Part Two: The Honeymoon

Liefeld told the Journal he had initially hoped to continue to draw his hit Marvel title X-Force, while creating his own series for Image. Marvel seemed to take the attitude that the artists, fan favorites or not, needed Marvel and its characters more than Marvel needed them. It was presumed to be only a matter of time before all of the departing rebels would be crawling back to Stewart's office, begging for work.

That scenario was not far from the minds of the artists. Even McFarlane, who described himself as a rabble-rousing union firebrand, said he would have been prepared to eat crow and beg for his job back if Image had fallen on its face.

There was every reason to expect that it would do just that. A number of independent publishers in recent years had tried to challenge the Big Two and fallen by the wayside. Larry Marder, Image's executive director from 1993 to 1999, told the Journal, "The direct [comics-shop] sales system had worked well when there were about 75 titles, but by the beginning of the '90s, there were just too many titles. The proliferation of Marvel titles had worked to crowd out Pacific and First. But it didn't work this time."

In fact, as Marder sees it, market saturation by the big publishers had the opposite effect. As the number of titles issuing from Marvel began to exceed the purchasing capacity of Marvel fans, the notion that it was not necessary to buy every Marvel title was forcibly impressed upon even the most dedicated Marvel Zombie. From that hard lesson, it was a short jump to the idea that it was possible to buy titles from another publisher.

Marder, who in 1991 was marketing director for the Moondog chain of comics shops, remembers the buying patterns of customers beginning to vary. "Books that dealers had always ordered that were no-brainers, like Captain America, had started to fluctuate substantially in sales," he said. "This was something unbelievably unprecedented. Everybody was flooding the market and there was so much choice that you started to see something akin to channel-flipping, which led to brand loyalty sort of starting to disappear."

Replacing brand loyalty was a heightened awareness of the individual styles that creators brought to their comics. It was hard not to notice that at Marvel young Turks like Liefeld, McFarlane and Lee were taking turns breaking each other's sales records month after month. "People forget," said Liefeld, "New Mutants was a dog. They couldn't give that away. [Marvel editor] Bob Harras told me to 'fill this book with whatever you want,' and I feel I turned it around."

If kicking the title from the bottom to the top of the sales charts can be called "turning it around," then Liefeld's claim can be considered a more than fair statement. How did Liefeld, a novice who had broken into the comics field less than four years earlier at the age of 17, accomplish this? First, he turned New Mutants into X-Force and began to replace the teen soap-opera cast with bad-ass characters like Deadpool and Cable. Then, and perhaps most importantly, he began to pile on hardware and accessories. Where superheroes had traditionally leapt around in their skivvies, surviving on their wits and innate powers, Liefeld's heroes were likely to pull out a laser cannon and blast their way out of a bad situation. Overnight, mere comic-book characters had become very cool toys. The appeal of these accessories was so great that Liefeld was told Marvel's series of X-Men action figures would jump straight from the old uniformed X-Men to a line of X-Force figures.

McFarlane, too, was overhauling the look of Spider-Man and drastically altering the traditional Marvel page layout despite heavy editorial resistance. Liefeld said, "At Marvel, we were utilizing the page in ways it had not been done before." According to Liefeld, the artists competitively tried to outdo each other's over-the-top effects. Though still at Marvel, Liefeld, McFarlane, Lee and Larsen were in the process of shaping what would come to be known as the Image Look.

It's a Superhero Life, If You Don't Weaken

Despite all the signs in the air, the success of the Image break took almost everyone by surprise. Marder said, "When I was first told about [the plans for Image] months before, I didn't think it was a very good idea. I thought the personality of the creators was the weakest factor [in what attracted fans]. But people were now talking about Todd McFarlane's Spider-Man and Jim Lee's X-Men. The artists had become more important than the company."

In a way, it was the logical outcome of a policy that Marvel itself had initiated back in the 1960s when it had started turning formerly anonymous creators into personas that sounded like something out of a comic-book story: Jolly Jack, Smilin' Stan, Darlin' Dick. Even the letterer started to take shape in the mind's eye, when one thought of him as Adorable Artie Simek. Marvel artists, therefore, had long had their followings, but the Image generation of creators were smart enough to lure their fans away from Marvel by doing for their own imprint exactly the sort of comics that had made them popular at Marvel.

Even current Image Publisher Jim Valentino, who is known for his attempts to lead Image outside the limits of the superhero genre, told the Journal, "There was a reason for Image to embrace superheroes in the beginning. It was a matter of: How do we fight the Marvel brand loyalty? We assumed people did not want to see Rob Liefeld's It's a Good Life if You Don't Weaken. We did color superhero books, and Image literally broke that [brand loyalty] thing wide open. Fans went lemming-like to the Image line. Doing superheroes laid the foundation for the successful launch of the company."

As Marder explained, "Generally, when somebody got hot and went off and did something on their own, they did something weird, like Frank Miller with Ronin. Everybody went off doing Prestige-format, high-ticket projects. At Image, they stuck to what they knew and they filled a vacuum in newsprint. Nobody really saw them coming."

As their first comics began trickling out in the early months of 1992, the Image creators used Malibu Comics facilities to solicit and print their titles. In fact, the name Image never even came up in those first solicitations for Liefeld's Youngblood, and the banner didn't really start to get a big play until solicitations for August, when a coupon promotion ran in all the Image titles and the comics were listed in the catalogs for the first time under Image instead of Malibu.

As it first appeared, the Image line was evenly divided between monstrous solo heroes and superteams that were more like well-armed super task forces. In the first category were McFarlane's undead hero, Spawn; Larsen's reptilian police officer, Savage Dragon; and Valentino's back-breaking vigilante, Shadowhawk. Spawn was saturated in urban gothic atmosphere and Shadowhawk was a traditional superhero series with a dark edge, but Savage Dragon was largely a straight-ahead, good-time superhero fight book. In the second category were Youngblood, Lee's WildC.A.T.s, Silvestri's CyberForce and Liefeld's Brigade.

Though their flirtations with sexual and violent material were sometimes a little bolder than would normally be seen in the Marvel or DC universes the new Image comics were, for the most part, safely within the parameters of the mainstream superhero formula. From the beginning, Image was less about self-expression or expanding the boundaries of the comics form than it was about giving readers what they seemed to want. Describing why the Image creators chose not to use their newly won freedom to experiment with alternative avenues of storytelling, McFarlane delicately explained, "Just because you go in a room and circle-jerk and put it on paper, doesn't mean anybody gives a fuck."

Then again, titles like Youngblood and Spawn did constitute a kind of self-expression for the Image creators. Superheroes were what they had grown up with and what they had cut their artistic teeth on. With the exception of Valentino, the Image creators simply liked superheroes. "I know The Comics Journal views superhero comics as that they're shit," Liefeld told the Journal, almost apologetically, "and it's true that all too often they read like children's puff literature. But I like doing superheroes. I'd only been doing comics for four years. I was still getting it out of my system. I was fed by MTV images, and I think any young cartoonist is dealing with their rage on the page."

In fact, Liefeld was apparently getting a lot of his experiences onto the pages of those early Image issues. Clearly, there was something about the camaraderie of teamwork that appealed to Liefeld, who followed his initial Youngblood superteam mini-series with the ongoing Brigade team title, and who by most accounts had been the driving force behind bringing the Image creators together as a group.

"Youngblood was my attempt to do something like The Avengers and Teen Titans," he said. Liefeld had approached DC about the possibility of doing a new version of Teen Titans, and, according to Larsen, Youngblood is a slightly revamped incarnation of Liefeld's plans for the DC heroes. "If you look at the pages," Larsen said, "you'll see that Shaft is Speedy."

But Youngblood was a superteam with a twist. Liefeld realized that to be a superhero was to be a celebrity, which meant dealing with fan expectations, contracts, media exposure, agents and public relations, things that weren't generally acknowledged in comics. "I wanted to do something with the cult of celebrity," he said, "icons that crossed every border -- like sports figures, Madonna or Michael Jackson. I got a whiff of that when Youngblood #1 was coming out and all these Hollywood agents were wanting to represent me, and I was able to bring some of that back to the book."

Liefeld had courted that celebrity status. When Levis ran a series of commercials and ads asking "What do you do in your Levis?" he wrote them to volunteer himself as a Levis-wearing cartoonist and ended up on TV as part of the campaign. The other Image partners complained that Liefeld, at the peak of his popularity, would often brag about the various Hollywood celebrities he had been hanging out with. Even today, forcibly ejected from the superteam he brought together, he waits patiently for the big break that will make him a true Hollywood player. The truth is if Liefeld had created his own It's a Good Life if You Don't Weaken, it would've looked something like Youngblood.

Welcome to the Tent Show

The first sign the Image creators had of just how far their own celebrity stock had risen was at a series of book-signing appearances at the Golden Apple comics shop in Los Angeles just as the first Image comics were coming out. Liefeld appeared on the front page of the LA Times, TV cameras converged on the shop, helicopters hovered overhead and police were brought in to control crowds of as many as 2,000 fans. "By the time we got to [the] Chicago [Comicon], we were just riding the wave," Liefeld said.

The comicon organizers began to get a little spooked at the prospect of that wave, which, as it continued to grow beyond all expectations, looked like it might swamp the con's facilities. Marder was then working at Moondog with Gary Colabuono, and a stipulation of Colabuono becoming a partner of the Chicago Comicon was that he make a pitch to get the Image crew to come to the con. Marder, who had been friends with Valentino, was the link that made that happen. But no sooner had all parties agreed to the appearance than the con organizers began to have trepidations. It was the last year the Comicon was held at the Ramada Hotel, which longtime congoers will remember for its small ballrooms and tight hallways. Already organizers were beginning to realize the con had outgrown its venue, and now it was facing what threatened to be the biggest draw in its history.

Marder said, "They had had a hard time with lines of 20 or 30. The idea that they might have hundreds of people lining up scared them."

The solution that the organizers came up with was to keep the Image creators from ever setting foot in the con. Instead, a tent was set up around the Image artists outside the hotel, and an elaborate system was devised, involving the issuing of tickets that allowed the holder a limited audience with each creator.

"They wouldn't allow us to appear on the floor of the con," Valentino told the Journal. "I remember talking to Rob about it and asking, 'What do they think is going to happen?'"

What happened were lines a mile and a half long. Valentino was told an estimated 26,000 people passed through the Image tent. "All I know was we saw an endless stream of belt buckles for three days," Valentino said. "Our necks were crimped. Our backs were crimped."

According to Marder, who was on hand to observe the spectacle, it was Marvel and DC's failure to take the upstart creators seriously that helped to make the Image launch the colossal success that it was. "Marvel and DC had made some serious miscalculations," he told the Journal. "They really thought Image would fail. They could have seriously counter-programmed against the Image appearances. At this time, Image only had a couple of issues of Youngblood, Spawn and Savage Dragon out. If Marvel had produced a big Spider-Man extravaganza, they could have drawn fans away. But they canceled Spidey's 30th birthday party, which they had planned for the con, and nobody counterprogrammed anything against Image. People didn't feel they would be missing anything by going out to the tent."

Marder blamed Marvel's blindness in part on the loss of key marketing personnel like the then recently deceased Carol Kalish. "Kalish would have been smart enough to see that they had created an enormous vacuum for Image," he said.

But as fans were swarming to the Image banner, resentment was growing among the Image artists' comics-field colleagues -- especially writers, who appeared to have been left out of the Image formula for success. It didn't help matters, when Image set up a tent outside the Comicon and left the rest of the industry twiddling its thumbs and tossing paper planes while waiting for fans to finish having their copies of Spawn #1 signed next door. Valentino said, "The entire comics professional community was deriding us for being too good for the con."

According to Marder, "There may have been a belief that they were getting special treatment, but it was really a comfort and safety issue."

Meanwhile, partly spurred by a burgeoning speculator interest in comics, Image titles were selling out in comics shops across the country. Spawn, the most popular, was selling in the neighborhood of 2 million copies, and even Image's apparent weak link, Shadowhawk, sold approximately 750,000 -- which Valentino noted is "better than the output of most entire companies today."

In fact, the launching of Image probably fanned the flames of speculation as much as speculators boosted sales of Image titles. Marder said,"The tenor of the industry was such that speculation was probably at an all-time high," a state of affairs that he named as a key factor in Image's success. And Image, in turn, was a key factor in the ascendancy of Wizard magazine, which had been featuring the fan-favorite Image artists since before they left Marvel. Along with the Overstreet Guide, Wizard was the speculator's bible.

In short, only months after announcing their existence, the Image partners were on top of the comics world, high-fiving one another and slapping each other on the back. In a 1992 interview, McFarlane, aglow with camaraderie, told the Journal, "I like Rob. Rob's like a brother to me." Five years later McFarlane would describe Liefeld to the Journal as "a fucking loony ... He's delusional and he tells a bunch of fucking lies, too."

According to Valentino, "When you first get married, you expect everything to be perfect. I think the honeymoon lasted until about 1994 at Image."

Image's fall, as was that of the comics industry itself, was rapid and from a great height. As our overview of Image continue, we will look more closely at the serpents in the garden.