The Image Comics Timeline

4 min readNov 17, 2021

Back in August I’ve been tinkering with a dataviz project, illustrating the publication timeline of Image Comics. I accessed the data from Comicvine’s database through its API and displayed it using D3.js.

Got inspired to do this after a day or two of discourse on Twitter about the various Image series that fell into an indefinite hiatus, be it official or unofficial (Saga, Bitch Planet), which allows for other publishers, like Boom! to step up in the commercial genre comics arena.

But, to my mind, this is hardly a surprising development. I was always thinking of Image as a company that allowed series to delay the publication of new issues and as only one of a few publishers occupying its segment. What’s been dubbed the Image Expo era started around 2012, between the premiere of the Walking Dead TV show and the launch of the hit series Saga. It got its name after the conference where the publisher made splashes in the trade press by announcing projects from big name creators that up to that point would have worked with Marvel and DC and publish their creator-owned work at dedicate Big 2 imprints like Vertigo or Icon.

Looking at the period prior to this Image Golden Age I think we can see clear contrasts with what followed, which partly explains why a particular vision of Image Comics stuck.

Gaps in the timeline represent delayed series. Visually one of the biggest ones is between 2008 and 2011. I wonder if the Image Expo era is so particularly remembered because it not only ushered a great quantity of high-profile series, but that it also came after this lull, when Image was losing attention and sharing or even getting shadowed in the ‘indie’ space by IDW, Oni, Top Shelf and Dark Horse with still some glimmers of relevance at Vertigo and Icon. Thinking about that time I think of Locke and Key, Scott Pilgrim, the Parker GNs, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen restarting, the last great stretch of B.P.R.D. comics, Stumptown, The Sixth Gun, Casanova getting reissued and continued at Icon, Scalped and Sweet Tooth. That period was also a moment of expected possibility when thinking about form and distribution, with lots of attention payed to graphic novels, webcomics and digital comics.

Then, in the Image Expo period Image ‘gobbled-up’ not only Big 2 talent, but also webcomics people and most of the vital people from the other publishers. For this, and various other reasons ranging from changing contracts, shifting viability of various formats, to abusive work environments, other publishers contracted in scope, while Image grew.

The thing is that from the get-go plenty of those Image Expo-announced series ended up being duds, plagued by delays, as can be seen in the gaps, or even never coming out. What I think obscured this fact was the huge growth in the number of series published by Image following that landmark. As long as at least some of the releases go through and come out on a reasonable schedule it’s easier to look at the shiny new comics than to keep track of all those that get sidetracked. On the other hand, by 2019 we can see a contraction in the series published by Image. Explainable maybe by new publishers like Black Mask, Vault and TKO catching-up, Boom! attracting talent, the growing popularity of self-publishing through crowdfunding, tech companies like Amazon, through ComiXology, entering the field (and now Substack). I’m thinking that the gap in releases created by the COVID-19 epidemic allowed people to catch-up both with the backlog and with what’s actually coming out, realizing that there’s a broader phenomena happening.