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You know what I love about Image Comics? (And I do love Image Comics, like nobody’s business). I love that you can buy a comic – any comic – and you get it all in that one book. If you buy the new Youngblood, out this month, you don’t need to buy Dynamo 5 or Godland or Spawn in order to make sense of it all. And there aren’t huge, phony events that promise to “change the universe forever” and tie into every book under the sun and cost a king’s ransom to keep up with. If you want to follow one Image book, all you need to buy is that one title.
And that’s the way we like things.
I’ve worked at comic companies that engaged in all manner of mind-numbingly stupid crossover events and I’ve had to interrupt what I had planned and put it aside in order to accommodate these abominations. The comics that resulted were not pretty.
The truth is that comics – or anything – created by committee, are more often than not, pretty darned awful. You get too many cooks in the kitchen and things start getting nasty. You get a whole tangle of suits knocking their heads together in order to maintain the status quo while still presenting readers with the illusion of change. Things get pretty dumb pretty fast. And you know it’s just a matter of time before the latest shocking death of a beloved character is undone as readers are, yet again, shocked to find that everything was not as it appeared. Comic fans can set their watches on who’s going to get bumped off and resurrected.
And I don’t know about you, but I’m a little bored by it all.
The truth of the matter is, I’m far more interested in reading books by creators who are telling their own stories without taking dictation from some bigwig with a master plan. I like the fact guys at Image can spin their own yarns without feeling that some successive creative team will come along later to undo everything they did.
And it’s nice to be able to drop into a world for an issue or two without feeling pressured to fork out upwards of a hundred bucks in order to get the rest of the story.
These over-hyped, over-sold extravaganzas almost always disappoint. Heck, anyone who sat through the Star Wars Prequels can tell you that. The original Star Wars? Perfect example of a creator telling the story he wanted to tell, without piling on the hype and giving his audience the old hard-sell. Fans of those original movies were buying into the story, not the marketing plan – and everyone was better for it.
I just want to read a comic book, darn it – I wasn’t looking to make a year-long commitment to some disjointed, unwieldy, overpriced, over-hyped crossover event that leads into yet another disjointed, unwieldy, overpriced, over-hyped crossover event.
Maybe it’s just me.
- Erik Larsen
