Back in the early 1990s when fanboys and fangirls everywhere were buying up multiple copies of first issue comics featuring their favourite superheroes drawn by their favourite artists courtesy of one of the big two publishers in Marvel Comics and DC Comics, a group of hot, up-and-coming creatives got a crazy idea in their heads.
They thought they should own all the acclaim, the control, and the sales they were making with their hard work and not so easily shunt it off to their corporate bosses.
Sure, complete company control was the way business had operated since time immemorial throughout the comic book industry, but it didn’t have to be that way anymore.
This was a new age! The glimmer of the new millennium was on the horizon! Siegal and Shuster, Robinson and Kirby, Ditko and Gerber and all the other golden, silver and bronze-age creators who got the short shrift treatment by their deep-pocketed employers? That time was over!
And in 1992, that new generation of fan favourite artists in Larsen, Liefeld, Lee, McFarlane, Portacio, Silvestri and Valentino gathered up all of their pouches, loaded up all of their oversized weapons, flexed all of their bulging muscles and started a comic book revolution that continues to powerfully reverberate across pop culture to this day.
Owned and operated by those names, thirty years ago saw the founding of Image Comics.
The Official Image Timeline (One-Shot) is a 64-page, prestige format publication that marks that important moment in comic book history but it also details the three decades of a publishing company that showcases Image Comics as being just as relevant today as it was in 1992.
Written and compiled by Jim Valentino, one of the company’s original founders, and with an introduction by current Image Comics Publisher, Eric Stephenson, The Official Image Timeline (One-Shot) is a comprehensive archival look back in chronological order at Image’s history – all of its myriad of successes and, indeed, many of its missteps and outright failures. From Spawn to Saga, Youngblood to Astro City, Shadowhawk to Happy!, Cyberforce to Echolands, The Savage Dragon to Descender, WildC.A.T.s to The Walking Dead, the book is chock full of publication covers, photos and behind-the-scenes stories that reveal as much of the company’s importance in the comic book landscape and creators rights as it points a direction for the future of the industry and the creative artist and writer.
If you love comic books and comic book lore, the industry’s past, present and future or if you just love Image Comics, make the run to your local comic book shop and pick up The Official Image Timeline (One-Shot) today!
