Part Four: An Accounting

Some will say The Image Story is the story of comic books. All the elements that we associate with the medium are there: the exuberance of youth, the centrality of the superhero, teamwork, renegade underdogs vs. corporate empires, collector-mania, hyperbole, extravagance, collaboration, great power, great responsibility, great irresponsibility.

Image's triumphant inauguration in 1992 coincided with a glorious heyday of comic-book popularity, which it celebrated in a profusion of variant editions decked out in foil or embossed or die-cut so that even the blind could share in the plenitude. Image inspired so much faith among comics retailers that it soon bore the fate of many on its back -- and it failed them. Image titles quickly lost creative steam, falling further and further behind schedule even as retailers threw more and more money into heavily hyped events like the ill-fated Deathmate crossover. As they collapsed together, Image and the industry became Deathmates of a sort. Some will say the declining industry pulled Image down with it, while others will say that, by promising more than it delivered, Image carried much of the blame for the industry's slide.

For whatever reason, as the decade progressed, many comics readers began to turn their attention to other media -- movies, videogames, toys -- but no more so than the Image creators themselves. Within a couple of years, all but one of the founding partners had virtually ceased to draw comics, focusing instead on opportunities promised by Hollywood and the toy market. By the end of the '90s, the partnership's solidarity had degenerated into cross-filed lawsuits, Rob Liefeld had been ousted, and Jim Lee had, as Todd McFarlane put it, gone "back to the plantation" at DC Comics.

But as with the story of the comics industry, the Image story is not over yet, and everybody has his or her own way of telling it. As current Image Central Publisher Jim Valentino said, "It's like nine people watching a car wreck and the only thing they agree on is that two cars crashed."

In the previous three parts of this series, we have heard the metaphorical car wreck that was Image Comics described by several of its closest witnesses. In this final chapter, we will look at Image as it exists today and ask some hard questions about whether it has lived up to the promise so many saw in it eight years ago.

The Story So Far

But first, like any good comics series, we need to recap the story so far, and to do so we will turn to a voice not yet heard from: Top Cow Publisher and founding Image partner Marc Silvestri. Not surprisingly, Silvestri's version of events varies slightly from the stories told in this series by partners Liefeld, McFarlane, Valentino and Erik Larsen and former Image Executive Director Larry Marder.

As Silvestri recalls the origins of Image, "Jim [Lee], Whilce [Portacio], Rob and I had been talking about starting a studio together. I was out there [in New York City in 1991] for an X-Men meeting and Todd came up to me at the hotel with this idea of leaving Marvel to form Image. It all happened pretty quickly." Silvestri had been the penciller on Uncanny X-Men before being replaced by Lee and moved to Wolverine. According to various accounts, McFarlane, who dearly wanted Lee to be part of the planned group resignation from Marvel took the opportunity of being in town at the same time as Lee to broach his proposal. Silvestri happened to be with Lee at the time and thus was drawn into the conspiracy.

Given the competitive nature of working for mainstream comics companies, how easy was it to shift gears and act in concert with other creators when they made their Image move? Did Silvestri feel any animosity toward Lee, the fast-rising star penciller who had taken over his X-Men gig? "No," he said. "I had a heavy schedule and X-Men had been a big work load, anyway. I was thrilled to be asked to join them. I jumped at the chance to work with these guys. As an artist you start to get isolated. Your neighbors don't understand why you're staying up all night working. It was great to be around other artists who do understand. Also, working with them raised your bar a little bit."

Silvestri was in agreement with the other Image partners that an eventual showdown between Marvel and its most popular artists had been inevitable. "We didn't get a whole lot of recognition from Marvel," he said. "They had always had the attitude that 'It's not the creators; it's the characters.' The Image artists created the comics star, something Marvel didn't want to see, because, consequently, they needed to pay big bucks. There probably was a happy medium between Marvel and Image, but they [Marvel] weren't interested."

In the face of a threatened group exodus, the compromise that then Marvel Publisher Terry Stewart reportedly offered the star artists in December of 1991 was management of Marvel's then-still-struggling Epic line. The artists scornfully rejected the offer, choosing to launch their own line with the help of Malibu Comics' printing facilities.

Image was born in 1992 in a burst of creator camaraderie and all the partners were given a warm welcome in the marketplace. Even artists who had not developed a particularly large following, such as Valentino and Silvestri, basking in a kind of popularity by association, found themselves with a new fan base beyond their wildest imaginings. In the beginning, Silvestri said, "We psyched ourselves up. We had an attitude of 'Fuck the people who don't understand us.' There was a lot of getting in each other faces, but it never went very far. It was us against the world."

Rifts quickly began to appear, however. As reported in earlier chapters of this series, McFarlane had been opposed to Valentino's membership and the partners found they did not see eye-to-eye about aesthetic goals. "I always had this thing," Silvestri told the Journal. "I had a problem with some of the books. From my point of view, some of the books we were putting out were shit. They were like filler books just to put something out. It seemed like they were just grabbing people off the street and letting them do work for us."

The trouble was, once the artists were away from Marvel's corporate conveyor belt, they began to let deadlines slide. As they scrambled to find creators to help with the scripting, inking and even pencilling of stories, they found themselves drawing from a dwindling talent pool. Though McFarlane had hoped that artists everywhere would follow Image's example and add to a mass backlash against the big companies, artists had instead rushed to fill the vacuum left at Marvel. "It was hard for us to get people," Silvestri said. "There weren't a lot of Scott Williamses around. I had to ink my own work in the first issue. Putting together my own company (the Top Cow studio), doing my own comic, and setting up a studio in San Diego just overwhelmed me. We got behind and delivered a lot of books late."

Promises, Promises

Disappointment therefore followed hard upon the glowing promise of the new comics company. Retailers and fans were disappointed when books failed to materialize. Those, like McFarlane, who had hoped Image would spark a revolution, were disappointed that artists continued to bow to the guaranteed paychecks of the Big Two. Critics were disappointed that the unleashed creators had merely produced another line of generic superhero comics. And even the partners were disappointed in the quality of work being produced by their fellow Image artists.

But what exactly had Image promised to begin with? Certainly there is a distinction to be made between what the Image partners said they would do for us and the unspoken promise that Image represented to so many in the industry. Even among the partners, the motivations behind Image differed considerably. According to Liefeld, "Todd left Marvel to hurt Marvel. Rob left to help Rob."

Notice that in neither case is anything said about helping the rest of us, whether readers, retailers, critics or fellow artists. From the beginning, Image championed creators' rights as long as the creator happened to be an Image partner. "'Creators' rights' sounds like we were taking up a mantle," said Liefeld, "but we didn't create Image for that purpose. It wasn't a fight."

As McFarlane explained the more modest ambition behind the company, "Image meant that there was an option. There should have been 50 Images."

As it took shape in a private meeting in 1992, Image's mission statement had only two fundamental principles: 1) Image would never own another creator's property; and 2) Image Central would never interfere creatively or financially with any Image partner. According to Valentino, "Over the years, we have managed to keep those two resolutions."

It's not the partners' fault, in other words, if many saw other potentials like better comics and better working conditions for artists in the emergence of Image. For those who blamed the editorial pressures of the big companies for keeping the comics industry bound to the narrow path of superhero serials, the release of yet another line of superhero titles by the unfettered artists of Image seemed to be nothing less than a betrayal.

Creators like Liefeld and Larsen will almost apologetically defend their choice of material, saying they simply liked superheroes. To paraphrase John Lee Hooker, superheroes were in 'em and they had to come out. Talk to Valentino, the company's current publisher, however, and you get a different view. Though best known for his work on Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy and his Image character Shadowhawk, Valentino broke into comics with Normalman, a parodic indy series that was part of the black-and-white boom of the 1980s. "Even a cursory glance at my career in comics will show that my roots are in the undergrounds and alternative comics," he told the Journal. "That was my work up to the point where I went to work for Marvel. I firmly believe it's in the best interests of the medium to present a diversity of books. To do otherwise is basically an act of self-strangulation."

After a run with various incarnations of his Shadowhawk character in 1993 and 1994, Valentino told the Journal he became sick of the limitations of the genre, as well as his own limitations as an artist. He published his own black-and-white coming-of-age story -- A Touch of Silver -- then quit drawing altogether. Instead, he became a kind of Image talent scout, picking up one nongenre, black-and-white project after another and publishing them under the Image banner. The creators of these titles were not Image partners. Image solicited and printed the books, then repaid itself off the top of the books' sales income, passing any remaining profit on to the creators. Valentino brought so many of these titles into the fold that they became known as the Image nonline. Not surprisingly, most of these titles failed to generate significant sales, and in 1997, the nonline was abandoned.

Though the nonline is no more, Valentino has continued to recruit properties from outside the superhero genre since becoming publisher of Image Central in 1999. "Almost from the day we started Image, I wanted to do something like that," he said. "It's still something I'm trying to do. I saw the nonline as being a stepping stone hopefully to comics that would challenge [readers] more."

When accused of catering to superhero fans, Valentio responds, "Name a traditional superhero good-guy/bad-guy title that Image publishes. We don't have a title where a bunch of teen-age mutants dismember each other over a metropolitan street and we haven't for a long time." Rather, Image has mutated the genre itself, combining its more traditional elements with bits of gothic fantasy, manga, paramilitary technology and pubescent titillation.

If one detects a core of superhero power fantasies remaining just beneath the surface of titles like Spawn and Witchblade, Valentino admits that, "Judging from what makes it onto Diamond's list of Top 100 books I can't deny the fact that it's still a superhero market. [As an industry,] we're completely out of step with the rest of the world in that. To the rest of the world the mainstream is not superheroes. My philosophy is that I want to produce a diverse and quality line. Here's what I want: books that are well-written and well-drawn and come out on time. Except for Westerns. I don't want any Westerns. And I don't want any eros comics."

What about books that sell? "Salability has to be a factor," he said.

Fighting in the Toy Aisles and Hanging Out with Tom Cruise

It's possible to forgive an artist who produces a simplistic superhero tale as a labor of love, but it's hard not to see much of what comes out of Image as cynical market manipulation, when the founding artists themselves seem to have lost interest in creating comics. Marder, who ran Image Central from 1993 to 1999, said, "Image was always about comics and Image is still primarily about comics," while admitting, "It's true that Todd runs a giant toy company and Silvestri is producing a TV show in Canada right now as we speak."

Liefeld charged that "Todd's biggest passion is sports, not comics. Now he manufactures plastic for a living and gets to tell other people what to draw."

McFarlane has a straight-forward explanation for why he has applied himself to toys and movies instead of drawing comics: "I'm at the point where I want to take my energies to outlets where people will see the results. I want the fucking world to see, because I'm goddamn proud of my work. I like to show it to everybody. I'm not doing it to hang out with Tom Cruise. I've gone 35 years without hanging out with Tom Cruise and I can go another 35. But billions of people watch TV and go to movies. Billions of people don't read comics."

McFarlane said he finds plenty of creative stimulation in his current activities. "People complain just because Todd McFarlane himself is not doing all the things that are coming out," he said. "just because I don't put pencil on paper to draw the final product. To come up with a script takes a lot of work and creativity. And I still draw. I did some design sketches today for a toys video conference."

Marder, who left his position as Image executive director to work under McFarlane at Todd McFarlane Productions, said, "I know that Todd is a scrapper and a fighter. When he was at Marvel and DC, he was fighting. And now, Todd is fighting the same good fight in the toy aisles that we did in the comics aisles. We're radicals in this industry. We have fundamentally changed the way the Big Two (Matell and Hasbro) look at action figures. Our action figures are not really action figures. They're more collectible touchstones, conversation pieces."

McFarlane's latest piece to inspire conversation is Deathrow Marv, which gives consumers the chance to fry Frank Miller's Sin City character in the electric chair. The Marv collectible touchstone lights up and contorts in response to a thrown switch, then asks "That the best you can do, you pansies?" Recommended by TMP for ages "13 and up," the toy has drawn considerable media attention, including an appearance on Late Night with David Letterman. McFarlane's products typically appear on consumer watchdog groups' annual lists of the most violent and reprehensible toys on the market.

"To me he's a visionary, a genius," said Marder. "Because he went to school on a jock scholarship, people lose sight of the fact that deep down inside he's just an awesome designer. There are stories associated with every action figure that comes out of here. He'll ask, for example, 'What if we had a line of biomechanical animals? How would they work?' He really drives so much of this stuff today. And the ways that he pitches ideas are very unorthodox."

In addition to his hot toy lines, McFarlane is the only proven Hollywood success at Image, with a 1997 Spawn animated HBO series and Spawn movie. McFarlane's comment about having no aspiration to hang out with Tom Cruise, was a backhanded slam at Liefeld, who, his former Image partners complain, frequently bragged about the Hollywood celebrities he had lunched with and the fabulous deals he was on the verge of finalizing with studio suits.

Liefeld admitted that Hollywood had been a major distraction from his comics work. "When you get called up for a meeting with Steven Spielberg or you're hanging out with Tom Cruise four days a week, you don't want to go home and draw; you want to find some friends and tell them about it. I was able to meet a whole lot of people that I had never conceived of meeting. It seemed that comics were very much in vogue, and I was only 30 minutes out of LA. Someone would call and say, 'Hey, you want to come and meet so-and-so?' and I'd say, 'OK.' "

It was Liefeld, however, who announced suddenly in 1995 that the founding Image artists had lost sight of their original creative goals and that he was going to return to his pencilling roots by drawing the next 12 issues of Avengalyne. He challenged the other partners to do the same.

According to Liefeld, "Todd's reaction to that was, 'That's funny to me. That's a joke.' But I lived up to my statement."

Liefeld also picked up his pencil in 1996 to join Jim Lee in drawing their versions of classic Marvel characters for Marvel's Heroes Reborn mini-series event. The once-hot penciller found that his style had begun to fall out of favor with fans, and some critics made fun of the anatomical exaggerations that had always been part of his art. Marvel kept Lee but dropped Liefeld from the project before its completion.

By the time the Heroes Reborn series had run its course, Liefeld had also been dropped from Image itself. Accused of using Image resources for nonImage projects for his own Maximum Press, Liefeld was voted out of the partnership. Today he continues to publish an average of two titles a month through his Awesome imprint. Dreams of Hollywood retain a powerful hold on him.

Asked if, after years of stillborn projects and undeveloped options, he had come, like many in the comics business, to see Hollywood as a mirage, Liefeld told the Journal, "No, I don't see it that way. My intention is to make films eventually. Youngblood is my bestselling comic and I've never sold it as a property yet. I'm in contact with all these people still -- Cameron, Cruise, Spielberg. They're brilliant people. I think there are things coming from all these relationships. It just takes years and years to build."

Silvestri, whose Witchblade, is about to make its television debut, is also smitten by Hollywood. In fact, he had been about to leave comics for a career in movies when he had been sidetracked by the formation of Image. "I was looking for ways to get out of comics," he said. "I was going to go to film school to become a storyboard artist. Movies have stimulated me again. The Witchblade show looks good. It's fun. I love playing around in this other medium."

Silvestri vacillated somewhat when asked if the comics industry is becoming dependent on Hollywood. "It's all a question of how you're running your business," he said, at first. "At Top Cow, the comics support themselves. We don't really need movies to be profitable." Pressed on the subject, however, he said, "If you want to be profitable, there's generally not enough income to support the comics industry without movies." Asked if Hollywood had become a distraction from the art of making comics, Silvestri said, "Quite frankly, without the distraction of movies, there's no comics."

Valentino, like McFarlane, Liefeld and Silvestri, has virtually ceased to draw. He resents those who complain that he has abandoned his artistic calling. "I find those criticisms insulting," he told the Journal. "Don't people have the right to grow and change? I stopped drawing and writing for personal reasons. I just hit a wall and didn't want to do it any more."

Amid the hotshots at Image, Valentino apparently developed a growing inferiority complex. "My book was definitely DOA from the beginning," he said, despondently. "I'm not stupid. And anyway I hated Shadowhawk. I hated him so much, I killed the motherfucker. I was free to do that at Image. I couldn't have done it at Marvel."

Larsen is the only founding Image partner to continue to draw new comics. After a flirtation with an animated Savage Dragon series, he has washed his hands of Hollywood. "The thing is, when you're doing comic books, you have complete control," he said. "But when it comes to cartoons, for example, a lot of different things come into play."

Larsen said the Savage Dragon show included four or five black characters, "but when I described one of them as fat and lazy, I was told that these were black stereotypes and the character couldn't be both black and fat and lazy."

Production personnel rejected his selections of voice actors and objected that Larsen's Hispanic character Alex Wilde should have a more Hispanic name. Larsen refused. "So they said, 'What if we color her Hispanic but never call her Hispanic?' I said, 'OK.' Then they said, 'Now, we need another Hispanic character.' There were too many things along those lines. I was paid very well. Is that just compensation? Well, yeah, and they were good people who were involved in the show. But do I want to battle the battle necessary to make a Dragon movie? No. I'd rather use the time to produce another 30 or 40 issues."

Larsen's Savage Dragon is Image's longest-running title and it has been written and drawn by Larsen since its inception. He is perhaps the only artist in the comics field without a property in turnaround in Hollywood. "I know it's freaky," he said, "but I got into comics because I wanted to do comics."

Image and Creator's Rights

Larsen was not the only Image artist who entered the field with high ideals. McFarlane, for example, was known at Marvel as a rabble-rouser who complained about working conditions and urged artists to unionize. Now that McFarlane has left the ranks to become the owner of a company that threatens to dwarf Marvel, the Journal asked him in what way his own employees are better off than he had been at Marvel. The question reduced him to a rare moment of speechlessness.

Asked if the conditions of the contracts under which his employees worked were the sort that would meet the approval of a union, he said, "They have no contract. It's totally free here. The best contract is no contract. If I have someone who does good work, the only way I can keep them is if they're satisfied. If they're not satisfied with me, they can leave. It's not for me to save everybody's life."

The first issue of Spawn was produced by McFarlane himself with the assistance of Terry Fitzgerald. Today he has approximately 120 people on his payroll. Among his employees are artists and writers who produce stories on a work-for-hire basis, as he once did for Marvel. What rights, if any, do these creators have with respect to characters, designs or story elements that they introduce into McFarlane's comic? "It depends on my involvement," he told the Journal. "Most of the characters, I created. I'm very loose, but I can't let anyone dictate to me. You have to trust the people you work with -- This is where it gets weird -- The way I see it, everybody gets treated fairly, but what's fair is predicated on what I think is fair. A lot of people don't see eye-to-eye with me."

One of those people appears to be Neil Gaiman who, as a guest-writer on Spawn, created the character of Angela, then saw her become a recurring character and a toy without any royalties being paid to him. Gaiman confirmed that an out-of-court (so far) legal dispute over the character has been under negotiation for several months.

"Todd has become that which he criticized," Liefeld said. "You don't own anything you create for Todd McFarlane."

Image's minimalist mission statement explicitly allows each partner to determine his own work-for-hire arrangements without interference from Image Central. "The subject was absolutely taboo between us," Valentino told the Journal. "Work-for-hire agreements are up to your own discretion. Some did work for hire on one basis, some did it on another, and some didn't have it at all. Noninterference means noninterference, even when someone does something onerous."

As a result, work-for-hire arrangements vary from partner to partner and even from creator to creator. At Liefeld's RPL Inc., creators are entitled to at least partial ownership of characters they create, as they were at Liefeld's Image studio. "If somebody creates a character for me, they have an ownership percentage," he said. "Others have brought their characters to me and they own those characters."

When creators worked for Valentino's studio, they also retained rights to the characters they created. "The advantages of work for hire outweigh the disadvantages," Valentino said, "but I believe in creators' rights. A creator should own whatever he or she creates. When I asked Kurt [Busiek] to write Shadowhawk, there was an understanding that I had created Shadowhawk, but if he created a character in a story, there was a deal under which he would be compensated every time it was reprinted."

According to Valentino, the only troubling episode occurred when Busiek pursued a storyline involving Shadowhawks from other eras. Were these original characters or variations on one character? "I was concerned about that and called him," Valentino said, "but as far as he was concerned, they were all Shadowhawk, and there was no problem."

Silvestri said Top Cow's work-for-hire contracts are "all different to a point. In general, Top Cow controls ancillary rights to a property, but I believe in creator rights, and I want to make sure people have something in their hands after they've created a character."

As for Image Central, according to Valentino, the question does not arise. "Image is a fulfillment house," he said. "We don't own and we don't create. And we only take creator-owned books."

Valentino's definition of creator-owned book, however, apparently would extend to a book not owned by the book's creator. "The person who approaches us has to own the book," he explained. "How they got the property is none of my business." What exactly would be turned down? Valentino gave the example of "a nonpartner vendor studio that wanted us to publish someone else's book through them. We said no."

That is a prohibition, however, that does not apply to the partners. "A third party can come into Image through a studio," Valentino said. "The partners can do that but nobody else can." For example, Portacio, a founding partner, who dropped out when Image incorporated, sold his Wetworks property to Jim Lee, who continued to publish it as an Image title.

Marder noted that "Mike Turner worked his ass off on Witchblade and they gave him Fathom." In other words, Top Cow agreed to publish Turner's creator-owned Fathom title as a reward for his work-for-hire performance on Witchblade. (Unfortunately, Turner's already snail-like pace on Fathom has been further delayed by his recent hospitalization for emergency reconstructive hip surgery.)

The Image Deal

What kind of deal does Image offer creators? According to Marder, "Image is an alternative to the big companies. If you go almost anywhere else, people will want to own your film negatives and your movie rights."

Image asks to own nothing. The creator risks only the time and labor it takes to generate the pencilled, inked and lettered content of a book without any advance payments. Image then provides what amounts to an interest-free loan for soliciting, coloring and printing the title. The company's contract with Diamond Comic Distributors ensures that solicitations for titles published through Image will get a prime space near the front of Diamond's catalog. Once the orders come in, Image repays itself the cost of the book's production. Initially, the company also charged a percentage of a book's profits after cost, but Marder did away with that after he took over as executive director. "I didn't like the fact that if a book was a success, Image was sucking off that success," he said. Marder also discontinued Image's early practice of representing foreign rights for titles it published.

Although this apparent zero-sum proposition means Image can make no profit as such, the company could lose money if a title fails to make back its printing costs and a creator is unable to pay what is owed. Marder admitted, "From time to time, I would carry worthy books that couldn't make back their costs. I'm not sure if the partners knew who I was carrying or by how much."

Nevertheless, Image is not a charitable foundation. The flat rate it charges to recoup its production costs includes all the salaries and administrative costs that allow it to continue operating, which means that publishing through Image genrerally costs a creator more than self-publishing. A self-publisher without benefit of the Image connection, however, is not likely to have access to up-front credit from printers or up-front catalog placement by Diamond.

In the past four years, Jinx-creator Brian Bendis has had every sort of relationship with Image short of a full partnership. He has published his own titles through Valentino's nonline, becoming one of the few to survive at Image after the breakup of the nonline, and has produced stories for Todd McFarlane on a work-for-hire basis. In every instance, his working relationship has been satisfactory, he told the Journal. "It was a healthy place for my book to be," he said. "I'll take a flat rate charge any day. Once you pay the nut, it's all yours. All I require is that you do everything you say you're going to do, and at Image, they always do a little more in terms of promotion and other things."

As for Todd McFarlane Productions, "Working for Todd is not working for Image," he said, "but it's a good work-for-hire situation. It's very creator-friendly."

Jeff Smith's experience at Image, however, was one he decided to cut short. He found that the fixed production costs through Image were greater than the cost of publishing himself through Cartoon Books. "Jeff made it clear that he wasn't going to be around for the long term," Marder said. "He felt it was going to be a rocky road out there for a while and wanted a safe place to publish. Also, I think he anticipated the Bone movie was going to have moved along at a faster clip and his infrastructure in Columbus was going to be otherwise occupied. To me it was a good thing that he came in and got out with no real horror stories about getting involved with Image."

Rich Koslowski told the Journal his experience publishing Geeksville through Image has been a positive one, with the expanded readership due to his association with the Image banner more than making up for additional costs.

Steve Conley said he is pleased with his arrangement with Image, but noted that his Astounding Space Thrills was unusual in that it had built up a readership, as well as income, via the Internet prior to publishing through Image.

According to Liefeld, it isn't just altruism or a search for quality work that motivates Image's recruitment of a steady stream of small publishers. Image must publish and sell a certain volume of books in order to keep its position in the Diamond catalog, he said. Neither Image nor Diamond will reveal details of Diamond's exclusive distribution contract with Image, and both Marder and Valentino deny that there is any such provision, but according to Liefeld, "It absolutely exists. Their position in the catalog is based on maintenance of a marketshare percentage."

McFarlane scoffs at the idea that Liefeld, who often slept through Image business meetings, would have any idea of the details of its contract with Diamond.

Even if its contract with Diamond forces it to value quantity of titles over quality, Liefeld admitted that Image is a good place -- maybe the best place -- for a creator to take a book. "Image still lives up to its offer of freedom to a lot of creators," he said. "I can't match their deal. The Image deal is probably the best creator-owned deal in comics."

According to Marder, "We do have a system that will allow you to do your own books. Images exists for creators to be able to do that, which makes it an important entity in the marketplace."

Image in Decline

Nevertheless, the heyday of Image's first years has passed. None of its current titles come close to the sales levels of its early issues. "Image has the same problem as everybody else," Marder said: "a dwindling consumer base in conjunction with declining sales outlets. Now, the decline in sales outlets has been stopped by retailers finding other things to sell than comics. The problem is the stores that have leveled off seem to have the ability to sell less and less new comics. It's increasingly hard to find people to sell comics to."

Does Marder see any way around the problem? "I don't believe the [comics-shop] direct market is the only way, but it's the only way right now," he said. "It always seems that bookstores and newsstand distribution should be doing better for comics, but they have their own problems. It's a general crisis in newsstand print in America. Comics are the canary bird in the coal mine of the industry. Other areas have also been hit. There is a serious decline in the sales of chewing gum. Where did all the 8-year-old girls go in the Barbie market? Comics lost the kid customer a long time ago and never realized they were gone. If they had realized it, why would they still be putting out summer annuals? Now a comics connoisseur begins reading as a young adult, and they're not nec-essarily geared to going to the comics store every week. At Nickelodeon, comics are the most popular part of their magazine, but every time they try to put out comics on their own, they tank."

Did Marder leave Image to work for McFarlane out of a loss of faith in the comics industry? "My role had changed to that of a publisher -- finding talent and publishing them," he said. "I realized that this wasn't what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. My real skills had always been in getting people who were located far apart to work smoothly together. My long-term interests have increasingly moved toward branding and worldwide marketing. Image was always a difficult brand to sell. Brand identity got away from us as each studio promoted its own brands more and more and as people came in from the outside."

Image: Pass or Fail?

Which brings us to the question that must finally be asked: Was Image a failure? "I don't see how you could leave Marvel Comics and end up with a 10 percent market share and call that a failure," Marder said. As a measure of Image's continuing success he pointed to the fact that Image "was there for Mike Wieringo to create and publish Telos."

Certainly, Image would seem to have been an unqualified success for people like Larry Stroman, who were able to get in and out of the company at the right time. According to Liefeld, Stroman made a million dollars by publishing a single issue of The Tribe at the peak of Image's popularity. When his next issue fell too far behind for even the chronically late Image partners to tolerate, they voted to drop the title. Valentino asserts that there has never been a split vote in the history of Image, and this vote was no exception, but only because Larsen, who wanted to keep Stroman on, was unable to attend. In any case, it may have been the best thing that could have happened to Stroman, who left with his million intact.

Image a failure? "We are the biggest independent comics company in the history of comics," said McFarlane. "How is that a failure?"

McFarlane, of course, is speaking from the top of a huge toy empire. "The empire is just a bonus," he said. "If all I had was my own comic to draw, I'd still be happy. I think people don't realize how much of a love I really have for comics. There was a sense of community in the old days. Even The Comics Journal used to have it. But I don't get that any more. We're a dysfunctional family and that bugs me. The system itself fell apart because nobody kept their eye on the ball. Short-term thinking is the demise of everything, and we're all part of the problem. I can kick and scream all I want, but one lone voice is not going to save this community."

McFarlane's wistful nostalgia for the comics community, however, comes and goes as he speaks. The story he wants to tell is, in the final analysis, not the Story of Comics but the Story of Todd McFarlane. "The comic-book world could blow up tomorrow," he told the Journal. "I'm taken care of. The guy you got to worry about the least is Todd McFarlane. I'm bulletproof. I will make no apologies for anything Image has done. I left Marvel to be free. Eight years later, is Todd free? You're fucking right he is. I can't even envision the day when I would go back to the plantation and do Spider-Man or Heroes Reborn. I'm free, goddamn it! I've got everything I want!"

Looking back on his time with Image, Liefeld, the man who brought the partners together in 1991 and was later forced out of the company by those same partners, summed up his feelings: "Given that it's 10 years later nearly, I believe that, in that decade, Image has changed dramatically, but it still offers a good haven for creators, and I will always be proud to have been part of that."

"We said it at our first press conference," said Valentino: "The face of Image may change drastically over time."

Marder: "Is Image what it was when it started? No. Back then it was a tear-down-the-walls motherfucker of a company. But we are living in a different world than we were in 1992. And not just in comics."