Image Comics Announces Diverse Future Slate at 2015 Expo

Image Comics held its fifth Image Expo in San Francisco Thursday, announcing a number of upcoming projects from creators including Brian K. Vaughan, Scott Snyder and Image Comics founder Todd McFarlane.

In total, 18 new titles were announced during the two-hour presentation, led by Image Comics publisher Eric Stephenson, who gave a keynote emphasizing the importance of ideas to the company. “One good idea can change everything,” he said, calling Image a company where “anyone with the right combination of guts and talent could do the comics they wanted, exactly the way they wanted.”

Certainly, the latest Expo offered new series by a more diverse set of creators than previous events, with Marjorie Liu, Eric Canete and Alex de Campi appearing on stage to make announcements. Similarly, there was more variety in the projects themselves, with previous focuses on sci-fi and horror being replaced by projects that included memoir (Emi Lenox’s travelogue Tadaima), young adult survivalist fiction (di Campi and Carla Speed McNeil’s No Mercy), fairy tale parody (Skottie Young’s I Hate Fairyland) and The Ludocrats, a new series by Marvel writer Kieron Gillen and artist David Lafuente that Gillen described, tongue-in-cheek as “the greatest comic of all time.”

Related Stories

TV

'Swarm' Showrunner Janine Nabers Looks Back at the Ominous Start to Dre's Rampage

TV

Why Telling the 'Daisy Jones & the Six' Story Using Original Songs Was Crucial

The diversity even continued into format; although most announcements were for traditional comic books, Brandon Graham spoke about Island, a magazine anthology with a rotating collection of creators inspired by Heavy Metal and the defunct Raw (A 1980s anthology that originally published Art Spiegelman’s Maus).

Perhaps the biggest announcements both came from Saga and Lost writer Vaughan, who named two new projects: We Stand on Guard, with art by The Matrix concept artist Steve Skroce, about a war between Canada and the United States 100 years in the future, and Paper Girls, with Cliff Chiang, about a group of 12-year-old newspaper delivery girls “on the night something very strange happens.” Vaughn called the latter series the most personal comic he’s written, but he declined to reveal more details at this point.

The full list of Image Expo announcements is below:

• Savior, by Todd McFarlane, Brian Holguin and Clayton Crain, which asks the question “What if the most dangerous man on Earth was also the one trying to do the most good?”
• Heaven by James Robinson and Philip Tan, which Robinson described as “Mankind going to war with God in the future.”
• Starve and Black Road, both written by Brian Wood, with art by Daniel Zezelj and Garry Brown, respectively.
• Island by Brandon Graham, Emma Rios and others.
• Tadaima by Emi Lenox.
• Plutona, about a group of kids who find a dead superhero in the woods, by Lenox and Jeff Lemire.
• A.D. (After Death), by Lemire and Scott Snyder, a graphic novel about what happens after someone survives their own death.
• We Stand on Guard and Paper Girls, both written by Brian K. Vaughan, with art by Steve Skroce and Cliff Chiang, respectively.
• Monstress by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda, about a young girl in an alternate 1920s populated by monsters.
• Sons of the Devil by Brian Buccellato and Toni Infante, a formerly-crowdfunded project about the son of the leader of a religious cult.
• Run Love Kill, by Eric Canete and Jonathan Tsuei, which Canete described as featuring “a lot of running, a lot of loving and a lot of killing.”
• No Mercy by Alex di Campi and Carla Speed McNeil.
• The Ludocrats by Kieron Gillen, co-writer Jim Rossignol and David Lafuente.
• Kaptara by Chip Zdarsky and Kagan McLeod, which takes place on an alien planet described as the Island of Dr. Moreau populated by action figures.
• Revengeance by Darwyn Cooke, a crime story inspired in part by Mickey Spillane.
• I Hate Fairyland by Skottie Young, about a woman who grew up trapped in a fairytale and has issues as a result.

Read more Comic-Con 2014: Image Comics ‘Moves Forward’ with New Sci-Fi Titles