Image Expo: New projects from Aaron, Ellis, Wimberly, and more

I say, goddamn! This year’s IMAGE EXPO has kicked off, bringing its usual deluge of new project reveals from Creators I Fucking Love.

The Mary Sue:

Image’s Eric Stephenson delivered a keynote that touched on the importance of indie and creator-owned comics. After going over a short history of creator-owned comics, he began to express his belief that Image stands at the forefront of putting the power back into creators’ hands. On what exactly Image does for its creators, he said, “We handle the publishing, creators handle the rest.”

Then, he shared what could be summed up as a bit of a mission statement, a sentiment that can probably describe everything Image strives for. He said, “We imagine comics not as they were, not as they always have been, but we imagine comics as they can be, comics as they should be.”

Which is a great thing, and Image might be that company to define what comics should be… if they weren’t, you know, letting transphobic jokes and slurs slip into their comics (see: Airboy #2).

Either way, here in order of presentation, are the new titles that Image believes comics should be.

Invincible Reboot – Oct 2015
Sean Mackiewicz

Huck
Rafael Albequerque, Mark Millar
One man with learning difficulties and a heart of gold finds that he has superpowers and sets out to help people. Because that’s just what good people do.

Codename: Baboushka
Antony Johnston, Shari Chankhamma, Simon Bowland
James Bond-esque pulp spy thriller featuring a former Russian mafia head and her entanglement with working for “the good guys.”

Heartless
Tula Lotay, Warren Ellis
Genre-defying spooky “horror comic” focusing on a female musician who returns home to live with her parents. Focusing on the dark side of human nature, Lotay is calling it a modern British folktale with David Lynch and Andrei Tarkovsky.

Camp Midnight – Halloween 2015
Steven T. Seagle, Jason Katzenstein
A little girl finds herself the only human at a summer camp full of monster kids. Full graphic novel one-shot, 240 pages.

Ringside – November 2015
Joe Keatinge
A story about wrestling and the relationships that pop up in the wrestling industry.

Expired
Jimmie Robinson
A homeless veteran out of Afghanistan, a woman haunting a parking meter, and the incredible collision of all the forces involved: parking attendants, serial killers, and Satan!

Throwaways
Caitlin Kittredge
Real world sci-fi spy thriller focusing on a former MKULTRA human experiment subject with psychic powers, partnered with his strong, tanky female bodyguard.

Axcend
Shane Davis, Michelle Delecki, Morry Hollowell
Teenager gets pulled into a video game and spit back out, but something follows him back to the real world. A story on finding out where fantasy ends and reality begins.

Faster Than Light – September 2015
Brian Haberlin, Skip Brittenham
The discovery of faster than light travel comes with an ominous warning that triggers a race to find a way to stop a threat that is looming in the not-too-far distance.

Hadrian’s Wall
Kyle Higgins, Alex Siegel, Ivan Reis
“A sci-fi murder mystery on the Nostromo.” A tale about destroyed relationships; between planets, between countries, between people.

Cry Havoc – January 2016
Simon/Si Spurrier, Ryan Kelly
A London street musician finds her world turned upside down once monsters and other supernatural threats living inside other people begin to make their presence known in her life. A book to be broken into three parts, with three different colorists to represent different aspects of the character’s life.

Virgil
Steve Orlando
A “queersploitation” comic that focuses on an outed cop fighting his way across Jamaica to save his man.

Blue Monday; Scooter Girl –
Chynna Clugston-Flores

Sunset Park; SLAVE PUNK vol. 1: White Coal –
Ronald Wimberly
Sunset Park is about a monster who comes over the East River into Brooklyn to change its neighborhoods. Yes, that monster is exactly what you think it is.

SLAVE PUNK vol. 1: White Coal is a book focused on an engineer whose partner is a slave set in the pre-abolition American South.

The One%
Kaare Kyle Andrews
One man’s journey to even the score between the super rich elite and the rest of the world. With violence.

Black Magick – October 28th, 2015
Greg Rucka, Nicola Scott

The Goddamned
Jason Aaron
“This is if Quentin Tarantino ended up making Ten Commandments.” Enough said.

The Otherside
Jason Aaron, Cameron Stewart
A special edition, hardcover re-release of The Otherside.

Crosswind
Gail Simone, Cat Staggs
Sexy, suave hitman trades lives with a suburban Seattle housewife. Check out our exclusive interview with Simone and Staggs for more information!

The Walking Dead (special issue)
Brian K. Vaughan
Vaughan is writing a Walking Dead issue. Yes.

Snotgirl
Leslie Hung, Bryan Lee O’Malley
Allergies suck, and nobody knows it better than a fashion blogger who suffers from the worst allergies in the world. No, seriously. And it looks like it’s going to be great.

Personal picks out of this year’s expo? Snotgirl, Crosswind, Black Magick, Sunset Park, and SLAVE PUNK vol. 1: White Coal all seem like amazing books, Sunset Park especially. A book that can turn gentrification into a monster that changes/destroys neighborhoods is a book worth checking out. When Wimberly presented it on stage, there were more than just a few tongue-in-cheek laughs when he began to describe exactly what it is the featured monster does.