• Hi Guest!

    The costs of running this forum are covered by Sea Lion Press. If you'd like to help support the company and the forum, visit patreon.com/sealionpress

Comics of Infinite Earths: A Valiant Failure

One story I've heard relating to Deathmate is that Rob Liefeld was so late on his pages that Bob Layton ultimately resorted to flying from New York to California, going to Liefeld's house and refusing to leave until he finished his work, then Layton inked them himself in his hotel room and sent them on ahead of him via FedEx.

I think that's emblematic of the big problem in that era. Image was where the young guys and Jim Valentino basically did whatever they wanted the way they wanted, because their art virtually guaranteed that it would sell at the time. Valiant was where older guys who wanted to keep things going like it was still Marvel Comics in 1985 ended up (though they tended to have younger "hotshot" artists; some of Joe Quesada's earliest work was at Valiant). A crossover wasn't going to work because the working cultures were too different.

More to the point, "Image Comics" wasn't this cohesive thing in the way Marvel and DC and, indeed, Valiant, were or tried to be. Every Image creator owned (and continues to own) his own work. If they wanted to cross over they could but strictly speaking there was not really an "Image universe". Crossing it over with Valiant, for whom the connected universe was its bread and butter, was probably a bad idea in the first place! So overall, I would concur with @Charles EP M. that avoiding Deathmate is probably the best choice!

(Here's a fun one you may wish to consider in the future, by the way: what if Perelman never got his bid in and Jim Shooter had bought Marvel Comics?)
 
Last edited:
The video game side of things is interesting to me because I like comics but I don't really like video games. I wonder sometimes how you end up with a video game studio of all things buying a comic book company, never mind buying it for as much as they spent. If all their games were as crap as people say they were, where did they get the money?
 
Interesting to think of Disney's Valiant film series, especially since them not owning a massive shared universe on the same scale as Marvel's with (crucially) characters most people have heard of means that the chances are that superhero films will remain where OTL they were pre-MCU: mostly self-contained action-adventures.

That, or Doctor Solar ends with Ninjak trying to talk to the title character about the Harbinger initiative...
 
The video game side of things is interesting to me because I like comics but I don't really like video games. I wonder sometimes how you end up with a video game studio of all things buying a comic book company, never mind buying it for as much as they spent. If all their games were as crap as people say they were, where did they get the money?

Acclaim made a lot of their money by licencing properties to make games from (they had the WWF licence before WWF jumped to THQ, since WCW was doing better on the video game front under that developer), perhaps Acclaim saw their purchase as a way to cut out the middle man?

It's maybe not a coincidence that they filed for bankruptcy a few years after losing a lot of these licences and trying attention seeking marketing like offering thousands to any UK couple that would name their son Turok or buying advertising space on headstones.
 
In this, Acclaim's sadly like too many midcard comic companies: entirely reliant on licenses which can go away like that, and then what are you publishing? Dark Horse lost Conan, Buffy, and Star Wars in a few years, and where'd they be now if Mignola had taken Hellboy to Image in the 90s?

One story I've heard relating to Deathmate is that Rob Liefeld was so late on his pages that Bob Layton ultimately resorted to flying from New York to California, going to Liefeld's house and refusing to leave until he finished his work, then Layton inked them himself in his hotel room and sent them on ahead of him via FedEx.

I don't know if Layton's telling the whole truth there but I've never heard Liefeld deny it, so I know what conclusion I draw!
 
That's a real spiraling into the plughole scenario there.

True, but presuming Dark Horse can survive Joe Mad being too busy playing Final Fantasy VII to do any of the work he's being paid for, it could mean the that in the 2000s you potentially of people being lifted directly out of the early webcomics scene because they have a vaguely manga-like drawing style. (Unless you are referring to the scenario posited in the article, of course!)
 
I wonder sometimes how you end up with a video game studio of all things buying a comic book company, never mind buying it for as much as they spent. If all their games were as crap as people say they were, where did they get the money?
Video games are simply a much bigger market than comic books. A small video game company is going to be bigger in objective terms than a small comic company.
 
Back
Top