favourite Image Comics founder

pretty easily lee for me - super stylish, sure, but also a great costume designer (most of his x-men designs remain iconic versions of the characters) and seemed to have the strongest handle on actual anatomy and storytelling of any of them. at least, i think one can read his better stuff as belonging to the kirby-byrne-JRjr genealogy of coherent beefy action storytelling. obv. had his cranking-out-too-many-pages-per-month moments too and as a writer he was pretty terrible but hey.

I think Larsen might be the best overall storyteller of the bunch, although I prefer the draftsmanship of Lee and Silvestri. Hmm.

Nah, who'm I foolin', gotta go with Liefeld. Excessive pouches and an inability to draw a foot will win out every time.

Voted Portacio not because I love his work but because he’s not a dickhead

obv. had his cranking-out-too-many-pages-per-month moments too

IIRC he was (along with a few of the early Image creators) notorious for missing deadlines.

Missing deadlines is one of the main reasons to start your own company in any field iirc

Lee is terrible and has always been terrible, and is also an exploitative cunt. His costume design skills ime consist mainly of genericising pre-existing work or adding pointless filigrees.

Portacio and Silvestri are Lee but worse.

Liefeld is obviously the absolute worst, and the fastest to become a factory-running cunto. Has that light bruise that stopped him from returning the Rick Veitch art he stole healed yet?

Larsen is a dickhead online, but the only one of these who could write at all (only within his own style, obv), and AFAIK always treated labour well: even on sharecropping gigs, he gave opportunities to talent he thought deserved exposure or needed a $ gig.

McFarlane clearly one of the 28 biggest cunts in comics history, but you're asking about having time for their work: his Amazing Spider-Man work was really great teenage comics, the only person between Ditko and Rege to bring a distinct visual approach to the character. He turned terrible with the advent of the Adjectiveless, but had a few years of decentness there.

Valentino obviously the most decent person in the bunch, and only a member by fluke, but alongside Marder did the most to make Image Central a) a thing and b) a force for good. His work is very, very bad, but at least I COULD read three issues of Normalman in a row. It would be almost impossible to read an entire issue by one of the others for surface-level enjoyment.

McFarlane always came off like a megadick but he came off like an ultramegadick in Howe's Marvel book. And then I recently read the Gaiman/McFarlane trial transcripts in an old TCJ and wow. Nuclear-grade megadickdom.

I always liked Silvestri's X-Men stuff, I have no idea what he's done in the 30(!) years since then

Todd's 1992 TCJ interview is up in text or audio form, if you're up for delving further

Romita Sr and Ross Andru had distinctive visual styles on Spider-Man before McFarlane. Agree w/ the rest of yr post. Jim Lee's porno sensibilities when it comes to drawing female characters undermines any claim to 'actual anatomy' imho.

fair point actually, his cheesecake was relentless, as much or more than liefeld's guns and pouches. i was thinking about his big beefy magneto, cyclops, colossus, omega red... all classic power fantasies in the grand tights tradition. but probably psylocke's rear end got more page space than any of those.

the 28 biggest cunts in comics history

this might be the more important poll

Do we need a noms thread, or does sic have 28 ready to go?

loved mcfarlane as a teen reading spiderman and then spawn, but larsen (who i don't know anything about as a person) was more fun i think? where's sam kieth? was he not a founder?

narrator: no he was not

Where's Hank Kanalz (yes, I know, 'who?')?

Kanalz continues to receive jobs from Jim Lee, and is Senior Vice President of Vertigo and Integrated Publishing at Warner Bros Entertainment.

I really like some of Larsen's work on the late-80s immediately pre-Grant Morrison Doom Patrol series, it was kind of inconsistent, but occasionally it almost reminds me of 80s 2000ad, Brett Ewins or Mike McMahon maybe

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/marvel_dc/images/c/c3/Doom_Patrol_Vol_2_12.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20091014070206

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/marvel_dc/images/4/42/Doom_Patrol_Vol_2_14.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20091014070530

xpost lol, sic, I'm aware he didn't evaporate into the ether, but shall we acknowledge just for a moment that he isn't a 'name' in the same way the other dudes are.

OIC, that might've been a miscommunication. I was asking where Kanalz was on the list of Image founders (and yes, I'm aware he isn't technically a founder).

Larsen since he writes the only book I still care about and he was the only decent editor.

Larsen since he writes the only book I still care about and he was the only decent editor.

Larsen since he writes the only book I still care about and he was the only decent editor.

Larsen since he writes the only book I still care about and he was the only decent editor.

Cool ILX

Wow, you're really a fan of Larsen, huh.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I picked up a Savage Dragon the other day, and it seems to be a comic about drawings of Savage Dragon's semen dribbling out of his diminuitive wife.

Isn't every comic, though, really?

I haven't seen a new issue of Savage Dragon in forever, but apparently this is part of a Robert Crumb inspired new direction?

http://www.savagedragon.com/review-savage-dragon-228/

the real revelation here is that dragon has a goatee now imo

The current Dragon is the son of the original Dragon I think.

I kind of wish that all the original Image books were still around and had all also had evolved into disgusting R Crumb style sex comix

didn't Liefeld do a regular comic strip about a tiny Atom-esque superhero with disproportionately huge genitalia at one point

the real revelation here is that dragon had a son and that son has a goatee imo

The 'savage' descriptor was a foreshadowing of that development imo.

erik larsen's the disgusting savage dragon, jr

didn't Liefeld do a regular comic strip about a tiny Atom-esque superhero with disproportionately huge genitalia at one point

He did four single-panel cartoons about superheroes going to a psychiatrist, sold the movie rights to Jennifer Lopez, and never created anything new again iirc

I did not recall correctly, there were five

http://robliefeldcreations.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/shrink4.jpg

so they never actually made the movie? it's weird, those cartoons are obviously at a 'bad even for Rob Liefeld' level of bad, but the basic idea of a comedy about a psychiatrist whose patients are superheros seems like it could potentially work? (maybe it would be better as a cartoon on adult swim or something rather than a movie though? some kind of Dr Katz-esque thing?) imagine how angry ppl would be if an adaptation of that cartoon was a huge hit an Liefeld became like twice as rich as he is now

I guess something about superheroes being essentially ridiculous male power fantasies for dorky insecure adolescents makes the idea of a superhero on a psychiatrists couch talking about their neuroses inherently funny somehow?

I don't like any of these guys (in a laughing-with not laughing-at way) but I voted for Portacio as I enjoyed Mike Baron's run on Punisher as a kid, before I discovered good comics

Thank you sic, I had never seen those Liefeld panels before, they really are beyond wretched. It makes me puke to see him bigging up Ed Piskor's X-Men thing, as if his endorsement meant anything at at all.

Next you're gonna tell me you didn't buy a pair of button fly 501's after seeing how nicely they compliment a session of excessive crosshatching.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

I would have voted Larsen. I read about 150something issues of Savage Dragon and at its best it was some of the best superhero comics I've read without ever getting into the visionary territory of Kirby, Ditko, Gene Colan and a few others. It could be very funny and on a couple of occasions surprisingly sad. He had a good letters page, he always preferred to print the more negative feedback and answer it patiently. He can be refreshingly honest and even though I don't follow his work anymore I still enjoy his take on things.
As a drawer, he always had anatomy problems but had some personality but I think over time it has lost some of that personality.

Jim Lee is often seen as more solid but I think he's one of the least interesting of the bunch. I'll give him credit for wonderful Psylocke cosplayers though and his drawings of Invisible Woman's butt awakened me to butts as a boy.

I'll give Portacio credit for the sheer strangeness of his drawings.

I'll echo Sic about the distinctiveness of McFarlane's Spider-Man. He could also draw good capes, grubby underworlds, gritty streets and interesting faces. I think Spawn can be worked into something interesting sometimes. Shame he never improved as an artist and didn't seem to have the passion to keep doing it. Maybe I should compliment him for (mostly) just giving up on drawing rather than becoming a hack.

I have little experience with Valentino's work.

Silvestri done a few decent looking comics in the 80s, sometimes the inkers deserve more credit for making these guys look their best but I remember this issue of Wolverine being impressively moody.
https://comicvine.gamespot.com/wolverine-43-under-the-skin/4000-64306/

I'm not a Liefeld fan but I don't think he's the absolute worst. He's distinctive enough that I'll place him above hundreds of trend chasing hacks and occasionally I can see the appeal of some of his early work, like in this link.
https://mercurialblonde.wordpress.com/2013/05/22/rob-liefeldx-force-comics-love-in-part-iii-decoration-in-comics/
Surely as flawed as it is, you can see some trashy appeal in these drawings?

I surely could at age fourteen.

I'm curious if the three ppl who voted for Liefeld in this poll were just trolling, or if they don't rate any of these guys but Liefeld is their 'favourite' in as much as his art is so bad it's funny, or if there are actually sincere Liefeld admirers on ilx?

I'm with Robert in finding Jim Lee's art pretty boring for the most part. idk if it's maybe an age thing - when I started reading American comic books in the mid-90s stuff that looked like Lee's art kind of felt like the generic default superhero style, I can imagine I might have felt differently if I saw his work before that style became ubiquitous and Lee so widely imitated

I think I voted for Liefeld mostly because I haven't had particularly strong feelings about any of these dudes since I became old enough to drive and so why not vote for the golden retriever in a human body. For a brief window of time, though, I was way into these guys and they helped usher me into the larger world of comicsdom so I have to give props.

I'm so happy Erik won this poll.

Something about him I always thought was funny is when Wizard was asking creators which was the lamest dorkiest character they've ever worked on. Most creators chosen forgotten characters and Larsen chose The Punisher.

in retrospect, the idea of these dudes being talented entrepreneurs doing their own thing, and all the misconceptions and press angles on what they were doing, feels a lot like the later dot com boom that happened at the other end of the 90s

"the writing is bad, but it can come later!"
"missing deadlines is bad, but they'll make it work"
"self-publishing is a strong creator's rights move"

Probably discussed this before but I wonder why more people didn't jump onboard or try something out at Image in the early days? They often got big superhero artists to do pinups and things like that but there really wasn't many big names beyond the founders.

because that wasn't an option in the early days, is the most obvious guess and also the factual answer

can you imagine the number of ill-conceived pitches they received in the mail from teens?

I mean, half were probably better than Liefeld's ideas, but that's a given