Image Comics

Image Comics is a comic book publishing company ran by partners, and is the fourth largest comic book publisher in the United States. The partners were seven high-profile illustrators who founded the company in 1992 as a place where creators could publish their material without giving up the copyrights to the characters they created.

It all started at the Marvel headquarters. Some of the Illustrators at marvel were feeling somewhat unappreciated for the reason that it was made to seem like the illustrators were not important, and could be replaced anytime.

So these illustrators, argued to be led by Todd McFarlane (famous for his work on Marvel's Spider-Man), decided to go to the president of Marvel and demand the rights, ownership and creative control of their work.

Marvel did not meet the illustrators’ demands, and several months later Image Comics appeared, with Todd McFarlane, Liefeld who is famous for work on The New Mutants and X-Force, Jim Lee (X-Men), Marc Silvestri (Uncanny X-Men, Wolverine), Erik Larsen (The Amazing Spider-Man), Jim Valentino (Guardians of the Galaxy), and Whilce Portacio (Uncanny X-Men) became the six partners and founders of Image. Although all the members were famous at Marvel, Lee, Liefeld, and McFarlane were the most popular.

All of the partners later created their own studios which were under Image comics.

Some of the founder’s even used their studios to publish other independent comics, and some independent comics titles decided to join Image. With the publications of Sam Kieth, who created The Maxx, Dale Keown, who created PITT', Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross, who created Astro City. Some of the established self-published series that moved to Image comics were Jeff Smith's Bone and Colleen Doran's A Distant Soil. After a while Image grew to the point that they could even rival that of Marvel and DC comics.

Even though Image was doing great, it was said that the only major problem that slightly hampered the company’s success was the fighting between its partners and their lack of business experience. The business aspect of running a company was a learning process for the partners that an executive director had to be hired to organize their schedules. Due to suspicions regarding Liefeld’s honesty and possibly usage of his position as CEO to benefit his studio financially which is banned in the Image comics company he was voted out of the company. Some of the partners moved their studios to other comic book companies. However, Lee sold his studio to DC comics and Silvestri moved his studio back to Image.

In spite of all the transactions that took place in Image Comics, they have still manage to be one of the largest comic book production comics due to the sales of Todd McFarlane's Spawn and related titles like his McFarlane Toys line, and Silvestri's Top Cow imprint.

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