Image Comics is on a serious winning streak right now, with a catalog that boasts a wild variety of titles, each strange and unique and totally different that all the others. You see, Image operates as a forum for creator-owned properties. It’s a company that handles marketing and publishing duties, but leaves the rights to the work in the hands of the people who make it… And this environment has given them probably the strongest and most diverse roster of any comics company. They’ve cultivated an amazing stable of writers and artists and allowed them to run wild, unleashing their wildest ideas on paper, concocting new characters and stories and owning the results.
And in the past year or so, they’ve rolled out a slew of new series, in a wide variety of genres. Here’s some of the ones I’m especially fond of.
Peter Panzerfaust
In this tale set World War Two, author Kurtis J. Wiebe and artist Tyler Jenkins use the spark of the Peter Pan legend to weave a tale of young boys trapped behind enemy lines. The Nazis have pushed into France, dividing and scattering the population as they roll toward their destiny, and a young man named Peter is the only hope of survival for a group of orphans trapped inside the city of Calais. The script is terse and minimal, characters tumbling over themselves as they’re introduced in rapid succession, dialogue unfolding in clipped sentences. The drawings fit the words perfectly, melding jagged lines with clean-cut areas of open space, creating dimension with overlapping elements and patches of light and dark. Weibe and Jenkins’ Peter is a fully realized icon: a bewildering force of chaos, a lanky and angular youth with a towering precipice of hair and a billowing trenchcoat that set him completely apart from his surroundings. It’s believable that these lost boys would follow him anywhere, his assurance in the midst of desperate situations giving hope for an impossible redemption.
The events are framed by a narration, an old veteran telling of long-ago adventures… But once that device is dismissed, the pace begins to quicken and we’re plunged headlong into wartime. Bullets and shrapnel fly past, the heroes and villains of the piece begin to reveal themselves, objectives make themselves clear. The fantastic and the horrible entwine. And while there’s pains taken not to downplay the horrors of war (and there’s an occasional pause to note the gray areas of morality in desperate situations), the overall tone is one of adventure, of adrenaline and swashbuckling. It may be a combat narrative, but it’s still a fairy tale at heart.
Peter Panzerfaust is an ongoing series, with two issues published to date.
No Place Like Home
A dark revisitation of the Oz mythology through a modern-day lens, this is the first major project from the writer/artist team of Angelo Tirotto and Richard Jordan, and it’s an impressive debut. There’s an air of inevitable disaster in their depiction of modern-day Kansas, a sense of dread that builds steadily throughout the first chapter. The story follows a young lady, Dorothy, as she returns to her hometown in the wake of a tornado that decimated her family and their home. The script and art pull no punches in depicting violence and gruesome happenings, so it’s not a book to be approached unawares or while eating… But so far, it’s a well-considered and singular take on classic themes. My interest has been piqued, and I’m going to make sure I don’t miss an issue.
No Place Like Home is an ongoing series. Issue one was released February 22, 2012, and the second issue is imminent.
Gladstone’s School For World Conquerors
The title tells you most of what you need to know about this series: it’s set in a school populated by the offspring of super-villains, who are being taught to follow in their parents’ evil footsteps. It’s a broad concept, and it provides space for a vast ensemble of fascinating characters to be introduced. Students and teachers of all shapes and sizes crowd the pages, their costumes and metahuman abilities on full display. And the large cast is handled deftly by Mark Andrew Smith’s script and Armand Villavert’s pictures, which imbue each individual with their own visual style and distinct personality.
It’s really a series that almost anyone can enjoy, full of intrigue, adventure, and super-powered spins on teenage tropes. The students hone their powers and get in fights, but also deal with academic issues, romance, and their own impulsive behaviour. And of course, there’s crazy twists as the series progresses… Each time you think you know where things are going, it turns out that everything is not quite what it seems. It’s great to look at, a fun read, and it’s full of surprises. What’s not to like?
Gladstone’s School For World Conquerors is currently on hiatus. The first six-issue series has been collected in trade paperback, and is available now. A second six-issue series will launch later in 2012.
Alpha Girl
A young girl on the run in a world overrun by zombies. This pitch could describe any number of stories, movies, and TV series, but this comic takes those core elements, and gives them a new and intriguing twist. The girl in question is a chainsmoking sociopath who was orphaned at a young age, leaving her and her brother to fend for themselves. The zombie plague was created by an over-zealous cosmetic company. Everything moves at such a quick and easy clip that there’s never time to worry about the originality or meaning of the proceedings. The script by Jean-Paul Bonjour and Jeff Roenning is a pleasure to read, even as horrible events befall the characters at every turn, and Robert Love’s art is grotesque and bewitching in equal measure. And while the world it depicts is bleak and unforgiving, there’s a looseness in the text, a cartooned stylization to the drawings that keeps it light and enjoyable: a giddily nihilistic joyride through a chemical world.
Alpha Girl is an ongoing series, with one issue released to date.
Li’l Depressed Boy
I’ve written about LDB before, in my series of articles on Pop Music Comics, but as I’m busy talking about Image books, and this is one of the comics I most look forward to each month, I may as well discuss it again. S. Steven Struble and Sina Grace’s series is about… Well, it’s about a guy. A guy who looks like a large ragdoll, reads comics, falls hopelessly in love with a girl, looks for a job, overthinks everything, and tries to make his way through a life that’s never as simple and true as the pop songs that he listens to endlessly. It’s a coming-of-age story, a teen movie for modern-day twenty-somethings, a snapshot of the point in early adulthood when high hopes conflict with lessening expectations. It deftly combines melancholy and humor. And while there’s not many defining events in any one issue, the small details add together beautifully, and create something uniquely affecting.
Li’l Depressed Boy is an ongoing series. Issues 1-4 have been collected in paperback as Li’l Depressed Boy: She Is Staggering. Issues 5-8 have been collected in paperback as Li’l Depressed Boy: Movin’ Right Along.
Last Of The Greats
This series tells the story of a world where a family of superheroes (“The Greats” of the title) have managed to eliminate all suffering on Earth. No famine, no disease, no inequality. Mankind lives without fear, free of strife. So, thus untroubled, they have turned on their saviours and killed the entire family, save one.
And now, as the story begins, Earth is threatened by an invasion. Humanity has no hope of survival. The planet is doomed. Unless, somehow, the last surviving Great can be convinced to come out of hiding and save the day.
It’s quite a set-up, and what ensues isn’t pretty. This is not a nice polite comic book. It’s a knock-down drag-out gut-wrenching ride, a journey through blood and death and devastation and double-and-triple crosses. There’s violence and suffering and mass destruction, and Brent Peeples’ illustrations depict the proceedings with clarity and precision.
Joshua Hale Fialkov has written a truly unsettling story here, one filled with characters who are too well-rounded to be entirely likeable. There’s no clear heroes, no clear villains, just a bunch of characters working in their own interests. It’s not an approach one expects from a superhero comic, and it means there’s no way to predict what will happen next… You just keep your fingers crossed, wait to see where it leads, and hang on tight.
Last Of The Greats is currently on hiatus. The first five issues have been collected as Last Of The Greats Vol. 1, which is now available to pre-order.
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