Image, Extreme, Maximum and Warchild

Today let's talk about the exciting world of Image Comics, its history and financial practices...

Wait! Come back!

Okay, so this wasn't exactly what I was looking forward to thinking about today either, but I promise I'll keep it brief and it gets weird and funny by the end.

The original Image founders

Image was founded in 1992 by several high-profile illustrators (Todd McFarlane, Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld, Marc Silvestri, Erik Larsen, Jim Valentino and Whilce Portacio) as a venue where comics creators could publish their material without giving up the copyrights to the characters they created, as creator-owned properties.

They each set up studios where they all did their own thing, at first trying to interconnect the Image Universe, but ultimately setting up their own little universes. Liefeld set up his Extreme Studio, where he put out Youngblood, Supreme and other titles.

Titles thought not to fit with the Image brand were self-published under Liefeld's separate imprint: Maximum Press. These were financially supported separate from his Image/Extreme titles. These titles included Avengelyne, Law and Order, Black Flag, Risk, and licensed properties such as Battlestar Galactica.

The Image creators weren't known for having managerial or production experience, and a lot of the titles fell behind schedule and it was a mess for distributors and retailers. Disagreements between partners began to develop. Several of the partners complained that Liefeld was using his position as CEO of Image to promote and perhaps even to financially support Maximum Press. The other partners discussed ousting Liefeld from the company, and Liefeld resigned in September 1996, giving up his share of the company.

So what does this have to do with Moore or Supreme or Awesome? A lot, in fact.

Moore had been doing his own thing since leaving DC Comics, creating Lost Girls and From Hell among others, and returned to find that Image had completely shaken up the comics industry. Moore saw the Image founders as rebels, bringing change to the corporate industry, and was wooed into working for some of the separate studios.

In 1993 he wrote issue 8 of Todd McFarlane's Spawn and would eventually do some spinoff work for McFarlane on a character called Violator (god, this is worse than the financial analysis). He also wrote a self-owned retro miniseries called 1963 with Rick Veitch and Stephen Bissette.

1963 was an important touchstone on the way to Supreme as Moore and company were recreating comics from the 1960s, in much the same way as they would later recreate Supreme flashback stories. The intent of 1963 was to create a group of heroes from silver-age comics who would then battle the Image heroes of 1993. Of course, there were all kinds of production delays and fallings out among the Image guys (as well as between Moore and Bissette) so by the time Moore started writing the script for the final battle, it had all unraveled. The series ended on a cliffhanger of Youngblood's Shaft kidnapping a 1963 hero for a reason we never found out. (Spoiler alert... oh wait, nevermind.)

The next year Moore would put out a miniseries mixing his McFarlane work with another of Liefeld's Youngblood characters in Violator vs. Badrock, seen at left. (Please, can we go back to talking about how Todd McFarlane originally envisioned Image as a comic book creators' union? That sounds interesting, right?) Well, the only point I'm making is that Moore had produced a couple books with Liefeld characters prior to Supreme.

He almost produced one more: Warchild.

In 1995, Maximum Press promoted a series written by Moore called Warchild. According to the wonderful Glycon website, Liefeld gave an interview (posted on OC Weekly) that revealed some details:

"'He once called us up to tell us that he had just been in the dream realm and talking to Socrates and Shakespeare, and to Moses, dead serious, and that they talked for what seemed to be months, but when he woke up, only an evening had passed, and he came up with these great ideas. And I’m tellin’ ya, I think it’s shtick, dude. I think it’s all shtick. I’m gonna start saying that stuff. Cuz you know what? It makes you instantly interesting. Like "O yeah, last night I was hanging out with Socrates. Came to me in a dream. We played poker . We dropped acid." That’s the kinda stuff Alan would say all the time, and he’d say "Oh, I’ve been practicing dark magic."'"

"Liefeld goes on to describe a comic book pitched to him by Moore that he still owns the rights to, entitled Warchild. Written shortly after Moore saw Pulp Fiction for the first time, it's a knights-of-the-round-table concept set in a Tarantino-esque inner city gangland setting.

"'I have him on tape for 4 hours just talking about it; it’s my most cherished possession.

"'You haven’t lived until you’ve heard Alan describe the heroes – this is in the near future – getting trapped in an amusement park in Compton, where one of the rides you go on is a drive-by shooting.

"'A couple of the artists I gave it to handed it back. The first ten pages is some of the most difficult, visually, it’s hard to crack. We’ll probably publish it in script form. I can’t crack this, life’s too short.

"'There’s standing atop a building, looking in through the window at a certain angle, while the person is sitting doing their hair looking at themselves in the mirror...and the panel descriptions, you go, how do I shoot this? I could shoot it with a camera, but like all the storyboards? It’s just very difficult.

“'He’s a genius, a showman, a shrewd businessman, and a whiner. I have no intention of working with him again.'”

Moore disputes having some of these discussions:

"'OK. I’ve never spoken to Rob Liefeld at all in my life. I don’t ever remember ringing the Image office. I have had some conversations with [Image partner] Eric Stephenson, er –'

"OK.

"'For the record I have never had conversations with Socrates, Shakespeare or Moses.'"

Anyway, the ad for the series is above. Suffice it to say, this series never came out, to this reviewer's dismay:

In WARCHILD, a young warrior-boy (called Sword) and his cyborg guardian (called Stone) and their companion Merlyn (who is the famous mage, but inhabiting a female's body) team up to have adventures that circulate around battling villains The Black Knight and Morgana Ley Fe.I initially purchased this because of an advertisement I saw in a mid 90s Image comic announcing a project called WARCHILD written by Alan Moore and drawn by Rob Liefeld. I do not know if such a book ever existed, or if perhaps things got changed around in the planning stages (IE... Alan Moore telling Liefeld and Image to ram it where the sun don't shine), but in any case, this book--the book I ended up with, was created and plotted by Liefeld, written by Eric Stephenson, with art by Chap Yaep and John Stinsman, with some other inkers.

It's a medieval knight sword-n-sorcery fantasy adventure, something that might make a dazzling FX anime, but leaves a lot to be desired in the brainfood department. I don't share people's total criticism of Liefeld's art, but I never thought much of his (so-called) writing/plotting ability. As I mentioned, I bought this book expecting to get Alan Moore writing and Liefeld's art. I ended up getting neither (although, Liefeld drew alternate versions of the covers to the individual issues that make up this compilation). I have seen Chap Yaep's art before (Youngblood/Xforce, Youngblood) as well as Eric Stephenson's scripts (SUPREME), so I gave the book a chance.

First of all, I wasn't always sure if I was reading a period piece, or simply an adventure taking place in some alternate reality. After awhile, I didn't really care. There was plenty of action, but I found myself not really caring about any of the characters. I read the book simply to get to the end (so I could read other books). I did not find this a terribly engaging adventure. Like so many of the failed Image projects, the action was fierce and fast, and the art looked dynamic enough, but there just wasn't much imagination or creativity to it. Definitely not something I'd save to reread somewhere down the line.

If you're a fan of this kind of fantasy, and you're willing to pay 6 bucks (plus $4 shipping & handling), then have at it, knave. But I think this story will simply bore you and have you craving something really exciting--like seeing how many bites it takes to get your fingernails down to the nubs that you're used to having.

Much, much later, people would bug Liefeld and Image's Eric Stephenson about the Warchild scripts. Various rumors have popped up over the years about how it was a four issue series and the scripts were for more pages than the standard 24. Was Liefeld sitting on a potential masterpiece? Why haven't they published it in the last 20 years?

Here's Stephenson's response:  

"Well, I think you may be over-calculating how many of those scripts actually exist... There are two scripts for Warchild."

So Moore never finished writing the series. Did Liefeld tell him to stop? Did he just decide to do Supreme instead? Who knows? But don't expect Warchild to ever be produced or completed. If we're lucky, maybe the scripts will be released or leak out and we can all look back and wonder why we thought Tarantino was so cool in the mid-'90s.

Anyway, that's the long form reason why, starting with Supreme #43, the book came out for a while by Maximum Press instead of Image Comics. Moore eventually used this break as an opportunity to create a whole new universe. But that has to wait for another Day.

We're so close to Awesome, I can almost taste it!

Well, I think you may be over-calculating how many of those scripts actually exist. Alan wrote a total of eight Youngblood scripts, three of which have been illustrated, to date. There are two scripts