We love talking with Eric, and today at MC, we talk with him about Image Expo, their litany of announcements from that con, digital comics, who he’d love to see create a comic for Image most, and a whole lot more. You can find our latest chat with Eric after the jump, and thanks to him as per usual for chatting with us.
Twenty years later, what do you think Image Comics means to the world of comics, and how do you feel that perception has changed over time?
Eric Stephenson: Well, you know, when Image was first announced, pretty much everyone in the industry predicted it would be a huge failure. It was regarded as a move of ego on the part of the founders, and it was widely derided by retailers and professionals alike.
I remember attending a talk Jim Valentino gave at one of the old distributor warehouses out near Los Angeles, back when Capitol City was still in business. Jim got up and explained what he and the other founders were doing and what they wanted to achieve, and the reaction was a weird mixture of skepticism and outright anger. I was very new to comics at the time, so you know, it was quite the eye-opening experience. I thought what they were doing was incredibly important, even then.
I think more people share that view now.
I mean, even without the benefit of hindsight, I think it’s pretty clear that Image is one of the most progressive publishing houses in comics. Other publishers have dabbled in creator-owned comics, but at Image, creative ownership and the unfettered creativity that allows is the foundation for everything we do. There are obviously plenty of places to write and draw comics, but if you want to create something and actually own it, no strings attached, Image is the place to do that.
Seemingly everyone who attended considered Image Expo a massive hit. People raved about its comic-centric focus, which seems only natural for a comic convention but oddly atypical these days. How successful did you feel it was, and what did you learn from it that you’ll look to carry on to potential future iterations?
ES: As I said in the weeks leading up to the show, we had fairly modest goals for Image Expo. That said, we didn’t just meet them, we exceeded them, so we were very satisfied with how things worked out. Everybody seemed to have fun, so that alone was a huge reward. Different guests told me they’d never had as much fun at a con before, and that’s a pretty great compliment, because there are a lot of fantastic shows out there.
It was definitely a learning experience, though, and if I could go back in time, I would have preferred to have more lead-time. The whole thing came together very quickly: we decided to do it in late October and around four months later, we were standing on the con floor. Just that short window of planning alone was a huge obstacle, and while I’m happy to say we overcame it, I think more preparation would have benefited everyone.
As it stood, it was very much an all-hands-on-deck type situation, and I think the Image staff and myself wound up being more directly involved than we had originally anticipated. I’m happy we were, though, because we were able to do things like setting up the programming and designing the program guide and the tickets.
It all worked out in the end.
In your keynote speech, you brought the house down with a rousing array of announcements. Names like Morrison, Niles, Gillen, Spencer, Wood and many others were part of them, and it led the comics internet to fight over each other to be the first to declare this “the year of Image Comics.”
Continued belowFor you, both as a comics fan and someone who is one of the most outspoken proponents of original, creator-owned stories being told in this medium, what does it mean to have these giants of the industry at Image, telling the stories they want to tell the way they want to tell them?
ES: First of all, it makes me incredibly proud, because I admire the work of each and every one of the writers you just mentioned, and it’s kind of a dream come true to have them all creating comics at Image more or less simultaneously.
Adding them to a roster of talent that includes everyone from Ed Brubaker to Brian K. Vaughan is what’s really important, though, because when you see all those names together — Grant Morrison, Howard Chaykin, Brian Wood, Fiona Staples, Darick Robertson, Jonathan Hickman, Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips, Bryan Hitch, Jonathan Ross, Mark Millar, Frank Quitely, Jamie McKelvie, Kieron Gillen, Tony Harris, Steve Niles, Robert Kirkman, Nick Spencer, Scott Morse, Brandon Graham, and on and on and on — it’s hard to ignore that something is happening here.
And we’re not done making announcements. We aren’t even halfway through the year yet. There is much more to come, both in terms of established names and exciting new talent alike.
What that all means in the big scheme of things is 2012 is going to be a banner year for new creativity.
Out of all of the announcements, Grant Morrison and Darick Robertson’s “Happy!” was arguably the most shocking. Nearly all of the other creators announced had previously worked with Image, but Morrison never had. You touched on it on your keynote speech, but what was the story behind Morrison coming to Image?
ES: It happened pretty much as I explained in the keynote: Joe Casey’s good friends with Grant and Kristan, and I guess they’d been talking about Image for a little while. They had some questions about how everything worked, and they wanted talk to us directly. They were going to be in Los Angeles for a bit, so Joe asked Robert and myself if we wanted to get together with them for dinner, and it just kind of developed out of that.
More than anything else, it was a case of Joe introducing one set of friends to another set of friends and letting things run their course from there. That happens a lot in comics, I think, but it’s also kind of fundamental to how we do business here at Image. The guys who formed the company all knew one another — their individual relationships pre-dated the formation of the company — and over the last 20 years, there have been countless instances where people have come to Image through someone else.
It’s pretty simple, really: If someone has a good experience here, I think they want to share that with their friends. I think that’s kind of a neat attribute, and something you don’t necessarily get from a company that is beholden to stockholders, or some rigid and outdated view of both the medium and the marketplace.
In the keynote speech, you mentioned that Morrison was very curious about Image, something that seems to be shared by many creators as of late. In your perspective, what do you think it is that has made working with Image more appealing to creators than ever?
ES: Well, I think some of it has to do with Robert’s success with The Walking Dead, and the relative ease with which that success was replicated with the television show. I think that really kind of illuminates what Image is about better than almost anything else.
See, when someone like Brian Bendis sits down to work each day, whether he’s writing one of his Avengers books or he’s writing Ultimate Spider-Man, he’s working for the Walt Disney Company.
When Geoff Johns goes to work each day, whether he’s writing Justice League or Aquaman or just overseeing everything at DC, he’s working for Warner Bros.
But when Robert Kirkman goes to work each day, whether he’s writing The Walking Dead or Invincible or Super Dinosaur, he’s working for himself. And yeah, The Walking Dead has been very successful for Image Comics and for AMC, but Robert Kirkman doesn’t work for Image Comics or for AMC, we work for him. True creator-ownership puts the creator in control.
Continued belowAnd that is what appeals to other writers and artists, and that is what makes them curious about Image.
There are other companies out there with creator-ownership deals, but at the end of the day, Image has the best deal. Image Comics is a comic book company, and that gives us an advantage over all the other guys telling creators that they’re doing creator-owned comics while they’re busy locking them into first look deals on the media rights, or trying to make sure the publisher is getting a producer’s fee on a film or TV show — or worse, telling them they have to do x-amount of work for hire to qualify for x-amount of their own stuff. There’s a big difference in how we operate, and I think that appeals to a lot of creators.
Now more than ever.
Out of everything that was announced, I think the title that made me the happiest was Ken Garing’s “Planetoid.” Image has done such a great job of exposing new talent to the comic reading public in its twenty years, and this book looks just phenomenal. With the increased interest from top names in the industry in working with Image, how important to you is it to keep working to find fresh voices and ideas to release at Image?
ES: That’s always important.
I think you know, writers and artists don’t just materialize out of thin air as top names. Everybody starts somewhere, and I think we’ve had a better track record than most at exposing people to phenomenal new talent. I mean, Jonathan Hickman just put out The Manhattan Projects with us and he’s got Secret coming up — we just made a huge deal out of making his work available digitally — and yeah, he’s quite well-known for his work on Fantastic Four and FF and SHIELD, but he started at Image. All that work we just made available digitally — The Nightly News, Pax Romana, Transhuman, A Red Mass for Mars, The Red Wing — it’s all brilliant, original work that is as good or better as his Marvel work. And I’ll put Morning Glories up against anything Nick Spencer has done elsewhere. I could go on and on.
I think if you look at what we’re doing this year, there’s a real mix of established talent and exciting new writers and artists. And I think anyone looking closely enough will realize there’s a common denominator between them all, because regardless of experience or popularity, they’re all really good.
I hope as people pay more attention to these new books like Saga and Fatale and The Manhattan Projects, they’ll take a moment to check out some of the other amazing work we’re doing. Because there’s a reason people like Ed Brubaker and Brian K. Vaughan are singing the praises of something like Jay Faerber’s Near Death — it’s excellent work. And that’s just one example. There’s plenty more where that came from, and that has always been the case.
And that will continue to be the case.
We’ve talked in the past briefly about what you look for in blind submissions. Once that comes together and you get to the point where a book is set to be released through Image, what do you think it takes to succeed in creator-owned work? What do you feel separates successful ventures like “Luther Strode” from other releases that tend to come and go with little fanfare and buzz surrounding them?
ES: That’s hard to say, really.
On one hand, I could tell you, “Well, it’s better than the rest,” and with something like Luther Strode, I could make a strong argument for that. But at the same time, there are loads of great books that never take off, and that perplexes me just much as it does you, or more to the point, the people responsible for those books.
Like right now, I find it kind of frustrating that things like Jay Faerber’s Near Death or Nathan Edmondson’s The Activity aren’t doing better. With Near Death, you’ve got people like Brian K. Vaughan, Ed Brubaker and Robert Kirkman saying they love the book, and a $9.99 trade paperback that should kind of be flying off the shelves, given the success of things like Fatale and Thief of Thieves. But it’s not. It’s doing okay, but not would it could be doing. Or should be doing, for that matter. And the same goes for The Activity, because you know, Nathan’s extremely talented. We’re getting ready to go back to press on his Who Is Jake Ellis? book, but for some reason that success hasn’t bled into The Activity. So I kind of shake my head at things like that, because it really is mystifying.
Continued below
One of the under-the-radar announcements that I’ve found very exciting was “Creator-Owned Heroes.” Not much is out about this, but it seems to be in a more magazine style format and has a fantastic list of creators attached to it. What can you tell us about this, and with its seemingly different format, is Image aiming for a slightly different market with this book?
ES: This is something Jimmy Palmiotti, Justin Gray and Steve Niles came up with, because they’re all very enthusiastic advocates of creator-owned comics. We’re doing a couple new things with Steve, and Jimmy has done lots of books with us over the years, most recently this great new graphic novella called Queen Crab. They’re great to work with, and this is kind of the extension of all that.
When they approached us about this, it was with the aim of doing something that both celebrated and explained creator-ownership, and that’s why it has more of a magazine format. I think it seemed to everyone involved that “creator-owned” was kind of a term that maybe had a bit more resonance to the professional community than it did for readers or retailers, so the mission statement was to make that term a little less nebulous. So, there are going to be interviews and columns and feature articles about creator-owned comics, right alongside the new material Jimmy, Justin and Steve are writing. Phil Noto is involved, Kevin Mellon is involved — it’s great looking stuff, and I think it’s an interesting and well-timed idea.
The “Experience Creativity” ads Image has been running have been a joy to see, giving readers a look into the world of the people who create the books that we love. What was the genesis for this idea? I love that they focus on the creators themselves, not the characters or stories they tell.
ES: The basic idea grew out of my desire to do something different with the advertising in our comics. I think people’s eyes kind of glaze over when they see house ads in comics, and I’m not sure they’re a particularly great a sales tool.
So, I wanted to do something else, and I was talking about this for a long time with one of my friends, Charles Brownstein from the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, and that conversation became entwined with other things we were talking about, from music to television shows like Mad Men to how rich Image’s overall “story” is.
We kicked a lot of ideas back and forth, but things really kind of came together when we started talking about these great Impulse! record sleeves from the ‘60s, because they incorporated some really evocative still photography of jazz players in their element. I’ve really admired the overall packaging of the Impulse! albums for a long time, but as we talked about the various sleeves and how they related to the overall conversation we were having, it dawned on us that presenting writers and artists in a similar fashion could be just as appealing.
That said, they wouldn’t have worked if not for Jonathan Chan’s design work. He got what I was going for immediately, and really brought the whole concept to life.
It’s been an interesting beginning of the year for the big publishers. Marvel is taking a ton of heat for their double-shipping and a lot of Avengers vs. X-Men business, DC’s New 52 sales are dropping like they have anchors strapped to them, and then you have the list of hugely exciting announcements from your team, Dark Horse throwing down a lot of exciting work from people like Mignola, Wood, Cloonan, and more, and IDW has been making a bevy of exciting announcements and sneaky great comics. The sales may not reflect it (yet), but do you feel like there has been a subtle shift in the momentum of the industry recently?
ES: Yeah, I think people are getting tired of all the bullshit, frankly. I mean, I hate to be so blunt, but it’s the truth. There’s people out there who dismiss it as rhetoric, but you know it’s not just some schtick I’ve adopted. I go to the comic book store every week, just like everyone else who buys comics, and it’s a fucking drag. There’s glimmers of hope out there, sure, but I think readers are waking up to the fact that they’re shamelessly being sold different iterations of the same concepts over and over again. And they’re coming around to the fact that life doesn’t begin and end with Marvel and DC. I think readers are becoming more discriminating, really, and ultimately, I think that’s a good thing for all of us.
Continued below
Digital comics continue to be a hot button issue, especially with Mark Waid’s recent push into crafting his own creator-owned digital comics as well as his efforts on Marvel’s Infinite Comics line, and the response from retailer(s) has not been positive. It seems to me that there is a theoretical line that has been drawn in the sand when it comes to digital – you’re either for them and against retailers, or you’re against them and with retailers.
I know we’ve touched on this before, but what’s your perspective on digital and its potential value in the existing comic marketplace? I’m not in the business, but to me, an added digital reader could be an added print reader as well, and that the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive ideas.
ES: Well, we’ve talked about this before, and what you just said is exactly right. As a publisher, I can look at the sales on our books and tell you that we’re experiencing growth in terms of both of our print and digital formats.
I think it’s stupid to buy into all that print is dead bullshit that people have been spouting for over 20 years at this point. When I’m on the train going to San Francisco, I still see people of all ages reading books — comic books even. I just saw a girl reading Morning Glories on my way back from the airport the other day. Do I see people with iPads and Kindles? Of course, but honestly, I see just as many people reading actual books and magazines. On a recent flight, I saw lots of books and magazines, and a lot of times, it was people younger than me reading them.
The thing is: People like having choices. I have an iPad and iPod and an iPhone and I listen to music and watch videos and read things on them. I also have loads of books and probably more vinyl than sense at this point. I have movies on DVD, and I have movies on my computer and on my iPad. If I really like something, more often than not, I want a physical copy of it, and I don’t think that’s some kind of weird luddite perspective.
At the same time, there absolutely are people who only want to consume all this stuff digitally, and it’s really shortsighted to ignore their existence. If they’re not going into a comic book shop now, they’re not going ever, so if we can reach them some other way, how is that bad for the industry? Like I said — we’re experiencing growth across the board, and at least on the publishing side, there’s a very real benefit from the additional sales that come from digital comics, just as there was a benefit from selling comics in bookstores when that channel opened up to us. I don’t see how it’s at all that different, really. Digital is just another sales channel.
The people who get that — whether they’re retailers or publishers or creators — will do just fine. The ones who don’t, won’t.
In a recent post you put up on your blog, you talk about the remastering of Amazing Fantasy #15. In its body, you briefly touch on your dislike for oversized collections of comics, including the Compendium collections of “The Walking Dead” and “Invincible.” It seems to be an increasingly popular format for publishers and for fans alike. I’m curious – what is it about this format that rubs you the wrong way?
ES: Well, I actually don’t have a problem with the Compendiums, it’s the big slipcased hardcovers that don’t do it for me. Anything that’s big and clumsy when you’re trying to read it, really. I think the size of standard comics is pretty ideal, honestly, even more so than magazines. With the bigger books… they’re just no fun to read. Don’t get me wrong, they look great on a bookshelf, but they’re not terribly convenient for reading in bed or whatever. In a couple cases, I made the decision to ditch things like my Marvel Masterworks in favor of the Omnibus collections of certain things, and wound up regretting it. The very first time I went to actually sit down and read one of those, I was just — man, this is not for me. If I just wanted to have them on the shelf to show off or whatever, they’d be fine, because as collectibles, they’re lovely books, but for reading? Not for me.
Continued belowFor Eric Stephenson, reader of comics, what’s your preferred way to digest comics?
ES: For the most part, it’s single issues. I spent a good part of the last year buying Frank Miller Daredevil comics, the Byrne/Claremont run on Uncanny X-Men, and old Lee & Kirby Fantastic Fours. I’d sold off my Walt Simonson Thor issues, too, so I had to go back and buy those again.
I buy various things at the comic book store, and it’s almost always single issues. I just picked up the latest issue of Terry Moore’s Rachel Rising, and then there are these awesome books Nobrow Press is putting out. In fact, I think the production values on things like Robert Hunter’s The New Ghost, or Ben Newman’s Ouroboros are kind of pointing the way forward in terms of singles, because they’re just so perfect in every respect, from paper stock to size. It’s small press stuff, but I think the attention to detail on those books, and you know, everything Nobrow does, kind of elevates the whole package and creates a different kind of experience from standard single issues.
Let’s say there was some weird circumstance where you’d only be able to read one of the titles you’ll be producing this year. Out of all of them, what’s the one title you wouldn’t be able to miss out on?
ES: Man, I really don’t know how to answer that question!
There are things that haven’t come out and things we haven’t announced yet that are likely going to be really amazing, so it’s just impossible to say….
Plus… I mean, it changes all the time. One day it’s Saga, the next it’s Fatale, then after that it might be Glory or Near Death or Invincible. I really love Super Dinosaur, but I also love The Walking Dead. And Savage Dragon. And Haunt. We’re doing two new Jonathan Hickman books — how do you split that baby? I was just in England and Jonathan Ross was showing me pages from America’s Got Powers, and you know, that’s going to be really amazing, too.
I think there was a time, way back when, that Image had like one kind of “tent pole” book every few months or so, but now…. I think Image’s line is the most robust its ever been. I’m in a very privileged position, because I don’t have to worry about budgeting to read all the great books we’re putting out.
The last two times we’ve talked to you, we asked who the one creator you’d work with would be if you could, and you answered Brian K. Vaughan and Grant Morrison respectively. You’re now working with both. Who’s the next name you’re eager to work with at Image?
ES: You know, one of the other writers for Multiversity actually came up to me at Image Expo and told me you guys were joking that the next time you asked me that, my answer would be, “God,” so I think any other response is probably going to be a huge disappointment.
But…
I certainly wish there was a way to get Alan Moore to do a monthly comic book again. League of Extraordinary Gentleman is great, but that’s a little different from getting a monthly dose, you know? It could be he’s no longer even thinking in those terms, but if he was, I think we’re in a position to do right by him, whereas some other publishers can’t or won’t.
I mean, I’ve kind of said all I have to say in regards to the Before Watchmen stuff, but the one thing I will add is that when I read about Alan’s frustrations with that whole situation, it occurred to me that just a few years later, Image could have been an option for him.
And given the proper circumstances, I think we still could.
Since you took over in 2008, Image’s overall share of the market is up, the roster of talent working for the company has skyrocketed, and everyone from fans to creators is buzzing about Image Comics. How do you capitalize on that momentum? What’s next for you and Image?
ES: We are going to keep moving. There’s still plenty to do.
