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Copping the Image Style

Old-timers and comics historians might recall a period where Marvel Comics seemed on the top of the world. They had the sales, they had the aesthetic credibility, they had redefined superhero comics in a way that forced the rest of the industry to evolve or perish. Marvel had become something to imitate and other publishers could ignore this only at their peril. They enjoyed this role as the vanguard/innovator from the early sixties into the eighties, at which point their older sibling, DC Comics, strove to reinvent itself in Marvel's image, using as much of Marvel's talent as they could acquire.

Less than ten years later, both DC and Marvel, in an imploding comics market, would play the role that the aging DC behemoth had a generation before, as old-timers desperately attempting to keep pace with an upstart group of comics talents who had become the forefront of the business. For a brief moment, a cluster of comics creators with names like McFarlane, Valentino, Sylvestri, Larsen, and Liefeld would define the standards which a sluggish industry would attempt to use as their own.

What did these talents have going for them? We can mention their youth, compared to the sexegenarian remnants of the Silver Age that barely eked by in those days before the modern Silver Age nostalgia would canonize these figures; they had a type of credibility among fans we might call "hipness," even if it would, for some of them, not enjoy a very long half-life; they had a repertoire of new, loud tricks that seemed to perk up pages at risk for listless and increasingly indifferent treatment sometimes inflicted by tenured talent; they experimented with and used up-and-coming technologies, like computer processing of art, which sometimes baffled old-timers; and, best of all, they could sell books.

Comics, in the absence of some non-market-based type of funding (such as a comics tax on payrolls), must sell product in sufficient quantity to offset or exceed the costs of production. Failing this, the comics themselves fail and can bring down their publishers. The straits in which the industry had found itself at the turn of the nineties forced commercial considerations to pull rank on aesthetic ones; and even Marvel Comics, the one time upstart of the business, resorted to attempts to appropriate the hip new style.

Force Works

Several forces, including the improbable explosion of Image Comics on a once-deadlocked comics market (one we might call "The Beast with Two Heads"), brought about the short-lived Marvel title Force Works.

Flagging sales and flagging direction had left Marvel with (perhaps) too many Avengers books. As DC had discovered with its Justice League franchise - one that would host, at various times, titles such as Justice League International, Justice League Europe, Justice League Strike Force, and Extreme Justice (described elsewhere in this column), the momentum that caused the expansion of the franchise would eventually fail, and the primary superteam books would collapse back to one, and possibly none.

Marvel, to its credit, tried to keep its second Avengers book, Avengers West Coast, afloat during the crunch. To this end, it appropriated two sets of elements: pieces from the Iron Man cartoons of the day, in which Iron Man sometimes appeared with an Avengers-like team called "Force Works," and what Marvel could decipher as the essence of the Image style.

Though the story doesn't fare too badly for an action-based tale with minimal character development, some traits mark this piece as an attempt to make Marvel work with the Image style.

For instance, the hyperbusy art where everyone crouches at all times and all faces show rows of tiny clenched teeth strongly implicate a Liefeld influence, even though the art here remains distinct from any of the Image central artists or their trained copyists from the various individual studios that once comprised that publishing concern.

Manhunter '94

The version of Manhunter '94 that appeared roughly contemporaneous with DC's Zero Hour: Crisis in Time event seemed, in many ways, to seek to reach an Image Comics audience through a DC piece.

In some ways, Manhunter '94 played a stealth role, since, in between harsh and cranked-up action scenes delineated in an ultraviolent style, comics author Steven Grant managed to infuse themes of destiny, doom, and Man's role in all of it, though not with as much depth as he would enjoy in other, later, less derivative, venues.

Extreme Justice

Even from its title - "Extreme Justice" - this book betrays its datedness and the style of ultimate, hyper and extreme everything that tried to define the early nineties.

Perhaps because DC had watched the young Turks of the business get away with selling far too many books with essentially interchangeable, indistinguishable, and uninteresting characters, it may have assumed that characters who had failed to make an impact anywhere else could still drive a book to success if presented in a more adrenal, busier style. Thus DC created the superhero team "Extreme Justice," a rough parallel for Marvel's "X-Force" in that they took a more proactive role in dealing with menaces and didn't fret over the excess of violence. To this team they delegated Captain Atom, Booster Gold, the Blue Beetle, another version of Amazing Man (evidently based on the Thomas/Ordway version of All-Star Squadron), and Superman's would-be consort Maxima.

True to form for Imagelike pieces by the major publishers, the book reeked of testosterone and contained a very busy sort of art laden with explosions and motion lines and enough activity to cause headaches among older, calmer readers. While the stories didn't seem especially bad - gauging mainly from Extreme Justice #0 and #1 - little there really worked to connect a reader to the characters. As an early issue of Brigade, one saw superheroes fight things, blow things up, and watch things blow up. One could come away from the story knowing very little about the principals, including their names; one could similarly read an issue cover to cover without necessarily comprehending why anyone fought with anyone, or zapped anything, or blew anything up, or watched anything explode.

Heroes Reborn

By the time the "Heroes Reborn" experiment began putting books on the shelves, Marvel's intentions regarding the new generation of supercelebrity cartoonists had become very clear to some, even if a bankrupt and misdirected Marvel Comics did not necessarily entertain anything like a long term plan in those days.

What "Heroes Reborn" meant still remains somewhat open to debate. Did Marvel really intend to reinvent itself from the ground up after the adrenal but dumbed-down model of early Image comics? Or did Marvel merely grasp desperately at straws to spike flagging revenues? Or did Marvel simply intend to buy time while key decisions had to languish pending the outcome of bankruptcy court proceedings?

Kingdom Come

In the end, it seems, the onetime "Big Guns" of superhero comics would abandon their attempts to remake themselves after the model of Image Comics. Poor sales might have contributed; Image fans probably preferred the real version to retrofits of older superheroes, and, with the implosion of the comics market that followed the inflation of the "new comics" bubble of this era, fewer and fewer followers of the younger talent seemed to demonstrate the staying power necessary to float their corner of the industry.

So, in the end, backlash would set in. DC's fairly recent Elseworlds piece Kingdom Come resonated with anti-"new comics" themes, including a repudiation of the violence-for-its-own-sake ethos attached to the dubious younger generation of so-called heroes that infested that work and stood as proxies for characters that Waid and Ross felt had neither ethos nor tradition as guiding principles.

In Kingdom Come, the abdication of Superman's generation of superheroes - essentially brought about by Superman's defection from his role as protector of Metropolis - left a vacuum into which stepped the children and grand-children of older heroes, a diverse and nihilistic crowd that brought cities to chaos by pointless rumbles that respected no concerns of life or property. One sees in this generation of superheroes the big-gun-and-shoulder-pad crowd that populated very early Image pieces. With Superman's return, the world saw some hope for a return of sanity and the ethos that hero represented, but the arrogance of this generation threatened to unleash a greater destruction by turning random incidents into a real war for control of the superheroic community.

The grotesque Magog played a central role throughout the piece, both in background incidents and as the avatar of the new and callous generation of blood-drenched superbeings; that this character bore an armor covering on the arms and one glowing eye suggests that Waid and Ross intended him to represent Marvel Comics' Cable, a character who, in his earliest depictions, presented an excellent template from which one might caricature the creations of the young comics celebrities of the early nineties.

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Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.

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