Part Three: What Went Wrong

Image Comics took its name from the prominence it gave to The Picture, the product of a comics artist's inspiration, talent and labor. Appropriately then, the company owed the great success of its launch to a picture -- the one that had formed in the minds of hundreds of thousands of comics fans. To the readers, it was a larger-than-life picture bleeding off the page with its promise of coolness and radical novelty. To comics artists, it was a picture of solidarity -- the triumph of art over big business. It was the picture that was worth a thousand words and even more dollars. And, of course, it was all wrong. By the end of the decade, that "image" of solidarity had deteriorated so much that Image artists were filing suit against one another.

In Part One of this series (TCJ #222), we saw how the six partners came together to make their break from Marvel. Part Two (TCJ #223) covered the honeymoon years (or year), in which the creators released their first Image titles and rose to demi-god status in the eyes of the industry.

A Confederacy of Gladiators

The trouble was: The group of creators who formed the core of this potential artists' rebellion had been trained all along to be as fiercely competitive with one another as any gladiator-slaves of the Roman Empire. Despite their common interests and personal friendships, the future Image artists were mutually mistrustful and jealous of one another, as only simultaneously budding superstars can be. In place of Liefeld and McFarlane, imagine Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio sizing one another up across a crowded party at Spago's.

"They all appeared within the same year -- '87 to '88," said Larry Marder, who was Image executive director from 1993 to 1999. "They all emerged in the post-Dark-Knight-and-Watchmen days, and the rivalries between them had been set in place as early as '88. They were all friends and they were all rivals, like basketball teams. Some of those rivalries had been put in place by the editors at Marvel. That is one of the ways a company traditionally motivates its creators. These guys had been fighting the whole time at Marvel."

Liefeld told the Journal, "It was very competitive. There was a lot of 'I can draw Spider-Man better than you' sort of thing. There was the whole aspect of 'I'm pushing the envelope more than you.'"

Silvestri and Lee were friendly enough that they were sitting together at a Christie's auction when McFarlane approached Lee about joining the Image rebellion. According to Larsen, it was only this chance proximity to Lee at a key moment that resulted in Silvestri becoming an Image partner. Silvestri was not at that time a rising star and had just been dumped from a gig drawing the X-Men to make room for an artist who was a rising star -- Jim Lee.

Liefeld brought Jim Valentino (who recently ascended to the position of Image publisher) into the group over the objections of McFarlane, who felt Valentino didn't belong in the same artistic league as the others. Valentino described the personalities of the Image partners as "disparate" and "complex."

Image gradually went from being a loose coalition of artists to a corporate entity, printing and releasing titles through the facilities of Malibu for a year before beginning to publish under its own banner in 1993. The partners met to handle official business three or four times a year in meetings that typically lasted all day or all night. According to Valentino, arguments would break out among the disparate and complex personalities at the table. When asked what the arguments were about, he said, "I won't tell you." Valentino did confirm that one source of contention was the concept of multiple-cover promotions. Surprisingly, McFarlane, whose Spider-Man #1 for Marvel had been a particularly notorious example of using multiple editions to pander to speculators, opposed the idea. "Todd hated multiple covers and that whole bit and he still does," Valentino told the Journal. " It has been a subject of heated debate. Some members don't like it; others do."

As much as Image has come to be thought of as a house style that spread inexorably throughout the industry, Valentino said the partners were anything but homogeneous in their aesthetic attitudes. "You couldn't find six people more dissimilar. Erik and I didn't want to do television or movies the way Rob and Todd did. My taste was diametrically opposed to what Marc Silvestri thinks are good comics. That doesn't make me right or wrong, just different. Some partners were dead set against even having the Image 'i' on the covers of all the comics."

Marder told the Journal, "They were all building their own infrastructures in the studios. They were all inventing themselves at different speeds and didn't know how to deal with each other." Despite the friction, Marder said the partners were able to reach agreement with one another through what he called, "coalition politics. They either talked a problem to death or solved it. Image never did anything that wasn't agreed upon unanimously."

According to Valentino, the meetings went more smoothly than most people thought: "We had fostered publicly the idea that our meetings were screaming matches, which kept everybody saying we were going to be breaking up in six months. People said we were a bunch of loose cannons with overblown egos and there was no way the company could stick together. There were always factions [in Image], which varied depending on the issue, but things were pretty copacetic at least in the early days. Most of the meetings were filled with laughter. They were very funny. There has yet to be a split Image vote. It never happened. The table was small enough that democracy actually worked."

One reason that Image was not hampered by the various disagreements between partners was that they didn't have to agree. That was the whole idea behind Image. The partners vowed allegiance to only two principles: 1) that Image would own no creator's work and 2) that no partner had to agree with any other partner. No interference in a creator's creative or financial decisions concerning his own work was permitted. "When Erik did that 'Don't fuck with God' thing in Savage Dragon," Valentino said, "we all went, 'Oh god, Erik! We're going to get so much shit for that.' But it was his decision. And, as it happened, we got more shit for Todd running a Gay Comics ad."

Another reason was that, almost from the beginning, the partners were beginning to drift in their own directions with their own goals and studios. Liefeld was accused by the others of being preoccupied with dreams of Hollywood -- or just plain dreaming: McFarlane complained that Liefeld would frequently fall asleep during meetings. Liefeld didn't deny these accusations. "For me to say I took an interest in the business side of things would be ridiculous," he told the Journal.

Asked about the specifics of some of Image's business policies, Larsen told the Journal, "I'm not really sure. If it doesn't directly involve me, it's not my concern."

How Image Destroyed the Comics Industry

During this early period, all of the partners were to a greater or lesser extent being courted by Hollywood dealmakers. Fans were lining up to see them in unprecedented numbers. And retailers were ordering all the copies they could get of any title Image promised to publish. Unfortunately, their new celebrity status distracted the artists from not only business details but also what had once been the motivation for it all -- the act of creating comics. For all their differences, the partners had something new in common, as they all fell increasingly behind in their work.

According to Liefeld,"We'd call each other up and say, 'What page are you on?' 'Page 3.' 'Me, too.' The dark side of Image Comics was that we didn't ship the books. We were not prepared to deal with the business side of things."

Of the six partners, McFarlane, who had discontinued his work for Marvel earlier than the others, was the best-prepared to begin turning out issues for Image and the last to run into deadline problems. "Nobody knew the success we were going to have, but Todd was ready for it," Liefeld told the Journal. "He was stockpiling comics material. I went from X-Force one day to Youngblood the next day. Jim Lee went straight from X-Men to WildC.A.T.S. But Todd was coming off the bench with fresh legs. He had six issues out to our three or whatever, and he never hesitated to point it out at shows. He was the most dedicated to his product, he'd say. 'I'm the guy who's giving it to the fans.'"

Even McFarlane, however, reached a point where he was forced to use fill-in issues by other creators in order to catch up. And, as he became increasingly distracted, eventually all of McFarlane's comics became fill-in issues by other creators. According to Marder, "Todd always had the most discipline, but it's hard creating comics while being asked to meet with toy manufacturers and pitch movies."

Larsen proved most able to harness himself to a regular schedule, and after initially stumbling, he settled into the most steady creative output of any of the Image partners. "When we were starting out," he said, "I had two books that were late enough to be returnable [including work done with Don Simpson and featuring Simpson's Megaton Man character]. I took substantial hits in returns. I lost about $52,000. I had already paid the money to Don and he'd already spent it."

Marder said, "Todd had a period of time with fill-in issues. Extreme and Rob Liefeld were always anarchy. Whilce Portacio was ridiculously late. [Portacio, the seventh original Image founder, was so far behind schedule due to a death in the family and other problems, that he dropped out when it came time to officially incorporate. He was bought out of his creator-owned Wetworks property by Lee.] All young talent has trouble with deadlines. The young tend to forget that the art form is also a business. That's happening right now with Cliffhanger. When something is hot, you need to get it out. They weren't good at prioritizing what needed to be done."

The ones to suffer the most from the Image creators' undeveloped sense of priorities were the retailers, who had invested enthusiastically in heavy up-front orders. Valentino said, "It was a problem for retailers because they had so much money tied up, so much cash outlaid for these books."

As the Image creators chatted on the phone with one another and dallied over Page 3, a chain reaction had begun that some speculate was responsible for virtually destroying the direct market in comics. Retailers invested heavily in Image issues that failed to ship on time, which meant the retailers could not recoup their investment on schedule. Due to the required lead time for orders, retailers had, in some cases, ordered second and third issues of Image titles by the time they learned that the first issue had not shipped on time. The problem was further multiplied by the variant covers and high-priced bagged and foil-covered editions with which Image shamelessly pandered to speculator interests. The money invested could not be regained until the tardy issues finally arrived in stores and found buyers. When issues arrived so late that fan interest had waned, retailers found themselves stuck with titles that were no longer hot. Even so, they were not quick to learn their lesson. "The Pitt, for example, was consistently late every issue," said Valentino, "but every time he [Dale Keown] solicited orders, it sold."

The unstinting appetite of the retailers meant that initially there was little incentive for the Image creators to get their act together and on schedule. Instead, the problem snowballed until it reached its peak with the release of Deathmate, a variant-covered, crossover-event mini-series in late '93 and early '94 that sapped substantial amounts of retailer dollars but failed to reach shelves before reader interest had turned to apathy. Cliff Biggers, proprietor of Dr. No's Comics in Marietta, Ga., told the Journal, "Deathmate was a concept that we all thought was a great idea, until we had five, six, eight months to think about it. The lateness killed any reader interest in the book. But Deathmate also underscored the big difference between a company like Image and a company like Acclaim. Image was a very appearance-based company and Acclaim was more content-based." Deathmate, in other words, had been something to savor and anticipate, but its appeal had faded like cotton candy by the time it reached readers.

"That was probably when the retailers finally lost faith," Valentino said, "but by then their revenue lines were definitely clogged."

These circumstances created severe cash-flow problems for comics shops just as the comics market was beginning to tighten up. Distributors adjusted the rules for returnability, which had formerly allowed a book to be more than six months late before retailers could return it. The new rules narrowed the window to 60 days before a book became returnable, but for many retailers it was a measure that was too little, too late. Stores not able to weather the period of disrupted cash flow ended up closing their doors for good, and, publishers competing for fewer retailer dollars resorted to exclusive distribution contracts that edged out all but one major distributor and left Diamond Comic Distributors with an arguably monopolistic hold on a deflated industry. For those who subscribe to this chain of events, all the industry's current woes can be traced back to the day the Image "i" first took shape in Liefeld's mind.

Angry Words

If retailers did not "lose faith" until the time of Deathmate, Image had already been the object of a backlash by creators almost since its inception. Many creators who had spent years paying their dues in the industry were resentful of the way the Image superstars were being coddled and fawned over even to the point of getting their own tent set up outside the Chicago Comicon. Particularly unen-thused were comics writers who appeared to have been overlooked in Image's creator rebellion. The new titles coming out from Image implied that artists not only didn't need corporate control or editorial direction, they also didn't need writers.

"From Peter David's point of view, how could it be good that the lunatics were taking over the asylum," Marder said.

In letters pages and at conventions, David, the longtime writer, waged an ongoing debate with McFarlane. Liefeld said, "Peter David rode a career wave out of criticizing us."

The most consistent criticism leveled against the core Image titles is that they have tended to be composed of dynamically posed super-hero pin-up art with little substance, character development or storytelling sophistication. To writers like David, these flaws are the consequence of artists thinking that just because they can draw large breasts and rippling muscles they can also create coherent plots and believable characters. To Marder, the writer-artist creator of Beanworld, the Image founders were justified in the emphasis they placed on The Picture: "As far as the average consumer is concerned this is visual stuff. The comic book is an art-driven medium, just as movies are a director-driven medium. Fans have systematically rewarded artists more than writers. Even the best writers are held hostage by the people who draw their work."

Asked about Malibu's Ultraverse line, which was built to a large extent around name writers like Steve Gerber and Steve Englehart, Marder said, "It is disingenuous to compare Ultraverse to Image, because Malibu started Ultraverse to make up for Image leaving [its printing contract with Malibu]. With the best artists at Image, there were not enough artists left to start an artist-based line, so they launched Ultraverse. But it was a coalition of writers that didn't work." Whether it could have worked in the long run was rendered moot when Marvel bought up Malibu, absorbed its state-of-the-art coloring department and trashed the Ultraverse line.

Marder and the Six Marx Brothers

Marder, a longtime friend of Valentino, had always been sympathetic to the Image enterprise, and, as angry retailers added their voices to those of resentful writers and disappointed fans to form a growing public backlash, he was a logical choice to help pull the beleaguered company together. In 1993, the title of publisher was held by Tony Lobito, but Lobito had no power to act without the unanimous approval of the Image partners, a circumstance that made Image about as efficient as the League of Nations. Image was clearly hampered by the partners' lack of interest in business matters and undisciplined work schedules, and it was felt that someone was needed to provide focus to the company's day-to-day operations.

Marder had already dealt with Image, helping to arrange in-store signings and convention appear-ances, and had handled the marketing campaign for Alan Moore's 1963 Image mini-series. "Jim Valentino called me and said they were looking for some help in managing the company," he said, "some better guidance from above."

Valentino had some initial misgivings, not about Marder's ability to help Image, but about Image's capacity to be helped. "My concern was that they wouldn't let Larry do what they wanted him to do," he said. "But very much from the get-go they treated him as a peer. Larry was used to the Six Marx Brothers Routine that the partners carried on. His job was to be a small voice of reason. This would be a guy who would come in and tell you 'No,' someone to be a sounding board, an advisor, a mediator. They had to respect his decision-making process."

Marder's title was executive director, which Valentino said was appropriate because, "his actual job was to direct the executives, to keep misunderstandings down. He's a consigliere, a diplomat. And he takes information in his head and turns it into coherent press releases. Todd described Larry's function as being to protect the 'i,' and he did it very well for us for six years."

What, in Marder's view, had gone wrong with Image? And what was necessary to fix it? "I found more stability than I had anticipated," he said. "There were two main things that were hurting Image. 1) Comic books had begun a spiral downward that, quite frankly, is still going on today. 2) The direct market had had lenient rules about lateness that it was just beginning to correct. My primary goal was getting all the creative teams up to speed about their responsibility to retailers for getting their books out on time. The first thing we did was stop soliciting books that weren't already drawn."

As for the "complex" personalities of the Image partners, Marder said, "As I've often said, it was like being coach on a team of all-star players. Egos were a problem. But they're a problem everywhere, especially in public. When the Image partners get together in private there's an amazing lack of ego."

By all accounts, Marder's influence helped to stabilize the Image studios and get them back on track. McFarlane, Lee and even Liefeld began to adhere to a more regular schedule for their books, though reducing their own creative involvement in the titles in the process. Only Larsen was able to maintain a consistent schedule while continuing to do virtually all his own writing and drawing. According to Marder, Silvestri's Top Cow went from being the most consistently late studio to being the most on time after Silvestri moved out of Homage, a studio that Whilce, Silvestri and Lee had shared.

The Two Faces of Rob

But even as the partners learned to work more efficiently alongside one another, they continued to drift in their own directions. Despite the medi-ating efforts of Consigliere Marder, the center could not hold for long. Ironically, it was the partner who had had the most to do with bringing the creators together to form Image who became the most divisive element in the partnership. Liefeld formed Maximum Press in 1994 as an outlet for his own projects outside the Image camp, and Image partners and staff members began to suspect that he was advancing his own interests to the detriment of Image. In June of 1996, Silvestri announced that Top Cow was going its own way and would no longer be part of the Image banner. Though Silvestri pointed no fingers, it was no secret that he and Liefeld had been involved in an escalating conflict.

Marder told the Journal, "When Marc Silvestri chose to leave in protest that he felt he had been substantially hurt by an Image partner, it was the first time I realized Rob was no longer willing to reach a compromise to hold the partnership together."

How did Liefeld, a clean-cut, profanity-hating fanboy turned pro, go from being everybody's pal to being the thorn in everybody's side? According to McFarlane, there was more than one Rob Liefeld. "You had to ask yourself, is the real Rob the nice guy with with the smile that makes you melt or the Rob that you can't trust? In hindsight, we probably should have voiced our concerns earlier, but the digression was gradual and went from 'Don't worry about it; that's just Rob being Rob,' to the point where it became detrimental to the company. It all began at the same time sales began decreasing in comic books. You've got a true indicator of who someone is when times get tough -- and we saw a different Rob appear."

Despite his admitted disinterest in Image business affairs, the partners had seen fit to invest Liefeld with the powers of its top corporate offices, including that of chief executive officer, chief financial officer and secretary. Liefeld, who was notorious for snoozing through official meetings, was principal check-signing officer of the company. Among the many accusations against Liefeld, which came to light in subsequently filed legal complaints, was the charge that he routinely used his check-writing powers to cover personal debts from Image funds. Other dissatisfactions with Liefeld ranged from his alleged habit of copying art from other partners' comics to his plans to move titles that had been established at Image to the non-Image Maximum Press. In addition to allegedly siphoning funds, he was said to have used Image staff to do promotional and production work for Maximum.

According to Marder, "When they were talking about leaving Marvel, Rob was quite the firebrand, but once they had to start a business, he lost track of basic business practices -- like that it's better to make more money rather than lose money. A lot of things went wrong in a very short period of time. You will find that the partners all have a different laundry list of complaints. He was making an increasing number of business decisions that were counterproductive to being a business partner. It was becoming ridiculous. He was a person it was impossible to deal with."

Several partners described Liefeld as seeming to be oblivious to the rancor he was generating in the Image offices. McFarlane said, "He always had a warped sense of logic to justify it all."

Asked if the complaints against Liefeld had been made known to him all along, Marder said the technology of the time may have contributed to miscomunications. "These are the kinds of things that happen with voicemail and faxes," he said. "We didn't have e-mail until later. But he was given every opportunity. He just believed he was going to do better on his own."

On Sept. 4, 1996, separate press releases issued from Liefeld's studio and Image Central, the former announcing Liefeld's regretful resignation from Image, the latter announcing that Liefeld had been booted out of Image by a unanimous vote of the Image board. The Image release noted that Liefeld had handed in his resignation minutes before the board was to vote on terminating him as a partner. Addressed to all of his ex-partners, Liefeld's note of resignation read, in part, "It has become apparent to me by your recent actions that it is your intent to not only drive me from the company I helped to found, but also to destroy my career in the process. These actions have had a severe emotional impact on my wife and me. In light of these circumstances, I have no choice but to resign as a member of the Board of Directors, Chief Executive Officer, Chief Financial Officer and Secretary of Image Comics, Inc."

In fact, the partners had already voted to take away his check-writing powers and to eject him from the partnership a month earlier. The Sept. 4 vote was intended to cover objections that Liefeld had been given insufficient notice of the previous meeting. Silvestri, who was still technically an Image partner even though he had taken Top Cow out of the company, was among those who voted to remove Liefeld.

Lawsuits followed. In a suit filed Oct. 6, 1996, Liefeld sought $7.6 million in damages from Image for libel, slander, mismanagement of corporate funds, breach of contract and wrongful termination. The libel and slander charges related to allegedly defamatory statements made in person, in letters, in the Image press release and in computer postings. The breach of contract referred in part to Image's refusal to turn over an estimated $200,000 in proceeds from the sale of Liefeld books sold through Image.

Image responded with a cross-complaint, in which it accused Liefeld of misusing Image funds and staff for Maximum Press projects, copying pre-publication artwork from other Image artists and using Image as leverage to force vendors to provide services to Maximum Press on credit. The Image complaint alleged damages in excess of $1.2 million, including $85,000 in funds overpaid to Liefeld in 1993 and more than $240,000 in Image funds used by Liefeld to pay his own expenses. The cross-complaint also alleged that Image had suffered financial losses and damage to its reputation as a result of titles that were marketed and solicited through Image but taken out of Image's hands when Liefeld departed to start his own line.

In 1997, Liefeld and his former partners reached an undisclosed settlement. Reportedly, only McFarlane was opposed to settling the legal conflict with the partner he had once referred to as his "little buddy." With Liefeld gone, Silvestri brought his profitable Top Cow line back into the fold. Things did not remain stable for long, however.

Last year, Lee abandoned ship, taking his WildStorm Studios, as well as Alan Moore's America's Best Comics line, to DC. Shortly afterward, Marder resigned as executive director to take a position with Todd McFarlane Productions. Valentino, who no longer published his own line of comics, replaced Marder, taking the title of publisher of Image Central.

McFarlane commented, "Whilce left. Rob left. Jim went back to the Plantation. But Image Comics is going to go on forever. We have built an entity that's beyond the individual."

In the concluding segment of this series, we will take a closer look at Image today, its likelihood of survival, how it functions, what kind of deal it offers creators, how it has affected the industry for better or ill and whether it has lived up to the promises made in 1992 by Liefeld, McFarlane, Lee, Larsen, Valentino and Silvestri to each other and to the comics world.