Spartan succumbing to injuries in the process, and the Hulk-like Maul growing larger and more savage until teammate Voodoo has to take him down with one of her psychic shock waves. Convinced of the ‘rogue’ team’s sincerity, Youngblood allow the gifted stripper to ‘exorcise’ B’Lial from Dan Quayle’s body. In the meantime, Marlowe and the remainder of the team have succumbed to the forces of Helspont, who subsequently activates the orb and opens the doorway to Daemon by issue’s end. The brawling and mayhem persist throughout the bulk of Issue 4, in which the regenerating Spartan deactivates a relay switch which triggers a shutdown of the cold-fusion reactors and a closure of the stargate to Daemon. When Helspont seeks the power of the orb to fend off the recovering WildC.A.T.s, he discovers that the opportunistic Gnome and his forces have snatched the orb from the reactor casing when no-one was looking. It appears The Gnome has a few ideas of his own about world domination. The Gnome uses the power of the orb to destroy Helspont, and then Marlowe shoots the orb-holding arm off of the Gnome, sending it careening to the lower levels of the facility, the Gnome jumping after it. Void, as the entire facility goes ka-boom, manages (with some help from Marlowe’s dormant powers) to manipulate time once again, thus saving the entire team; and what started out as a rather complex plot is wrapped up as conveniently as a ’70s sitcom in a matter of pages.

As a comics plot becomes needlessly confusing, my interest begins to wane fast. In the case of WildC.A.T.s, a few well-placed narration captions in Nos. 1 and (especially) 2 could have a gone a long way in avoiding this. Similarly, the series could have done without the numerous invented terms and complex concepts: Kherubim, Daemonites, hybrids, the Cabal, the Coda, ‘time-line nexuses’, ‘quantum-psionic fields’, ‘dimensional jumps’ – the story is severely hampered by such a heavy dose of fictitious nomenclature and quasi scientific gobbledy-gook within just the first two issues. (I am actually reminded of post-1950s Marshall McLuhan texts. I wonder if Lee would have been familiar.) Such terminology could have at least been made more palatable by an upfront glossary of sorts (even Liefeld had the good sense to include introductory group profiles in Youngblood No. 1). “I don’t understand what all this is about,” says Voodoo at one point in Issue 2. I can sympathize with the poor girl—whatever she is. The dialogue is actually not that bad, it’s just that without the aid of explanatory captions and/or a decent editor, the intriguing plot becomes a confusing mess, and the reader gets bogged down in the midst of things. One might say that Lee and co-writer Choi simply bit off more than they could rightfully chew. It’s sad, really, for the first two issues demonstrated genuine potential. And by the time Lee and Choi rectified the situation by adding more descriptive captions, the plot was entering its generic knock-’em-down, blow-’em-up freefall of Issues 3 and 4. I’m not a major fan of classic Uncanny X-Men, John Byrne, Chris Claremont, etc., but I would have advised Lee and Choi to have studied the work of their heroes a little closer before committing WildC.A.T.s to paper.

Artistically, Lee hails from the same school of sketching as Liefeld, but thankfully his work on WildC.A.T.s is vastly more accomplished than that of his Image buddy on Youngblood. For one thing, he didn’t feel the need to cover his figures with ‘tiger print’ so that one appears to be viewing them through the shadow of a Persian blind. Also, while probably not demonstrating the same level of eroticism as Erik Larsen, Lee definitely does the female physique more justice than what Liefeld does. I’m not particularly a fan per se of this artistic style; I’m not even sure from what artists it originally drew influence (George Perez? John Byrne? Frank Miller?!); but Lee was far from the worst of the bunch, and I don’t think he has much to be ashamed of art-wise in these early WildC.A.T.s issues. Furthermore, his colourists, Joe Rosas and Joey Chiodo, never went down the ‘pastel route’, which is surely a blessing.

So if Lee and WildC.A.T.s were not the abomination that Liefeld and Youngblood were, then how come the title has suffered a fate of public indifference to it in the decades hence? Frankly, I think it has a lot to do with the fact that there was nothing particularly special about WildC.A.T.s. It does not have the appeal that a nutty train wreck like Youngblood has, nor does it have the allure of a noted artist like the man behind Spawn – Lee is vastly superior to Liefeld, but he doesn’t have the skills or originality of McFarlane. The series certainly didn’t demonstrate an overall grasp of a cartoonist’s palette as Larsen’s Savage Dragon mini-series did. It didn’t share the humour of that series, either. Considered in this context, WildC.A.T.s comes across as simply irrelevant.

The same holds true for the three ‘second-tier’ titles that emerged as those other Image artists made their presence be known throughout 1992. A cursory glance through early issues of Marc Sylvestri’s Cyberforce, Jim Valentino’s Shadowhawk and Whilce Portacio’s Wetworks (which debuted as a backup story in WildC.A.T.s No. 2) reveals merely ‘more of the same’ in regards to plot and characters. And only Shadowhawk, which is rendered in a slightly crude style—reminiscent of Ditko with a touch of R. Crumb, offers any real alternative on an artistic level. (It would have been wonderful if Valentino’s flagship series had been a Gen-X-oriented humour mag à la Peter Bagge’s Hate or J. R. Williams’s Crap; for not only would it have been a welcome change of pace from the oversized superheroes and more in keeping with his comical style, but such early diversification might have meant us having a different discussion about Image today.)

But so far I’ve talked only about the flagship series themselves, their particulars and strengths and weaknesses. One is probably wondering, what about the initial target audience? What would have been the experience of the average twelve- to eighteen-year old upon discovering Image Comics in 1992?

Considering how difficult it is to comprehend the major plots and even basic premises of Spawn, Youngblood and WildC.A.T.s, I’ve reached the conclusion that young consumers must have fallen into one of three possible camps in regards to the way in which he or she dealt with these titles: 1) They purchased the comics merely as potential collectors’ items and didn’t even attempt to read them in the first place; 2) They ‘read’ them, couldn’t grasp exactly what was transpiring between the garish covers, but didn’t give a damn because these mags were going to put them through university in a few years; or 3) They depended on all the hype (interviews, advertisements, press releases) to grasp the basics of the series in question; e.g., a reader learns about Spawn’s deal with the devil not from the fuzzy contents of those early issues, but rather from interviews with Todd McFarlane and advertisements in other comics and related magazines. This third possibility strikes me as actually a little shocking, for it entails that the hype was an external yet integral element of the comics; and should the hype be separated (i.e., by time) from the series in question—as in the case of a person attempting to read early issues for the first time decades after their publication—part of the story shall be lost to the reader. He or she will have both figuratively and literally lost the plot.

Liefeld, McFarlane, Portacio and Lee in appearances on Stan Lee’s Comic Book Greats, 1991–92; the Malcolm X baseball cap couldn’t disguise their ’80s sensibilities

With hindsight, it is only appropriate that the very first Image comic, Youngblood No. 1, should open with a scene at a shopping mall, for it actually set the tone for the whole Image experience. This may have been 1992, the year Kurt Cobain and Gen-X ‘alternative’ culture hit the big-time, but, for all intents and purposes, the Image company seems to have been stranded in a Tiffany or Debbie Gibson music video circa 1987. The aforementioned acid-washed denim and pastel sweaters still worn by Liefeld, Lee and McFarlane at the time should tell us something about their perspective on pop culture. Rob Liefeld’s television advert for Levi’s 501 Button Fly jeans should tell us even more. Make no mistake about it, Image was truly a byproduct of the Reaganomic 1980s in all it yuppie/preppy glory. Once the money started pouring in exponentially, the founding artists had no problem imitating the very same business model they had so ceremoniously left at Marvel, hiring freelancers to write and draw their comics for them at rates of up to $300 per page. And they certainly had no qualms about spending their filthy lucre on the dearer, if not finer, things in life. Liefeld and McFarlane were particularly adept at blowing their millions on extravagant fancies—like the life-sized Youngblood airship replica, and Mark McGwire’s dubious record-breaking home-run ball. Of course, much of the business generated was dependent on exploitation of a speculator market which was nearing its zenith. Image could churn out ‘collectable’ #1s and alternate editions as well as Marvel or DC any day. It’s useless for their founding fathers to argue otherwise.

“A lot of Image comics [...were] fueled by the speculator market,” admits Marc Sylvestri in Robert Kirkman’s ‘Declaration of Independents’ episode, “and we knew that.”

“Image was part of it,” McFarlane also admits in the same documentary. “As an entire industry, we took advantage of our consumer. You never, ever want to do that. Why? They will just leave you.”

And leave them, they did—in droves. Sales dropped sharply in the mid ’90s as the speculator bubble burst, and continued to decline into the early 2000s as the dwindling comics shops boarded their windows and Generation Y entered the workforce, leaving their comics collections to gather dust in their parents’ attics. Even Rob Liefeld left, in 1996, before being ousted for promoting his own Maximum Press at the expense of the company; apparently Image wasn’t enough for him. Similarly, Jim Lee sold his WildStorm studio and its characters to DC in 1998.

Item. People keep pointing out and reminding me in forums and Facebook groups that—so ironically—Image has rebuilt itself in recent years, becoming the most alternative and open-minded of the mainstream companies; which leaves me wondering if black and white zombie comics and mags about ‘bitch’ dystopias and dysfunctional prep schools truly are as cutting-edge and socially relevant as what Dan Clowes’s Eightball and Peter Bagge’s Hate were some 25 years ago. If so, then it doesn’t say much for the bulk of what’s being published in 2017, or the state of Western culture in the second decade of the 21st century.

Like it or lump it, just like Marvel’s (outdated) reputation for being relevant and groundbreaking still depends upon a handful of titles published in the ’60s and early ’70s, what we think of as Image is still predominantly defined by those comics created by the company’s founders in the early to mid ’90s. One might say then that the company can’t win for losing—profitably. Twenty-five years and counting, and the name Image still says it all: the accent was on the artists, in all their pouch-drawing, over-muscled (and overrated) glory. As McFarlane puts it so concisely in the Kirkman series: “We were novices as writers and we came out of the gate with badly written books—okay, I’ll concede it—and we crushed it sales-wise. Why? Because they liked our art. And you know who that bugged the most? The writers!”

Given the name of the company, the obvious deficiencies in writing, the eponymous creator credits, and the dedications to Kirby, Ditko, Shuster, etc., one is tempted to wonder if the whole concept of Image was little more than a big fuck-you of a statement about ownership and creative rights in the first place. If this hypothesis holds any water, then it is truly sad in every sense of the word, for a statement is not much on which to base a comic-book company.

Image at its commercial best was also Image at its creative worst. This is a sad yet inescapable irony. The Image Comics ‘phenomenon’ was like Mardi Gras outselling all of CCR’s previous albums combined. Considered objectively today, virtually all of the original flagship series now look like remnants of modern pop history: bizarre curios from a surprisingly romantic period that flashed by as fast and furiously as the Simpsons gags and Mudhoney EPs that helped define it. Nevertheless, these bizarre curios continue to be imitated, albeit inexplicably. They might as well be, for all the ‘alternative’ titles published in recent years cannot subtract from the reputation established a quarter of a century ago. I’m guessing that Saga, Paper Girls and even The Walking Dead will matter very little in the long run. Such are the sadly ironic ways of history.

Now where can I find those other three issues of SuperPatriot for under five dollars...?

All comics images © 1992, 1993 Image Comics / Malibu comics.