Image Comics

Image Comics is an American comic book publisher and is the third-largest direct market comic book and graphic novel publisher in the industry by market share. It was founded in 1992 by several high-profile illustrators as a venue for creator-owned properties, in which comics creators could publish material of their own creation without giving up the copyrights to those properties. Normally this is not the case in the work-for-hire-dominated American comics industry, where the legal author is a publisher, such as Marvel Comics or DC Comics, and the creator is an employee of that publisher. Its output was originally dominated by superhero and fantasy titles from the studios of the founding Image partners, but now includes comics in many genres by numerous independent creators. Its best-known publications include Spawn, Savage Dragon, Witchblade, Bone, The Walking Dead, Invincible, Saga, Jupiter's Legacy, Kick-Ass, Radiant Black and Stray Dogs. In the early 1990s, artists Todd McFarlane, Rob Liefeld, and Jim Lee broke successive modern sales records at Marvel Comics with Spider-Man #1, X-Force #1, and X-Men #1 respectively. However, the creators became discontent. Liefeld worried that their success actually made their positions at Marvel precarious. "We had become too big for the system," he said in 2000. "Marvel didn't want a star system, but with Todd's, Jim's and my books selling millions of copies, that's what we were becoming. They were trying to reproduce the success of our books." McFarlane and Lee, on the other hand, felt undervalued at Marvel, where they were not paid when their art was reused for merchandise such as t-shirts. Malibu Comics agreed to publish a creator-owned title by Liefeld in 1991. In July that year he announced plans to publish an independent comic called Youngblood and in September advertised a title called The Executioners to be published by "Image Comics.