Robert Kirkman's Secret History of Comics (2017) s01e06 Episode Script
Image Comics' Declaration of Independents
[Robert Kirkman.]
For half a century of comics, there were only two shops in town, Marvel and DC, and if you weren't working for one of those, you just weren't working.
[Todd McFarlane.]
I went in on day one hoping I'd work for Marvel for 25 years.
I just found out that I wasn't wired that way.
At some point, you have to just say "no.
" [Kevin Smith.]
A bunch of Marvel artists who were, like, "Not for nothing, but we think we could do this on our own.
" We didn't know what we were doing exactly, but we knew it was time for a change.
None of us knew how this was gonna work, or if it was gonna work.
[Jim Valentino.]
I said, "Remember that avalanche we've been talking about all summer? I think it just became an atomic bomb.
" [Smith.]
It was crazy.
It was a mini revolution.
It was like that "I don't give a [bleep.]
" attitude that kind of, I think, spoke to me.
They were balls-to-the-wall with it.
[laughs.]
[Kirkman.]
And out of this crazy experiment came some of the biggest titles in the last 25 years but what these guys didn't realize is that what they were doing selfishly would actually go on to change the industry forever.
[title music.]
[music.]
[Kirkman.]
When I was 12 years old, I'm reading comics all hours of the day.
Comics were hugely important to me.
I start noticing these names in the books.
There are artists behind these books and they're all super talented, and I gotta follow these guys.
Late '80s, early '90s, man, it was the artists' medium, and artists ruled the roost, and all the best artists were collected at Marvel.
[Kirkman.]
You got your Marc Silvestri, your Erik Larsen, Jim Valentino but there were three undeniable superstars at the time, Rob Liefeld, Todd McFarlane, and Jim Lee.
Those three guys were drawing comics unlike they'd been drawn up until that point, making the page-turns so much more exciting as you would go through these books.
[Liefeld.]
We broke the mould of very static storytelling.
I remember the day that I heard "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana, and the strum of the guitar and the entire sound of that song, and how different it was, and powerful and commanding.
That's what we were doing on the page.
We had a very new sound in comics.
I was a huge Marvel fan growing up, and so that was my dream, to work at Marvel and to work on the X-Men.
You have to figure out how to get people to see you, and the way to do it is style.
Look at how Todd McFarlane can draw Spider-Man in this completely dynamic way that nobody else has before, and you're talking about a character that had been around for decades.
Suddenly, Todd McFarlane was putting his knees over his ears Spider-Man's, not Todd McFarlane's, and it was dynamic.
McFarlane, Liefeld, and Lee were really coming up strong.
Their work was being recognized, and they were very important to the company.
They sold a lot of books.
[bell clanging.]
[reporter.]
Most days at the New York Stock Exchange, the joint is jumping.
Marvel Comics has enjoyed some pretty heroic sales of late, an average of 8.
7 million comics a month.
[Eric Stephenson.]
Todd had just relaunched Spider-Man, one of the best-selling comics of all time.
Jim Lee had just done X-Men, which, I think, is the best-selling comic book of all time.
Rob had relaunched X-Force.
We'd had the greatest financial success and the greatest unit sales in the history of comics.
I don't think that will ever be broken.
If one's goal is to break into one of the top two comic book companies and work on the book that you loved as a kid, it felt pretty good.
[chuckles.]
It felt like it was a pretty big achievement.
I'd always wanted to work for Marvel Comics, since I was a kid buying their books from the liquor store.
I never took it for granted.
Every day was exciting.
I went in on day one hoping I'd work for Marvel for 25 years.
I just found out that I wasn't wired that way.
[Stan Lee.]
I think that everybody watching now knows why we call this series "A Visit with the Comic Book Greats.
" [Kirkman.]
The problem with comics at the time is that DC and Marvel kind of had a monopoly on what creators could do.
If you didn't want to work at Marvel anymore, you could kind of cross the street and go work at DC, but if you didn't want to work with either of them, there weren't really a lot of options for you.
[Liefeld.]
I created characters for Marvel, like Deadpool, Cable, X-Force that are still going strong today.
You know when you're in the zone.
I was in the zone, but suddenly I was hearing from Marvel, you know, "Well, maybe we should go this way or that way.
" I'm like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa.
Wait, wait, wait.
No, now I'm not driving the car anymore?" You know, there's nobody that's that's indispensable.
They can't be.
The characters are the most indispensable part.
That's what the business was built on.
So the book I'm doing is now selling more than any book in the country.
When I first walked in the office, years ago, when it wasn't in the top 20, they're going, "Help us!" And then I take it to the top, I set records, and now they're going, "We'll take over now, Todd," and "Because it's too popular.
" In my world, the characters had to come first, and, you know, Spider-Man has to do certain things and he can't do certain things.
[TV series anthem.]
We used to tell advertisers and merchandisers that "Spider-Man will never disappoint you.
He'll always do what he's supposed to do.
" So you go, "I don't think this elevator goes any higher here.
I've reached the top of my opportunities here.
" I had read the stories, and the one that had the biggest impact was that they had taken advantage of Jack Kirby.
Jack "The King" Kirby, that was his nickname, ladies and gentlemen.
[Jim Lee.]
Jack Kirby actually co-created 90% of the Marvel universe.
We don't want to be the ones that create a kingdom of characters and then feel unhappy with the way we were treated.
[McFarlane.]
I was on the phone with both Erik, but mostly Rob Liefeld, a lot.
Todd told me once, "Ugh, you're calling me again? You call me more than my mother," and I was like, "Uh, I don't know how to take that, but I'm just going to keep talking.
" The germ of the idea was as simple as Rob just wanted to do his own stuff any way he saw fit.
Same with Erik, same with myself.
I decided I was going to publish my own comic, and it was called The Executioners.
I had a big emphasis on the "X" in "Executioners.
" [Kirkman.]
He'd taken out a one-page ad in the Comics Buyer's Guide.
It was just a bunch of characters that he had come up with.
I was so excited! I wrote my check.
I bought my ad.
I'm gonna get a full-page foldout ad in the Comics Buyer's Guide, which, The Comics Buyer's Guide was a huge weekly comic book newspaper.
And Marvel flipped out.
They were giving him angry phone calls, and, at that point it was sort of blood in the water, you know? We could see, like, "Oh, these guys are these guys are scared," and that, probably more than anything, was the genesis of Image Comics.
[music.]
[Dave Olbrich.]
The whisper mill of the comic book community was a very strong and powerful thing.
Rob was on the phone all the time with Todd, and Rob was on the phone with Erik.
Something big was going to happen, but he couldn't talk about it and didn't really know what shape it was going to take.
We talked about launching a label, and I said, "I'm ready to go.
I'm ready to do this now.
" We're going to get together, Erik, Rob, Todd, and we're gonna have our books.
Now, Rob says, "Hey, I've got a buddy, Jim Valentino.
Is it okay if he comes along for the ride?" Sure, what the heck? We've got four.
The more the merrier to me.
- We're now a boy band.
- Todd took over, and I asked him, I said, "Are you really gonna do this?" and he said "Yeah," and I said, "Okay, then I'm in.
" Most of us were still working at Marvel Comics, so we didn't talk in the open about this.
Definitely there were secretive conversations.
It was definitely, like, how many guys can we draw into this, and how big can we make this? Now, at this point, we've involved Jim Lee, but he won't commit.
[Jim Lee.]
I'd been at Marvel for about five years.
I got to work on the characters I loved as a kid.
I did very well by them.
- Jim was adored by Marvel.
- We were the bad boys.
Mwah! He was the golden boy.
Nice kid, best art, best-selling book for Marvel.
They expected us to do something stupid, but not Jim, you know? Nobody expected Jim to do it.
Todd McFarlane had suggested we bring Marc Silvestri onboard, and I'm gonna tell you, Marc is the premier illustrator of our generation.
So Todd and I are in New York City, and in the hotel lobby where we were staying, Marc Silvestri's right there.
[McFarlane.]
"Do you have half an hour?" He goes, "Yeah, yeah, yeah.
" It's about 11:30 at night, and I give him the best sales pitch I've ever given.
The way that Todd sells things, and he's a great salesman, is that you just don't want to be left behind.
"Look at these Marvel and DC guys," you know? "Look what they did to Jack Kirby," you know? It was like, "He gets nothing," you know? "He gets nothing! We get nothing! This time, we've got something.
" You know? [laughs.]
It was genius.
I was like, "I'm onboard.
" Rob Liefeld, myself, and Todd, and we were all in New York City because we had some artwork of ours that was being auctioned off at Sotheby's.
And I run into Jim Lee, and Jim goes, "Todd!" He goes, "What are you doing?" I sort of told him what we were doing, and he goes, "Wow.
Let me think about that.
" I appear to be a fairly nondescript person, but there, in my heart, I really like doing things that other people wouldn't try to do.
A few hours later, he phones me up, and he goes, "Todd You mind if You mind if I join?" and I go, "What? We've got the Golden Boy? Yeah, you can come.
" Once Jim made that move, the train was off and running.
- Hey.
- How are you doing? - How's it going, bud? - Hey, what's up? [Liefeld.]
Jim wanted Whilce to join, so everybody just went, "Yeah, sure.
" I get a call from Jim Lee, and he says, "Hey, look, there's something happening, and we'd like you to be part of it, but, uh, I can't tell you about it, but, you know, if you can, think about it.
" [laughs.]
[imitating explosion.]
Four, five, six, seven We just grabbed three X-Men guys.
That was That was the best-selling books at that point.
Wow.
[Liefeld.]
Basically, all of the Spider-Man office and all of the X-Men office is now combining into one new publishing label.
That was exciting.
That was very exciting.
[music.]
[Jim Lee.]
Todd had decided that he wanted to formally inform Marvel that we were leaving, which I didn't understand, but if he was gonna do it, I'm going too.
I'm gonna be part of that ride.
[McFarlane.]
So Jim and I went along.
[elevator whirring.]
Marvel was closed for the day.
I just remember walking through the dark bullpen, and there was Terry's dark room.
That might've been the first time I ever went to his office, maybe the second.
[Liefeld.]
It was supposed just to be us and Terry.
[McFarlane.]
By coincidence, the Editor-in-Chief happened to be going to get a coffee.
"Oh! What are you guys doing here?" I did stumble in, in that I wasn't intentionally going to a meeting.
You know, I just showed up, knocked on the door, and was invited in.
[Stewart.]
They weren't happy.
They really wanted control and a very large percentage of the profits, and basically I said, "That's not gonna happen.
" I'm sure we all have our warped sense of what happened in that meeting.
My memory goes something like this.
"We're here to say we are leaving Marvel Comic Books.
We're just telling you why we're leaving, and if you don't do something, you may have another seven tomorrow.
" Terry's trying to come up with solutions to what he perceived as our discontent, and Todd was having none of it.
[Liefeld.]
Todd told him about how his dad, when he worked at the factory, they gave him a watch.
"They gave my father a watch for his work.
" Like, "We don't even get a watch, not even a watch from Marvel Comics," and I was like, "A watch? What the hell?" I think Jim It was the first time Jim Lee had heard about the watch.
I don't think I said much, other than "That's interesting.
" Was I surprised? Yeah, I was a little shocked.
I had shareholders that would ask me, "What are you gonna do now that you lost your top three artists?" We left the meeting.
Just like a movie, as the elevator doors are closing, Tom DeFalco's on the outside, and his last words to us were, "Hey, if it doesn't work out, you've always got a home!" [imitates doors closing.]
And I remember I looked at Jim, and I just went, "Wow They think we can't do this.
" Marvel Entertainment fell three and a quarter today.
Eight artists are jumping ship for a competitor.
Some investors did the same.
The industry trades were writing Image's obituary from the moment they got the press release announcing its birth.
Marvel and DC, at the time, essentially had a monopoly.
They controlled distribution, they controlled printing, they controlled the retailers to a certain extent, so the idea that another company could be formed that could actually compete with them was absolutely unheard of at the time.
[Liefeld.]
We represented a generational shift.
What united us for several years was the industry rising up against us.
You know, I'll confess.
I didn't think Image Comics was gonna last.
We actually had professionals dissing us publicly.
"Ah, these guys, bunch of losers, bunch of idiots, a bunch of" "So unappreciative.
" None of us knew how this was gonna work, or if it was gonna work.
I had put every dime I had into a down payment on a house.
There was no precedence to speak of.
There was nothing that we could turn to and say, "Well, these guys made it huge.
" It had been quite the opposite.
What I told my wife at the time was I either made the worst mistake I've ever made in my entire life, or I made the best call I've ever made in my entire life, and we're just going to have to wait to see which one it was.
[music.]
[McFarlane.]
February 1st, 1992, our very first meeting.
We were supposed to say, "Here's the book we're gonna do.
" We had to get practical.
Were we confident, cocky, or smug? I would say all the above, if you mixed us all together.
The thing that people should be aware of is there was no group-think going into this.
We only had two rules and the first rule that was that Image Comics Incorporated would own nothing, ever.
The other rule was that we would never get in one another's way, - as far as business went.
- Everybody had a different agenda.
Todd was out to make an anti-Marvel statement, but I just wanted the freedom to do whatever I wanted.
None of us considered this might be a problem down the road.
The book that I launched Image with was called Youngblood.
Youngblood is a celebrity-focused superhero team.
My first book at Image was called WildC.
A.
T.
s, Covert Action Teams, a group of espionage agents that were after superpower villains.
I created Spawn, the character that today, I still do.
Spawn is a man who's died.
He's back, but it's five years later.
[Larsen.]
Savage Dragon was this super-powered police officer.
He was just a guy who kicked ass.
That's all I wanted.
My book for Image was Cyber Force, mutants with cybernetic enhancements.
It You know, it was my X-Men.
[Valentino.]
I did a book called Shadowhawk.
I've never bought into the "superheroes don't kill" idea.
Well, he didn't kill.
He he maimed.
[laughs.]
The first Image comic book to be published was Youngblood, and as I sent it off to the printer, there was a lot of buzz building, and we had no idea where it was gonna end up.
[music.]
[reporter.]
This may look like any other Hollywood premiere, but this one is unusual even by Hollywood standards.
It's for the hippest new comic book, Youngblood.
Observers say it could be the next Superman or Spider-Man comic.
Youngblood definitely changed everything.
We knew it was gonna work.
We didn't know it was gonna "really work.
" Then Spawn comes out Bam! Even more sales.
Then Dragon comes out, does tremendous.
Then WildC.
A.
T.
s comes out, almost as much as Spawn.
I mean, it was just hit after hit after hit.
[laughing.]
[music.]
I remember when Spawn came out, and that was just That was a jawbreaker for me.
It felt like, you know, Wu Tang Clan came out at that time, too, and they came out with that gnarly-ass video where they didn't have pupils in their eyes.
It was just a vibe, you know? They really were able to capture, I think, the '90s really well, for me, as a teenager, 'cause I was kind of dark.
[laughs.]
Everything that was coming out of Image that first, I'll say, six months or a year, phenomenal! For 13-year-olds like me, the news that all those guys were jumping ship at Marvel and forming their own company and creating new characters was super exciting.
- But you've read comics? - I loved comics when I was young.
- Oh, cool, okay.
- But this one is so different.
I'm seeing cats get out of bed with women? - That never happens.
- Hey Yeah, well [cheering.]
The seismic impact that it had It affected everyone.
It was impossible not to see how suddenly, how overnight, there was this major player, and it was like the inmates had taken over the asylum for a little bit.
One of our focuses was on production.
We were going to make the books look as good as we could possibly make them.
[Portacio.]
Jim's manager at the time said, "I'm gonna bring in some Mac computers.
" - "Cool!" - "And we're gonna do this PhotoShop thing.
- Whilce, can you learn it?" - "Yeah!" So if you look around this store, you'll see that all these comics are colored digitally.
That had never been done prior to Image Comics.
[Jim Lee.]
We printed our comics on better paper, so the actual comic books themselves looked better, felt better.
Some of that was just creative ego, frankly.
They wanted their books to be the best.
[Liefeld.]
In August of 1992, Image Comics became the number-two comic company.
We became the number-two comic company with seven comics.
DC, with their 60 comics that month, was number three.
[Silvestri.]
We were in Wall Street Journal, we were in magazines.
We had our own tent at Chicago Comic-Con.
That's when we all kind of went, "Really? This is kind of crazy.
Kind of cool, but kind of crazy.
" [Liefeld.]
The fun we were having was ridiculous.
We had three of the biggest creators in comics, ever, and the fans could start at ground zero, which was a big thing.
Within Image Comics, we each created our own separate studios.
My studio was Extreme Studios.
Jim's was WildStorm, and then later on, Marc would create Top Cow.
We went after some of the most talented guys in the business, and I'd say, "So, what are you getting a page? You getting $30 a page? I'll pay you $300.
" It ended the discussion.
This becomes the moment, too, where "be careful what you wish for.
" It's great making the toys that you want so great, I made some for myself! Spawn, from Todd Toys.
[Liefeld.]
With the success that we were experiencing, I was able to do some creative things For instance, go off and get one of the top special effects prosthetics designers in the business to create a seven-foot Badrock costume.
And then, like, "Well, what are you gonna do next?" "Make a spaceship.
" We decided, okay, well, Todd's got the Spawnmobile, he's got Spawn Alley, well, we're gonna do the Youngblood Battle Cruiser.
Fans would be able to go in, sit in it, they could pose and have pictures taken in it.
It was awesome, but they never factored in how much it would cost to actually break it down and ship it to the next convention.
You had to store the thing, you had to set the thing up, you had to cart the thing around it did nothing but cost money.
I sold it for virtually pennies on the dollar to a paintball park here in Southern California, but I was just happy to get rid of it.
That's when you have too much money.
[music.]
We were just these renegade punk kids who were going off and doing their own stuff, and there was criticism of it because not everything that came about was completely awesome right out of the gate.
[Kurt Busiek.]
There were books that seemed to be empty and flashy, there were books that had a lot of possibility to them The one thing that they had that clearly was an appeal was the artwork.
Whether the stories were good or not didn't seem to be a make-or-break factor.
We were novices as writers, and we come out of the gate with badly written books.
Okay, I'll concede it.
And we crushed it sales-wise.
Why? Because they liked our art, and you know who that bugged the most? The writers! Image was playing to the era and its strengths.
The men looked like they could kill you with a pinkie, and the women looked like they suffered chronic back pain.
The breasts on some of them were of terrifying dimension.
I mean, the joke is "pouches.
" Everybody had 90 different thigh straps full of I don't know what they carried in there, - like, lip balm, maybe? - Yes, the work was juvenile, and, yes, the work was aimed at 14-year-old boys, but I was a 14-year-old boy, and 95% of the audience, if not more at that point, was 14-year-old boys.
I was a girl, and I still loved Image Comics.
It was like that "I don't give a [bleep.]
" attitude that kind of, I think, spoke to me.
I never really cared what people thought.
I was just happy that Image Comics existed, because it had a voice that I resonated with.
[music.]
[reporter.]
People at this convention in San Diego, California know something many of us don't.
Over the past 10 years, some of the most popular comics have become hot investments.
I don't buy expensive books.
I buy ones I think will become expensive.
By the time I retire, I'll liquidate everything and retire comfortably.
[Silvestri.]
A lot of Image Comics and a lot of comics in general back then was fueled by the speculator market and we knew that.
I remember having this conversation with Jim Lee about "how long do you think this is gonna last?" [Valentino.]
Speculators were buying comics in droves, just people were filling up basements with boxes of comics that they thought were gonna put their kids through college.
You could sell a million copies of a comic book just by showing people a cool-ass cover and saying it had "number one" on it.
You know how many alternate Spider-Man "number one" covers I got, man? It's crazy.
I've got the platinum one, the holographic-type paper one I've got the one with the card in it.
I've got the one with the certificate in the back.
These are two separate posters, the same book, - but different editions of the same book.
- Right.
Image Image was part of it.
As an entire industry, we took advantage of our consumer.
You never, ever want to do that.
Why? They will they will just leave you.
[music.]
By the mid '90s, sales were down across the board, including at Image, but they were still a major presence in the industry, but readers had no idea what was going on behind the scenes.
[Liefeld.]
Image Comics was born of rivalries.
Rivalries are great.
They drive people.
I would say that the six of us were closer to being brothers.
You're always in competition with your brother.
[Silvestri.]
If we were guilty of anything back in the early days of Image, it was hubris.
Marvel and DC weren't really our concern, because people were gonna buy Marvel books and they were gonna buy DC books.
So who was gonna be our competition? - My partner is my competition.
- It was like frat houses Fighting each other over ideas, over people.
Who gets the new hot kid that now walks into the studio? And if I do have a hot kid that I nurture, and you then give him more money than I'm giving him, should we be doing that to each other? Giving people that freedom, I think, was part of Image.
It's, like, that's what we wanted.
The autonomy that we had set up was also beginning to be the source of all of our tensions.
[Liefeld.]
In 1996, Jim Lee and myself were contacted by Marvel Comics to come back and bolster some of their classic characters who had fallen on hard sales times.
[Jim Lee.]
They said, "Look, these characters are suffering.
We want your help in sort of restoring some shine to the characters.
" I thought it was a big win and a cool opportunity.
These were characters I hadn't really worked on while I was at Marvel.
[Silvestri.]
You know, that was when as opposed to the early days of Image, people needed money.
Marvel came and basically cash-whipped Jim Lee and Rob And it's just, like, now it's just about the cash! Like, oh, my gosh, now we're administering even more, because now it's like I can be bought.
When the news of Heroes Reborn reached the other partners, they were very upset.
It was the first time things were getting openly ugly, and you're like, "Oh, we're not being polite to each other anymore.
This is These guys are pissed.
" [Liefeld.]
I sat next to Todd on a panel when all the questions for Jim and I that summer were about our deal with Marvel.
He lost his cool.
He yelled at the fans.
"This is for Image! There will be a panel later where you can talk to them about Marvel!" This was getting to the point where it just it wasn't fun at all.
Under the Image Comics deal, I owned all the books that I created, so I began to publish them under another company I created called Maximum Press.
[Mychaels.]
The other owners were not happy about that, because they actually saw that as competition to Image.
Todd sent me a letter that said, "If you do not bring these books back from Maximum Press, we are going to take legal action against you," and I responded with, "I don't care.
I'm not bringing them back.
" Our pages are actually 10 by 15, which is about the size of Rob's ego.
[Larsen.]
There did get to be certain arguments that had taken place with Rob Liefeld.
There ended up being enough points of friction that Marc Silvestri was like, "Look, if this guy's gonna be here, I got to go.
" Extreme Studios went after one of Marc's top guys, and Marc had had it.
You know, at that point, it was, like, "What are we doing here? This is insanity.
" I just couldn't live in that environment anymore.
I got a letter pushed under my door by the publisher of Image Comics that Marc has resigned.
Now, I'm not stupid.
I knew that that was ramping up hostilities, and but I-I got to tell you, I didn't care.
[Silvestri.]
Todd called me, and we talked and I said, "I can't deal with the B.
S.
anymore.
" And I go, "What if you're not the one that goes?" [Liefeld.]
We were gonna meet in a suite at the Marriott.
I wanted to do a little espionage.
I bought the room next to the suite, and Matt and I stayed in that suite and literally, we are laying on the floor, looking through the light in the door, but I hear everything.
"I guess Rob's not coming.
" They all kept waiting for me to come into the room, but I thought this would be an honest assessment, you know, and I hear Todd and Marc and Jim and Erik and Jim Lee discuss me.
Valentino is reluctant, Erik Larsen's pissed off at me, Todd's like, "We've got to do what we've got to do," Jim Lee is quiet, and I was like, "Yeah, we're done.
" Right before we were going to vote him out, Rob faxed in his resignation.
[Kirkman.]
When the news broke that Rob was leaving Image Comics, it was like the Beatles breaking up.
You really got a sense that they were all the best of friends, and, you know, this was kind of the first indication that that wasn't true.
It was kind of heartbreaking.
[Jim Lee.]
I don't think any of those decisions were made lightly by any of us, and, actually, he and Todd were super close as friends, and I'm sure that impacted their friendship for a bit, and it impacted my relationship with Rob.
I didn't talk to him for years after that.
[McFarlane.]
I'm not proud of that moment in our history.
We had success hard and fast.
The money came, you know It was just It was overwhelming.
[reporter.]
The sales slump which threatens to engulf the comic world could be the one enemy its superheroes cannot defeat.
Since peaking in the early 1990s, over half of America's comic shops have gone out of business.
About 1995, the speculator boom crashed, as they do.
When the guys who were planning to cash in went into their local comic book store and tried to cash in, found out their store was gonna give them 10 cents on the dollar, then the bottom fell out.
[Silvestri.]
Every year, the numbers were falling.
Every month, the numbers were falling.
Every week, sometimes, numbers were falling, and nobody could really stop it.
The business was seemingly kind of falling apart around us, and also, I was just burned out.
That kind of got me thinking about what it would be like if I took WildStorm and partnered with a bigger company.
Jim Lee took his company, WildStorm, to DC Comics and sold it, and eventually became an executive there.
[Portacio.]
That was a shock.
When Jim sold to DC, that was a shock.
Rob's leaving, I think, just leaves a bitter taste, but Jim Lee was a bigger punch.
[Silvestri.]
You know, Jim was Jim.
WildStorm was a massive studio.
They were our largest market share within Image.
It was a big blow to us.
We were worried for a minute, you know, would we survive? and I think a lot of us got kind of scared.
[music.]
[Stephenson.]
I think Image floundered for a bit at the end of the '90s and into the early 2000s.
Jim Lee leaving sort of forced us to take on books that we normally wouldn't.
We had lost some of the business dealings with our distributor, so we needed to get our market share back up.
At first, we were taking on stuff that we weren't overly proud of [Valentino.]
I volunteered to take over.
My idea was to get rid of all the books, the ones that I just thought brought the company down, and I told the guys, "We can do better than this.
" We started thinking in terms of "we need to diversify.
" You know, there's a market that's not being catered to out there.
It's the "indie market.
" Image started to take a lot of chances artistically.
It wasn't always superheroes.
They were starting to find new genres and new ways to go.
[McFarlane.]
One of the guys that walked in the door - was a guy named Robert Kirkman.
- At that point in my career, I had never done anything at all that was successful, and I wanted to do a zombie comic, because I had been watching tons of George Romero movies and I'd fallen in love with that genre, and I was like, "Ah, there's so much more you can do with this genre that hasn't really been explored.
" He pitched what he called "Planet of the Zombies" to me, and I was like, "Oh, Robert, that's just horrible.
" You know, and I said, "Look, zombie books have never, ever sold in this business.
I know their movies do okay, and I know they're a niche thing and all that" Jim was basically turning down the book, and he said, "Unless you can tell me how this is different from every zombie book that's ever been done, there's no reason to do it.
" There just was nothing that would've given you the idea that, like, "Oh, we should do this book because it's going to be a huge success," especially from somebody who had, you know, not a great track record up to that point.
And so, in the moment, I just go, "Well, you know, there's, it's, I I didn't put it in the pitch, 'cause, you know, I wanted to surprise you guys, but the whole thing, it's an alien invasion.
There's spaceships, and they've created the zombies, and they're trying to weaken the world's infrastructure so that they can take over," and I would later find out that that is apparently the plot from Plan 9 from Outer Space.
I didn't know that at the time, and they didn't know that at the time, but they're like, "Yeah, no, that's cool, that's yeah! Hey, that's the hook we're looking for.
Yeah, it's a good-looking book.
" Done.
Accepted.
[Stephenson.]
The book's doing great, and I'm loving it.
I'm reading every issue and, at some point, I say, "Robert," you know, "You said you were salting in all of this stuff about the alien invasion.
Like, can you, like, point out any of those things?" So I just said, "Eric, I lied to you.
There's no aliens in this book," and he goes, "Oh, okay Meh.
Probably better for it.
" [laughing.]
[music.]
[Larsen.]
Walking Dead has been a runaway success.
I mean, that comic book started off with low numbers and just kept building and building and building ever since then.
There was really no no stopping it.
[Kirkman.]
Spawn was always the number-one book, and then Walking Dead kind of was getting there, and I was like, "Oh, my god, is this gonna happen? Like, I don't know what's gonna happen," and then, all of a sudden, there was one month where it was like, boop boop boop.
You know? And it kinda like and then it and it kept going, and I was like, "I can't believe it.
I can't believe that Walking Dead is outselling Spawn now.
This is crazy.
" It became Image's best-selling book in probably a decade.
I don't think you can overstate the importance of the Walking Dead.
I think that it revitalized us, and it's not just the book on its own, but I think what it said about Image.
[McFarlane.]
So then Robert Kirkman becomes a partner of Image Comic Books.
We needed to show that we were willing to add to our ranks of partnership, if you were loyal to us, and you didn't have to be an artist.
Becoming a partner at Image Comics is probably you know, aside from my children being born and meeting my wife, like, the best thing that ever happened to me.
The Walking Dead show is nice, and it does very well, and I'm very proud of it, but I had dreams as a child of being at an Image Comics meeting, and then I became an Image partner, you know, as an adult, which is the stupidest thing in the world.
[crowd cheering.]
I have to tell everyone in the audience right now, I love the gentlemen on this couch.
They were the most arrogant, reckless maniacs, who decided that they were gonna start their own company, and they were gonna build it all around themselves, and they were gonna do whatever they wanted, and for whatever reason, they were like, "You know what? Let's build a company for all creators.
Let's make the deal [cheering.]
that we create for ourselves that is the absolute best deal in comics and let's make it available to everyone.
" My kids now have the opportunity to grow up and be completely pampered, and that is because of you guys.
[applause.]
Everything was going great, I couldn't be more excited, but there was one thing that just wasn't sitting right with me that I felt needed to be fixed.
[music.]
[Greg Rucka.]
Comics aren't a genre.
Comics are a medium.
One of the things that Image has done, I think, spectacularly well in the last half-dozen years is demonstrate the strength of the medium.
I think for me, their legacy was balls.
In American culture, "to have balls" means that you don't care what people think and that you are willing to express in all honesty whatever it is that's on your mind, and I think if there's any legacy for Image, it'll be that, that they were balls-to-the-wall with it.
What they did for the business for comics, how they disrupted the way things had always been and who got to make the rules was nothing short of revolutionary.
One of the things that Image brings is a creator ownership deal that is, in my opinion, right and fair and proper.
They keep the other publishers honest.
Everyone's page rates went up, and then exclusive contracts happened, so now freelancers had security and stability in their income.
[Kirkman.]
The success of Walking Dead took everyone by surprise, myself included, and it made people think, like, if a weird black-and-white zombie book can find success, the sky is the limit.
There are a number of titles that have come through Image that could not possibly have existed anywhere else.
[Kirkman.]
Image Comics publishes Saga, which is a romance story set in a sci-fi universe that is completely adult and has people with TVs for heads, but, you know, rivals Walking Dead in popularity.
It's a massively successful book.
[DeConnick.]
Pretty Deadly is a mythological western.
It is not an obvious commercial success, and they let us do it anyway, which is not capitalism.
[Fraction.]
I did a book called Sex Criminals which literally could not exist anywhere else but Image Comics.
This is the part of the show where, like, you can show different stuff that I've done and just the pages will be completely pixelated and pixelated and pixelated.
Literally, they said I could do all that.
It's ironic that a company that was founded on bulging veins and pouches and ammunition and women as props is now publishing easily the most progressive and politically provocative books on the scenes.
[music.]
I met Robert Kirkman at the 2003 Chicago Comic-Con.
You know, we start talking, next thing I know, he's like, "I gotta come to my room.
You want to come to my room? I got to get something real quick," and we're chatting in his room, and he's like, "I got to go to the bathroom," and he goes to the bathroom and leaves the bathroom door open, and so I'm, you know, a childhood fan of Rob Liefeld, having known Rob Liefeld for an hour.
I'm like, "I can't believe Rob Liefeld is peeing four feet away from me, and then he's like, "Oh, you want to go to the movies?" I'm like, "Yeah, I want to go to the movies with Rob Liefeld.
" Let's do that.
[Liefeld.]
And then we became happy friends for 48 hours.
I think we did dinner.
We did breakfast.
We had another breakfast, another dinner.
We were inseparable.
[Kirkman.]
Rob had just rebooted Youngblood with another publisher.
Youngblood is the first Image comic.
It's the first thing that had the Image "I," and there's a connection between Youngblood and Image that, as a fan, you know, it just irks me a little when there's a Youngblood comic that doesn't have an Image "I" on it.
Robert and I kind of had to sell the other partners on, "Hey, we want Rob to come back again.
" We all kind of go, "You know what? We all did this together.
Whatever the water was that went under that bridge, it is under the bridge, and we did something special together 25 years ago.
" Did it take time to heal? Yeah, sure it did.
Was I hoping that that healing process would eventually come? Sure, 'cause Rob is a good dude.
At his core, he just makes you laugh.
And it was like, "Sure, with open arms.
Come back in.
Publish your books through us.
" You know? It's like a version of the old days, you know? - And it's been great.
- [Liefeld.]
And I'm like, "I can't believe I'm gonna be doing this with Image again.
This is fun," and I remember I called Robert.
- I go, "Is everyone okay?" - "Everyone's okay.
" So here we are, 25 years later, and I am so proud of all that Image Comics has accomplished, and I love these guys.
[Silvestri.]
We've been through a lot, all of us, all the partners.
I don't believe any of us would trade anything, even with headaches, even with disappointments.
That's what we signed up for 25 years ago.
[McFarlane.]
I'm now got gray hair and I'm a little bit older.
I went from being the cool brother to, like, that fun uncle, to, like, now I'm just, like, that dad, and pretty soon I'll be, like, "Grandpa.
" "Oh, yeah, that's right, he's the guy that sorta started it.
" I could get hit by a bus tomorrow, and it won't really matter.
Image is here.
[Larsen.]
If it all went away tomorrow, to be able to say, "Oh, I only got to do everything I ever wanted to do for 25 years, and that was it" It's, like, that's still a hell of a run, you know? It was an exhilarating time in my life.
We were doing what we wanted and having tremendous success at changing the industry.
I wouldn't trade it for the world.
I know that there's a version somewhere of a guy that did all this and he's bitter.
That's just not me.
There are bands, and you hear the story of how a song came to be, and all that matters in the end isn't how great your guitar riff was and isn't how great your lyrics were.
It's how they work together to create immortality, and that's what Image Comics is.
[title music.]
For half a century of comics, there were only two shops in town, Marvel and DC, and if you weren't working for one of those, you just weren't working.
[Todd McFarlane.]
I went in on day one hoping I'd work for Marvel for 25 years.
I just found out that I wasn't wired that way.
At some point, you have to just say "no.
" [Kevin Smith.]
A bunch of Marvel artists who were, like, "Not for nothing, but we think we could do this on our own.
" We didn't know what we were doing exactly, but we knew it was time for a change.
None of us knew how this was gonna work, or if it was gonna work.
[Jim Valentino.]
I said, "Remember that avalanche we've been talking about all summer? I think it just became an atomic bomb.
" [Smith.]
It was crazy.
It was a mini revolution.
It was like that "I don't give a [bleep.]
" attitude that kind of, I think, spoke to me.
They were balls-to-the-wall with it.
[laughs.]
[Kirkman.]
And out of this crazy experiment came some of the biggest titles in the last 25 years but what these guys didn't realize is that what they were doing selfishly would actually go on to change the industry forever.
[title music.]
[music.]
[Kirkman.]
When I was 12 years old, I'm reading comics all hours of the day.
Comics were hugely important to me.
I start noticing these names in the books.
There are artists behind these books and they're all super talented, and I gotta follow these guys.
Late '80s, early '90s, man, it was the artists' medium, and artists ruled the roost, and all the best artists were collected at Marvel.
[Kirkman.]
You got your Marc Silvestri, your Erik Larsen, Jim Valentino but there were three undeniable superstars at the time, Rob Liefeld, Todd McFarlane, and Jim Lee.
Those three guys were drawing comics unlike they'd been drawn up until that point, making the page-turns so much more exciting as you would go through these books.
[Liefeld.]
We broke the mould of very static storytelling.
I remember the day that I heard "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana, and the strum of the guitar and the entire sound of that song, and how different it was, and powerful and commanding.
That's what we were doing on the page.
We had a very new sound in comics.
I was a huge Marvel fan growing up, and so that was my dream, to work at Marvel and to work on the X-Men.
You have to figure out how to get people to see you, and the way to do it is style.
Look at how Todd McFarlane can draw Spider-Man in this completely dynamic way that nobody else has before, and you're talking about a character that had been around for decades.
Suddenly, Todd McFarlane was putting his knees over his ears Spider-Man's, not Todd McFarlane's, and it was dynamic.
McFarlane, Liefeld, and Lee were really coming up strong.
Their work was being recognized, and they were very important to the company.
They sold a lot of books.
[bell clanging.]
[reporter.]
Most days at the New York Stock Exchange, the joint is jumping.
Marvel Comics has enjoyed some pretty heroic sales of late, an average of 8.
7 million comics a month.
[Eric Stephenson.]
Todd had just relaunched Spider-Man, one of the best-selling comics of all time.
Jim Lee had just done X-Men, which, I think, is the best-selling comic book of all time.
Rob had relaunched X-Force.
We'd had the greatest financial success and the greatest unit sales in the history of comics.
I don't think that will ever be broken.
If one's goal is to break into one of the top two comic book companies and work on the book that you loved as a kid, it felt pretty good.
[chuckles.]
It felt like it was a pretty big achievement.
I'd always wanted to work for Marvel Comics, since I was a kid buying their books from the liquor store.
I never took it for granted.
Every day was exciting.
I went in on day one hoping I'd work for Marvel for 25 years.
I just found out that I wasn't wired that way.
[Stan Lee.]
I think that everybody watching now knows why we call this series "A Visit with the Comic Book Greats.
" [Kirkman.]
The problem with comics at the time is that DC and Marvel kind of had a monopoly on what creators could do.
If you didn't want to work at Marvel anymore, you could kind of cross the street and go work at DC, but if you didn't want to work with either of them, there weren't really a lot of options for you.
[Liefeld.]
I created characters for Marvel, like Deadpool, Cable, X-Force that are still going strong today.
You know when you're in the zone.
I was in the zone, but suddenly I was hearing from Marvel, you know, "Well, maybe we should go this way or that way.
" I'm like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa.
Wait, wait, wait.
No, now I'm not driving the car anymore?" You know, there's nobody that's that's indispensable.
They can't be.
The characters are the most indispensable part.
That's what the business was built on.
So the book I'm doing is now selling more than any book in the country.
When I first walked in the office, years ago, when it wasn't in the top 20, they're going, "Help us!" And then I take it to the top, I set records, and now they're going, "We'll take over now, Todd," and "Because it's too popular.
" In my world, the characters had to come first, and, you know, Spider-Man has to do certain things and he can't do certain things.
[TV series anthem.]
We used to tell advertisers and merchandisers that "Spider-Man will never disappoint you.
He'll always do what he's supposed to do.
" So you go, "I don't think this elevator goes any higher here.
I've reached the top of my opportunities here.
" I had read the stories, and the one that had the biggest impact was that they had taken advantage of Jack Kirby.
Jack "The King" Kirby, that was his nickname, ladies and gentlemen.
[Jim Lee.]
Jack Kirby actually co-created 90% of the Marvel universe.
We don't want to be the ones that create a kingdom of characters and then feel unhappy with the way we were treated.
[McFarlane.]
I was on the phone with both Erik, but mostly Rob Liefeld, a lot.
Todd told me once, "Ugh, you're calling me again? You call me more than my mother," and I was like, "Uh, I don't know how to take that, but I'm just going to keep talking.
" The germ of the idea was as simple as Rob just wanted to do his own stuff any way he saw fit.
Same with Erik, same with myself.
I decided I was going to publish my own comic, and it was called The Executioners.
I had a big emphasis on the "X" in "Executioners.
" [Kirkman.]
He'd taken out a one-page ad in the Comics Buyer's Guide.
It was just a bunch of characters that he had come up with.
I was so excited! I wrote my check.
I bought my ad.
I'm gonna get a full-page foldout ad in the Comics Buyer's Guide, which, The Comics Buyer's Guide was a huge weekly comic book newspaper.
And Marvel flipped out.
They were giving him angry phone calls, and, at that point it was sort of blood in the water, you know? We could see, like, "Oh, these guys are these guys are scared," and that, probably more than anything, was the genesis of Image Comics.
[music.]
[Dave Olbrich.]
The whisper mill of the comic book community was a very strong and powerful thing.
Rob was on the phone all the time with Todd, and Rob was on the phone with Erik.
Something big was going to happen, but he couldn't talk about it and didn't really know what shape it was going to take.
We talked about launching a label, and I said, "I'm ready to go.
I'm ready to do this now.
" We're going to get together, Erik, Rob, Todd, and we're gonna have our books.
Now, Rob says, "Hey, I've got a buddy, Jim Valentino.
Is it okay if he comes along for the ride?" Sure, what the heck? We've got four.
The more the merrier to me.
- We're now a boy band.
- Todd took over, and I asked him, I said, "Are you really gonna do this?" and he said "Yeah," and I said, "Okay, then I'm in.
" Most of us were still working at Marvel Comics, so we didn't talk in the open about this.
Definitely there were secretive conversations.
It was definitely, like, how many guys can we draw into this, and how big can we make this? Now, at this point, we've involved Jim Lee, but he won't commit.
[Jim Lee.]
I'd been at Marvel for about five years.
I got to work on the characters I loved as a kid.
I did very well by them.
- Jim was adored by Marvel.
- We were the bad boys.
Mwah! He was the golden boy.
Nice kid, best art, best-selling book for Marvel.
They expected us to do something stupid, but not Jim, you know? Nobody expected Jim to do it.
Todd McFarlane had suggested we bring Marc Silvestri onboard, and I'm gonna tell you, Marc is the premier illustrator of our generation.
So Todd and I are in New York City, and in the hotel lobby where we were staying, Marc Silvestri's right there.
[McFarlane.]
"Do you have half an hour?" He goes, "Yeah, yeah, yeah.
" It's about 11:30 at night, and I give him the best sales pitch I've ever given.
The way that Todd sells things, and he's a great salesman, is that you just don't want to be left behind.
"Look at these Marvel and DC guys," you know? "Look what they did to Jack Kirby," you know? It was like, "He gets nothing," you know? "He gets nothing! We get nothing! This time, we've got something.
" You know? [laughs.]
It was genius.
I was like, "I'm onboard.
" Rob Liefeld, myself, and Todd, and we were all in New York City because we had some artwork of ours that was being auctioned off at Sotheby's.
And I run into Jim Lee, and Jim goes, "Todd!" He goes, "What are you doing?" I sort of told him what we were doing, and he goes, "Wow.
Let me think about that.
" I appear to be a fairly nondescript person, but there, in my heart, I really like doing things that other people wouldn't try to do.
A few hours later, he phones me up, and he goes, "Todd You mind if You mind if I join?" and I go, "What? We've got the Golden Boy? Yeah, you can come.
" Once Jim made that move, the train was off and running.
- Hey.
- How are you doing? - How's it going, bud? - Hey, what's up? [Liefeld.]
Jim wanted Whilce to join, so everybody just went, "Yeah, sure.
" I get a call from Jim Lee, and he says, "Hey, look, there's something happening, and we'd like you to be part of it, but, uh, I can't tell you about it, but, you know, if you can, think about it.
" [laughs.]
[imitating explosion.]
Four, five, six, seven We just grabbed three X-Men guys.
That was That was the best-selling books at that point.
Wow.
[Liefeld.]
Basically, all of the Spider-Man office and all of the X-Men office is now combining into one new publishing label.
That was exciting.
That was very exciting.
[music.]
[Jim Lee.]
Todd had decided that he wanted to formally inform Marvel that we were leaving, which I didn't understand, but if he was gonna do it, I'm going too.
I'm gonna be part of that ride.
[McFarlane.]
So Jim and I went along.
[elevator whirring.]
Marvel was closed for the day.
I just remember walking through the dark bullpen, and there was Terry's dark room.
That might've been the first time I ever went to his office, maybe the second.
[Liefeld.]
It was supposed just to be us and Terry.
[McFarlane.]
By coincidence, the Editor-in-Chief happened to be going to get a coffee.
"Oh! What are you guys doing here?" I did stumble in, in that I wasn't intentionally going to a meeting.
You know, I just showed up, knocked on the door, and was invited in.
[Stewart.]
They weren't happy.
They really wanted control and a very large percentage of the profits, and basically I said, "That's not gonna happen.
" I'm sure we all have our warped sense of what happened in that meeting.
My memory goes something like this.
"We're here to say we are leaving Marvel Comic Books.
We're just telling you why we're leaving, and if you don't do something, you may have another seven tomorrow.
" Terry's trying to come up with solutions to what he perceived as our discontent, and Todd was having none of it.
[Liefeld.]
Todd told him about how his dad, when he worked at the factory, they gave him a watch.
"They gave my father a watch for his work.
" Like, "We don't even get a watch, not even a watch from Marvel Comics," and I was like, "A watch? What the hell?" I think Jim It was the first time Jim Lee had heard about the watch.
I don't think I said much, other than "That's interesting.
" Was I surprised? Yeah, I was a little shocked.
I had shareholders that would ask me, "What are you gonna do now that you lost your top three artists?" We left the meeting.
Just like a movie, as the elevator doors are closing, Tom DeFalco's on the outside, and his last words to us were, "Hey, if it doesn't work out, you've always got a home!" [imitates doors closing.]
And I remember I looked at Jim, and I just went, "Wow They think we can't do this.
" Marvel Entertainment fell three and a quarter today.
Eight artists are jumping ship for a competitor.
Some investors did the same.
The industry trades were writing Image's obituary from the moment they got the press release announcing its birth.
Marvel and DC, at the time, essentially had a monopoly.
They controlled distribution, they controlled printing, they controlled the retailers to a certain extent, so the idea that another company could be formed that could actually compete with them was absolutely unheard of at the time.
[Liefeld.]
We represented a generational shift.
What united us for several years was the industry rising up against us.
You know, I'll confess.
I didn't think Image Comics was gonna last.
We actually had professionals dissing us publicly.
"Ah, these guys, bunch of losers, bunch of idiots, a bunch of" "So unappreciative.
" None of us knew how this was gonna work, or if it was gonna work.
I had put every dime I had into a down payment on a house.
There was no precedence to speak of.
There was nothing that we could turn to and say, "Well, these guys made it huge.
" It had been quite the opposite.
What I told my wife at the time was I either made the worst mistake I've ever made in my entire life, or I made the best call I've ever made in my entire life, and we're just going to have to wait to see which one it was.
[music.]
[McFarlane.]
February 1st, 1992, our very first meeting.
We were supposed to say, "Here's the book we're gonna do.
" We had to get practical.
Were we confident, cocky, or smug? I would say all the above, if you mixed us all together.
The thing that people should be aware of is there was no group-think going into this.
We only had two rules and the first rule that was that Image Comics Incorporated would own nothing, ever.
The other rule was that we would never get in one another's way, - as far as business went.
- Everybody had a different agenda.
Todd was out to make an anti-Marvel statement, but I just wanted the freedom to do whatever I wanted.
None of us considered this might be a problem down the road.
The book that I launched Image with was called Youngblood.
Youngblood is a celebrity-focused superhero team.
My first book at Image was called WildC.
A.
T.
s, Covert Action Teams, a group of espionage agents that were after superpower villains.
I created Spawn, the character that today, I still do.
Spawn is a man who's died.
He's back, but it's five years later.
[Larsen.]
Savage Dragon was this super-powered police officer.
He was just a guy who kicked ass.
That's all I wanted.
My book for Image was Cyber Force, mutants with cybernetic enhancements.
It You know, it was my X-Men.
[Valentino.]
I did a book called Shadowhawk.
I've never bought into the "superheroes don't kill" idea.
Well, he didn't kill.
He he maimed.
[laughs.]
The first Image comic book to be published was Youngblood, and as I sent it off to the printer, there was a lot of buzz building, and we had no idea where it was gonna end up.
[music.]
[reporter.]
This may look like any other Hollywood premiere, but this one is unusual even by Hollywood standards.
It's for the hippest new comic book, Youngblood.
Observers say it could be the next Superman or Spider-Man comic.
Youngblood definitely changed everything.
We knew it was gonna work.
We didn't know it was gonna "really work.
" Then Spawn comes out Bam! Even more sales.
Then Dragon comes out, does tremendous.
Then WildC.
A.
T.
s comes out, almost as much as Spawn.
I mean, it was just hit after hit after hit.
[laughing.]
[music.]
I remember when Spawn came out, and that was just That was a jawbreaker for me.
It felt like, you know, Wu Tang Clan came out at that time, too, and they came out with that gnarly-ass video where they didn't have pupils in their eyes.
It was just a vibe, you know? They really were able to capture, I think, the '90s really well, for me, as a teenager, 'cause I was kind of dark.
[laughs.]
Everything that was coming out of Image that first, I'll say, six months or a year, phenomenal! For 13-year-olds like me, the news that all those guys were jumping ship at Marvel and forming their own company and creating new characters was super exciting.
- But you've read comics? - I loved comics when I was young.
- Oh, cool, okay.
- But this one is so different.
I'm seeing cats get out of bed with women? - That never happens.
- Hey Yeah, well [cheering.]
The seismic impact that it had It affected everyone.
It was impossible not to see how suddenly, how overnight, there was this major player, and it was like the inmates had taken over the asylum for a little bit.
One of our focuses was on production.
We were going to make the books look as good as we could possibly make them.
[Portacio.]
Jim's manager at the time said, "I'm gonna bring in some Mac computers.
" - "Cool!" - "And we're gonna do this PhotoShop thing.
- Whilce, can you learn it?" - "Yeah!" So if you look around this store, you'll see that all these comics are colored digitally.
That had never been done prior to Image Comics.
[Jim Lee.]
We printed our comics on better paper, so the actual comic books themselves looked better, felt better.
Some of that was just creative ego, frankly.
They wanted their books to be the best.
[Liefeld.]
In August of 1992, Image Comics became the number-two comic company.
We became the number-two comic company with seven comics.
DC, with their 60 comics that month, was number three.
[Silvestri.]
We were in Wall Street Journal, we were in magazines.
We had our own tent at Chicago Comic-Con.
That's when we all kind of went, "Really? This is kind of crazy.
Kind of cool, but kind of crazy.
" [Liefeld.]
The fun we were having was ridiculous.
We had three of the biggest creators in comics, ever, and the fans could start at ground zero, which was a big thing.
Within Image Comics, we each created our own separate studios.
My studio was Extreme Studios.
Jim's was WildStorm, and then later on, Marc would create Top Cow.
We went after some of the most talented guys in the business, and I'd say, "So, what are you getting a page? You getting $30 a page? I'll pay you $300.
" It ended the discussion.
This becomes the moment, too, where "be careful what you wish for.
" It's great making the toys that you want so great, I made some for myself! Spawn, from Todd Toys.
[Liefeld.]
With the success that we were experiencing, I was able to do some creative things For instance, go off and get one of the top special effects prosthetics designers in the business to create a seven-foot Badrock costume.
And then, like, "Well, what are you gonna do next?" "Make a spaceship.
" We decided, okay, well, Todd's got the Spawnmobile, he's got Spawn Alley, well, we're gonna do the Youngblood Battle Cruiser.
Fans would be able to go in, sit in it, they could pose and have pictures taken in it.
It was awesome, but they never factored in how much it would cost to actually break it down and ship it to the next convention.
You had to store the thing, you had to set the thing up, you had to cart the thing around it did nothing but cost money.
I sold it for virtually pennies on the dollar to a paintball park here in Southern California, but I was just happy to get rid of it.
That's when you have too much money.
[music.]
We were just these renegade punk kids who were going off and doing their own stuff, and there was criticism of it because not everything that came about was completely awesome right out of the gate.
[Kurt Busiek.]
There were books that seemed to be empty and flashy, there were books that had a lot of possibility to them The one thing that they had that clearly was an appeal was the artwork.
Whether the stories were good or not didn't seem to be a make-or-break factor.
We were novices as writers, and we come out of the gate with badly written books.
Okay, I'll concede it.
And we crushed it sales-wise.
Why? Because they liked our art, and you know who that bugged the most? The writers! Image was playing to the era and its strengths.
The men looked like they could kill you with a pinkie, and the women looked like they suffered chronic back pain.
The breasts on some of them were of terrifying dimension.
I mean, the joke is "pouches.
" Everybody had 90 different thigh straps full of I don't know what they carried in there, - like, lip balm, maybe? - Yes, the work was juvenile, and, yes, the work was aimed at 14-year-old boys, but I was a 14-year-old boy, and 95% of the audience, if not more at that point, was 14-year-old boys.
I was a girl, and I still loved Image Comics.
It was like that "I don't give a [bleep.]
" attitude that kind of, I think, spoke to me.
I never really cared what people thought.
I was just happy that Image Comics existed, because it had a voice that I resonated with.
[music.]
[reporter.]
People at this convention in San Diego, California know something many of us don't.
Over the past 10 years, some of the most popular comics have become hot investments.
I don't buy expensive books.
I buy ones I think will become expensive.
By the time I retire, I'll liquidate everything and retire comfortably.
[Silvestri.]
A lot of Image Comics and a lot of comics in general back then was fueled by the speculator market and we knew that.
I remember having this conversation with Jim Lee about "how long do you think this is gonna last?" [Valentino.]
Speculators were buying comics in droves, just people were filling up basements with boxes of comics that they thought were gonna put their kids through college.
You could sell a million copies of a comic book just by showing people a cool-ass cover and saying it had "number one" on it.
You know how many alternate Spider-Man "number one" covers I got, man? It's crazy.
I've got the platinum one, the holographic-type paper one I've got the one with the card in it.
I've got the one with the certificate in the back.
These are two separate posters, the same book, - but different editions of the same book.
- Right.
Image Image was part of it.
As an entire industry, we took advantage of our consumer.
You never, ever want to do that.
Why? They will they will just leave you.
[music.]
By the mid '90s, sales were down across the board, including at Image, but they were still a major presence in the industry, but readers had no idea what was going on behind the scenes.
[Liefeld.]
Image Comics was born of rivalries.
Rivalries are great.
They drive people.
I would say that the six of us were closer to being brothers.
You're always in competition with your brother.
[Silvestri.]
If we were guilty of anything back in the early days of Image, it was hubris.
Marvel and DC weren't really our concern, because people were gonna buy Marvel books and they were gonna buy DC books.
So who was gonna be our competition? - My partner is my competition.
- It was like frat houses Fighting each other over ideas, over people.
Who gets the new hot kid that now walks into the studio? And if I do have a hot kid that I nurture, and you then give him more money than I'm giving him, should we be doing that to each other? Giving people that freedom, I think, was part of Image.
It's, like, that's what we wanted.
The autonomy that we had set up was also beginning to be the source of all of our tensions.
[Liefeld.]
In 1996, Jim Lee and myself were contacted by Marvel Comics to come back and bolster some of their classic characters who had fallen on hard sales times.
[Jim Lee.]
They said, "Look, these characters are suffering.
We want your help in sort of restoring some shine to the characters.
" I thought it was a big win and a cool opportunity.
These were characters I hadn't really worked on while I was at Marvel.
[Silvestri.]
You know, that was when as opposed to the early days of Image, people needed money.
Marvel came and basically cash-whipped Jim Lee and Rob And it's just, like, now it's just about the cash! Like, oh, my gosh, now we're administering even more, because now it's like I can be bought.
When the news of Heroes Reborn reached the other partners, they were very upset.
It was the first time things were getting openly ugly, and you're like, "Oh, we're not being polite to each other anymore.
This is These guys are pissed.
" [Liefeld.]
I sat next to Todd on a panel when all the questions for Jim and I that summer were about our deal with Marvel.
He lost his cool.
He yelled at the fans.
"This is for Image! There will be a panel later where you can talk to them about Marvel!" This was getting to the point where it just it wasn't fun at all.
Under the Image Comics deal, I owned all the books that I created, so I began to publish them under another company I created called Maximum Press.
[Mychaels.]
The other owners were not happy about that, because they actually saw that as competition to Image.
Todd sent me a letter that said, "If you do not bring these books back from Maximum Press, we are going to take legal action against you," and I responded with, "I don't care.
I'm not bringing them back.
" Our pages are actually 10 by 15, which is about the size of Rob's ego.
[Larsen.]
There did get to be certain arguments that had taken place with Rob Liefeld.
There ended up being enough points of friction that Marc Silvestri was like, "Look, if this guy's gonna be here, I got to go.
" Extreme Studios went after one of Marc's top guys, and Marc had had it.
You know, at that point, it was, like, "What are we doing here? This is insanity.
" I just couldn't live in that environment anymore.
I got a letter pushed under my door by the publisher of Image Comics that Marc has resigned.
Now, I'm not stupid.
I knew that that was ramping up hostilities, and but I-I got to tell you, I didn't care.
[Silvestri.]
Todd called me, and we talked and I said, "I can't deal with the B.
S.
anymore.
" And I go, "What if you're not the one that goes?" [Liefeld.]
We were gonna meet in a suite at the Marriott.
I wanted to do a little espionage.
I bought the room next to the suite, and Matt and I stayed in that suite and literally, we are laying on the floor, looking through the light in the door, but I hear everything.
"I guess Rob's not coming.
" They all kept waiting for me to come into the room, but I thought this would be an honest assessment, you know, and I hear Todd and Marc and Jim and Erik and Jim Lee discuss me.
Valentino is reluctant, Erik Larsen's pissed off at me, Todd's like, "We've got to do what we've got to do," Jim Lee is quiet, and I was like, "Yeah, we're done.
" Right before we were going to vote him out, Rob faxed in his resignation.
[Kirkman.]
When the news broke that Rob was leaving Image Comics, it was like the Beatles breaking up.
You really got a sense that they were all the best of friends, and, you know, this was kind of the first indication that that wasn't true.
It was kind of heartbreaking.
[Jim Lee.]
I don't think any of those decisions were made lightly by any of us, and, actually, he and Todd were super close as friends, and I'm sure that impacted their friendship for a bit, and it impacted my relationship with Rob.
I didn't talk to him for years after that.
[McFarlane.]
I'm not proud of that moment in our history.
We had success hard and fast.
The money came, you know It was just It was overwhelming.
[reporter.]
The sales slump which threatens to engulf the comic world could be the one enemy its superheroes cannot defeat.
Since peaking in the early 1990s, over half of America's comic shops have gone out of business.
About 1995, the speculator boom crashed, as they do.
When the guys who were planning to cash in went into their local comic book store and tried to cash in, found out their store was gonna give them 10 cents on the dollar, then the bottom fell out.
[Silvestri.]
Every year, the numbers were falling.
Every month, the numbers were falling.
Every week, sometimes, numbers were falling, and nobody could really stop it.
The business was seemingly kind of falling apart around us, and also, I was just burned out.
That kind of got me thinking about what it would be like if I took WildStorm and partnered with a bigger company.
Jim Lee took his company, WildStorm, to DC Comics and sold it, and eventually became an executive there.
[Portacio.]
That was a shock.
When Jim sold to DC, that was a shock.
Rob's leaving, I think, just leaves a bitter taste, but Jim Lee was a bigger punch.
[Silvestri.]
You know, Jim was Jim.
WildStorm was a massive studio.
They were our largest market share within Image.
It was a big blow to us.
We were worried for a minute, you know, would we survive? and I think a lot of us got kind of scared.
[music.]
[Stephenson.]
I think Image floundered for a bit at the end of the '90s and into the early 2000s.
Jim Lee leaving sort of forced us to take on books that we normally wouldn't.
We had lost some of the business dealings with our distributor, so we needed to get our market share back up.
At first, we were taking on stuff that we weren't overly proud of [Valentino.]
I volunteered to take over.
My idea was to get rid of all the books, the ones that I just thought brought the company down, and I told the guys, "We can do better than this.
" We started thinking in terms of "we need to diversify.
" You know, there's a market that's not being catered to out there.
It's the "indie market.
" Image started to take a lot of chances artistically.
It wasn't always superheroes.
They were starting to find new genres and new ways to go.
[McFarlane.]
One of the guys that walked in the door - was a guy named Robert Kirkman.
- At that point in my career, I had never done anything at all that was successful, and I wanted to do a zombie comic, because I had been watching tons of George Romero movies and I'd fallen in love with that genre, and I was like, "Ah, there's so much more you can do with this genre that hasn't really been explored.
" He pitched what he called "Planet of the Zombies" to me, and I was like, "Oh, Robert, that's just horrible.
" You know, and I said, "Look, zombie books have never, ever sold in this business.
I know their movies do okay, and I know they're a niche thing and all that" Jim was basically turning down the book, and he said, "Unless you can tell me how this is different from every zombie book that's ever been done, there's no reason to do it.
" There just was nothing that would've given you the idea that, like, "Oh, we should do this book because it's going to be a huge success," especially from somebody who had, you know, not a great track record up to that point.
And so, in the moment, I just go, "Well, you know, there's, it's, I I didn't put it in the pitch, 'cause, you know, I wanted to surprise you guys, but the whole thing, it's an alien invasion.
There's spaceships, and they've created the zombies, and they're trying to weaken the world's infrastructure so that they can take over," and I would later find out that that is apparently the plot from Plan 9 from Outer Space.
I didn't know that at the time, and they didn't know that at the time, but they're like, "Yeah, no, that's cool, that's yeah! Hey, that's the hook we're looking for.
Yeah, it's a good-looking book.
" Done.
Accepted.
[Stephenson.]
The book's doing great, and I'm loving it.
I'm reading every issue and, at some point, I say, "Robert," you know, "You said you were salting in all of this stuff about the alien invasion.
Like, can you, like, point out any of those things?" So I just said, "Eric, I lied to you.
There's no aliens in this book," and he goes, "Oh, okay Meh.
Probably better for it.
" [laughing.]
[music.]
[Larsen.]
Walking Dead has been a runaway success.
I mean, that comic book started off with low numbers and just kept building and building and building ever since then.
There was really no no stopping it.
[Kirkman.]
Spawn was always the number-one book, and then Walking Dead kind of was getting there, and I was like, "Oh, my god, is this gonna happen? Like, I don't know what's gonna happen," and then, all of a sudden, there was one month where it was like, boop boop boop.
You know? And it kinda like and then it and it kept going, and I was like, "I can't believe it.
I can't believe that Walking Dead is outselling Spawn now.
This is crazy.
" It became Image's best-selling book in probably a decade.
I don't think you can overstate the importance of the Walking Dead.
I think that it revitalized us, and it's not just the book on its own, but I think what it said about Image.
[McFarlane.]
So then Robert Kirkman becomes a partner of Image Comic Books.
We needed to show that we were willing to add to our ranks of partnership, if you were loyal to us, and you didn't have to be an artist.
Becoming a partner at Image Comics is probably you know, aside from my children being born and meeting my wife, like, the best thing that ever happened to me.
The Walking Dead show is nice, and it does very well, and I'm very proud of it, but I had dreams as a child of being at an Image Comics meeting, and then I became an Image partner, you know, as an adult, which is the stupidest thing in the world.
[crowd cheering.]
I have to tell everyone in the audience right now, I love the gentlemen on this couch.
They were the most arrogant, reckless maniacs, who decided that they were gonna start their own company, and they were gonna build it all around themselves, and they were gonna do whatever they wanted, and for whatever reason, they were like, "You know what? Let's build a company for all creators.
Let's make the deal [cheering.]
that we create for ourselves that is the absolute best deal in comics and let's make it available to everyone.
" My kids now have the opportunity to grow up and be completely pampered, and that is because of you guys.
[applause.]
Everything was going great, I couldn't be more excited, but there was one thing that just wasn't sitting right with me that I felt needed to be fixed.
[music.]
[Greg Rucka.]
Comics aren't a genre.
Comics are a medium.
One of the things that Image has done, I think, spectacularly well in the last half-dozen years is demonstrate the strength of the medium.
I think for me, their legacy was balls.
In American culture, "to have balls" means that you don't care what people think and that you are willing to express in all honesty whatever it is that's on your mind, and I think if there's any legacy for Image, it'll be that, that they were balls-to-the-wall with it.
What they did for the business for comics, how they disrupted the way things had always been and who got to make the rules was nothing short of revolutionary.
One of the things that Image brings is a creator ownership deal that is, in my opinion, right and fair and proper.
They keep the other publishers honest.
Everyone's page rates went up, and then exclusive contracts happened, so now freelancers had security and stability in their income.
[Kirkman.]
The success of Walking Dead took everyone by surprise, myself included, and it made people think, like, if a weird black-and-white zombie book can find success, the sky is the limit.
There are a number of titles that have come through Image that could not possibly have existed anywhere else.
[Kirkman.]
Image Comics publishes Saga, which is a romance story set in a sci-fi universe that is completely adult and has people with TVs for heads, but, you know, rivals Walking Dead in popularity.
It's a massively successful book.
[DeConnick.]
Pretty Deadly is a mythological western.
It is not an obvious commercial success, and they let us do it anyway, which is not capitalism.
[Fraction.]
I did a book called Sex Criminals which literally could not exist anywhere else but Image Comics.
This is the part of the show where, like, you can show different stuff that I've done and just the pages will be completely pixelated and pixelated and pixelated.
Literally, they said I could do all that.
It's ironic that a company that was founded on bulging veins and pouches and ammunition and women as props is now publishing easily the most progressive and politically provocative books on the scenes.
[music.]
I met Robert Kirkman at the 2003 Chicago Comic-Con.
You know, we start talking, next thing I know, he's like, "I gotta come to my room.
You want to come to my room? I got to get something real quick," and we're chatting in his room, and he's like, "I got to go to the bathroom," and he goes to the bathroom and leaves the bathroom door open, and so I'm, you know, a childhood fan of Rob Liefeld, having known Rob Liefeld for an hour.
I'm like, "I can't believe Rob Liefeld is peeing four feet away from me, and then he's like, "Oh, you want to go to the movies?" I'm like, "Yeah, I want to go to the movies with Rob Liefeld.
" Let's do that.
[Liefeld.]
And then we became happy friends for 48 hours.
I think we did dinner.
We did breakfast.
We had another breakfast, another dinner.
We were inseparable.
[Kirkman.]
Rob had just rebooted Youngblood with another publisher.
Youngblood is the first Image comic.
It's the first thing that had the Image "I," and there's a connection between Youngblood and Image that, as a fan, you know, it just irks me a little when there's a Youngblood comic that doesn't have an Image "I" on it.
Robert and I kind of had to sell the other partners on, "Hey, we want Rob to come back again.
" We all kind of go, "You know what? We all did this together.
Whatever the water was that went under that bridge, it is under the bridge, and we did something special together 25 years ago.
" Did it take time to heal? Yeah, sure it did.
Was I hoping that that healing process would eventually come? Sure, 'cause Rob is a good dude.
At his core, he just makes you laugh.
And it was like, "Sure, with open arms.
Come back in.
Publish your books through us.
" You know? It's like a version of the old days, you know? - And it's been great.
- [Liefeld.]
And I'm like, "I can't believe I'm gonna be doing this with Image again.
This is fun," and I remember I called Robert.
- I go, "Is everyone okay?" - "Everyone's okay.
" So here we are, 25 years later, and I am so proud of all that Image Comics has accomplished, and I love these guys.
[Silvestri.]
We've been through a lot, all of us, all the partners.
I don't believe any of us would trade anything, even with headaches, even with disappointments.
That's what we signed up for 25 years ago.
[McFarlane.]
I'm now got gray hair and I'm a little bit older.
I went from being the cool brother to, like, that fun uncle, to, like, now I'm just, like, that dad, and pretty soon I'll be, like, "Grandpa.
" "Oh, yeah, that's right, he's the guy that sorta started it.
" I could get hit by a bus tomorrow, and it won't really matter.
Image is here.
[Larsen.]
If it all went away tomorrow, to be able to say, "Oh, I only got to do everything I ever wanted to do for 25 years, and that was it" It's, like, that's still a hell of a run, you know? It was an exhilarating time in my life.
We were doing what we wanted and having tremendous success at changing the industry.
I wouldn't trade it for the world.
I know that there's a version somewhere of a guy that did all this and he's bitter.
That's just not me.
There are bands, and you hear the story of how a song came to be, and all that matters in the end isn't how great your guitar riff was and isn't how great your lyrics were.
It's how they work together to create immortality, and that's what Image Comics is.
[title music.]