A different take on the idea of sharing a THR graphic, for once; this wasn’t done for the newsletter, but for an Image Comics story for the site proper. There’s a rule at THR that you can’t just post images of a corporate logo to accompany a story, which makes a reasonable amount of sense until you have to find an illustration for a story where the only thing that makes sense is the corporate logo.
In this particular case, it was a story about changes at Image Comics’ sales department, which… isn’t really about a specific comic or anything else with a visual hook, per se, but about a company. So, company logo, right?!? Or some kind of graphic to encompass Image as a publisher. The only problem being, that’s not something that really exists — indeed, given Image’s ethos, the idea of one image (no pun intended) that sums up Image Comics is almost antithetical to the publisher’s operating theory. So, what to do?
I made something I thought skirted the rules enough, merging pictures from three different titles that felt “Image Comics,” but also big enough for the casual reader to get — in this case, the new Brubaker/Phillips title, Reckless; Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples’ Saga; and Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard’s The Walking Dead. Each one put into a color filter to let them be differentiated, but also play well together. Oh, and then there’s the Image Comics logo, because I needed the damn logo in there.
The graphic was rejected, because it was seen as being a corporate logo. In the end, we went with cover art from the first issue of Bitter Root, an Image Comics title that I chose more or less because, fuck it; I’m going to pick a book that I liked.
I still liked the graphic, though, so I rescued it and posted it here. Look, if I can’t use this site for something like that, what’s the point…?