34 Years Ago, Marvel's Best Creators Rebelled Like Never Before

Published Nov 8, 2026, 11:59 PM EST Kolt Day is a tenured freelancer who has brought invigorating and provocative takes to Screen Rant and ComicBook, alongside loads of writing experience in other realms. Outside of media journalism, Kolt loves music production and philosophy (particularly Nietzsche, Derrida, and Foucault). Back in 1992, a crew of Marvel Comics' best artists dramatically left to start their own venture; that decision would end up having a colossal impact on the comics industry of today. Image Comics is nowadays known as a powerhouse unto itself, historically publishing major works like Spawn, The Walking Dead, and Savage Dragon. Meanwhile, Robert Kirkman's Invincible has been adapted into what's arguably the 21st Century's best animated superhero series so far. Despite a slew of top-tier material, what makes Image Comics a particular standout in the history of comics is the publisher's fraught origins. Nestled within its founding and the early years when Image defined '90s comics is a story of independent comics, creators' rights, and more that connects back to creators' disillusionment with Marvel for decades. Image Comics just happened to have the right combination of things to make a true creators' rebellion work. How Marvel Drove Its Best Creators Away Image Comics was born from what was effectively an exodus of Marvel's hottest talents of the time: Todd McFarlane (Spider-Man), Rob Liefeld (X-Force), and Jim Lee (X-Men), all of whom had broken sales records—Lee's X-Men #1 remains the best-selling comic of all time. This wasn't something that Marvel rewarded. For Marvel, brand identity was the most important thing—over and above the personalities working on the comics, themselves. Comics were effectively written freelance as work-for-hire, meaning that creators themselves were—and often still are—disposable. This had two effective consequences for breakout stars working under the Big Two. The first, for some creators like Liefeld, was the feeling that their stardom made them disposable; creators with star power presented a risk to the brand-centric paradigm. The second, for other creators, was a feeling of being undervalued: because they worked as freelancers, they had no actual rights to things like royalties for merchandise based on their work. All of this should also be understood in the context of a tide-shift in the industry, generally. More and more independent and creator-owned publishers were cropping up, with varying levels of success. Creators' rights had always been a major concern in the industry: milestones included the 1978 formation of the Comics Creators Guild (featuring huge names like Neal Adams, Frank Miller, Chris Claremont, and more). Todd McFarlane had made efforts to unionize creators at Marvel prior to Image Comics being established. For the Image Comics exodus in particular, the minutiae were well documented in Michael Dean's four-part series "The Image Story" for The Comics Journal, charting the history of Image Comics up to its publication in 2000. What the deep-dive shows isn't an organized group of rebels but disgruntled artists with variable motivations and wavering commitments simply seeking to own the works they create if they were going to stay in the comics industry. Image Comics was the end result of a long process through which Liefeld found other options—it was Liefeld who would bring Marvel's top artists together, and it was Liefeld who went to Malibu Comics and probed into whether they would publish black-and-white lines from Marvel's biggest names. Liefeld would go on to recruit McFarlane, Lee, Erik Larsen, Jim Valentino, Marc Silvestri, and Whilce Portacio as a united front to bargain with Marvel for creative control. Image Comics Was An Unlikely Solution The triumphant Image Comics rebellion doesn't start with an exodus, but with an ultimatum given to Marvel Comics' president by Liefeld, Lee, and McFarlane in December 1991: that they would continue working at Marvel on their own creator-owned lines, or they would leave to publish elsewhere. The outcome was perhaps predictable, and the artists left with intentions to defect completely. In 1992, Image Comics was officially established. The underlying principle of creators owning their own works wasn't new, but Image's managerial structure was relatively novel; Image would act as infrastructure for the studios and partners working under its umbrella, and no partner could interfere with another partner's work. Malibu Comics played a critical role in realizing those principles, willing to take on the Marvel talent at face value and provide essential early support with marketing, publication, and distribution. Through a combination of luck, timing, and star power, Image would become a massive hit, even briefly overtaking DC's market share with record-breaking titles like Liefeld's Youngblood, McFarlane's Spawn, and Larsen's The Savage Dragon. To this day, many of Image Comics' best series can be traced to the company's first year. By 1993, Image was successful enough to leave Malibu entirely and become independent. The following year, more non-partners would start publishing under Image with titles like Alan Moore, Steve Bissette, and Rick Veitch's 1963 and Larry Stroman's Tribe (which would become the best-selling African American comic from an African American creator of all time). To an extent, Image's structure would also become its undoing for a while. The surrounding hype combined with its creators' failures to deliver books on time would arguably play a considerable role in comics' speculative bubble bursting in 1993. The same varied motivations that birthed Image Comics would pave the way for intense disagreements, tension, and poaching between founders—Liefeld would officially resign in 1996, right before a meeting where he would have been ousted. (He would later return as a creator, not a partner, in 2007.) For Better Or Worse, The Image Rebellion Redefined Comics Custom Image by Ana Nieves Despite everything, though, Image Comics eventually righted the ship, steadily expanding their line of comics and eventually bringing on a new partner, Robert Kirkman. Today, Image stands as an emblem of independent comics publishing in general: independent studios can not only survive and thrive in an ecosystem dominated by the Big Two, but they can become enough of a force to compete with them. This is despite unglamorous origins in an often understated history of creators' rights in comics that, ironically, found a major watershed at Marvel itself when the legendary Jack Kirby, co-creator of many of the brand's biggest characters, started to publicly criticize Stan Lee and the company over rights, royalties, authorial credit, and the work-for-hire model in the '70s and '80s. In other words, the stardom that would propel Image to success was latent in Marvel's own machinery. Image stands as a spiritual win for creators' rights in comics. But its huge success also meant it could provide a truly commercially viable platform for independent creator-owned works that could stand up against the Big Two—the lack of which creators had been circling for years before. The history of Image Comics is fascinating precisely because it's rocky. There was no golden origin, and the reality is that the bedrock was there for something like Image Comics to emerge eventually—the industry had been setting up for a creator-focused behemoth that could actually contest the Big Two for decades. But Image Comics is what emerged, and through the rebellion of seven disgruntled Marvel artists, the company now stands as a beacon for the stories mainstream publishers might not want to tell.