Nothing’s Impossible
Image Comics asked me to write about comics in a guest blog on their site, so I did.
It’s all about the ‘rules’ of comics or, really, the lack thereof.
Here’s an excerpt:
I became pretty jaded with comics after this, but continued to happily consume them. I began to understand there were rules here. Characters can never change too much. Covers weren’t literal. Villains never died forever. Heck, nobody really did.
Then there was 1992.
It was only a year or so before that I also understood comic books were made by individual human beings. They weren’t just born in a comic store like some sort of magic tomes generated from the ether. The first time was in Amazing Spider-Man #349, the Erik Larsen illustrated issue about Doctor Doom and Black Fox. His art style was so wildly different from the Spider-Man art I was used to that I took noticed. I then followed him through whatever he would do and quickly found what seemed to be similarly unique artists, like Todd McFarlane, Rob Liefeld, Jim Valentino, Jim Lee, Marc Silvestri and Whilce Portacio.
In 1992 that string of names jumped ship and formed Image Comics and again, I didn’t exactly get what was going on. For all intents and purposes they were just more comics published by the collective putting out Marvel and DC books. I didn’t quite distinguish lines just yet.
Then I read those books.
Everything changed.
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