Thread by @Comrade_Bullski

As promised (threatened?), strap in folks, because we are going to spend our Saturday talking about the abandoned, canceled and plain evaporated comics of Image Comics. Much of this is pretty fascinating and not just in a trainwreck kind of way, so stick with me!

First off a DISCLAIMER: These posts will touch upon comics creators who are not nice people at times. This is NOT an apology or endorsement of these individuals, merely a recording of facts about comics that existed (or nearly did). Support good creators, not bad ones.

SECOND DISCLAIMER: I have tried to find appropriate art for all comics discussed, but in many cases all we have is a solicit or a mention of a title, with no art even existing. In some cases there is an ad, but I haven't found any scan that has the ad included. Them's the breaks.

I will not spend too much time going through the history of Image as a company, but I feel it's important to establish that most of the comics involved in these posts will be the product of Rob Liefeld's Extreme Studios or its spin-offs Maximum Press and Awesome Entertainment

The latter two were not Image Comics studios, but they are very relevant to the topic at hand, and also Awesome Entertainment has enough canceled/abandoned projects to fill a whole thread on its lonesome.

If you wonder why most comics here will be Liefeld-related... well that is either already clear to you or will be once we are done. I will touch on some stuff from the other founders as well when appropriate, but suffice to say they have a LOT less unused and abandoned stuff.

Arguably the first canceled Liefeld project predates Image Comics by 5 years. Youngblood was first announced as an upcoming miniseries in Gary Calrson's Megaton Explosion, published in 1987. This was a special sampler issue, showing off the "Megaton family" of characters.

In this issue, Rob has a few pin-ups and a "Coming Soon" ad for Youngblood, a version of the team very different from the one that would appear in 92. It also shows off the characters that would become Brigade. However the promised Youngblood series failed to reach the required

...number of preorders, and thus never materialized. We thus never saw what this version of these characters would have been like. Rob instead went to work for DC and later Marvel, where he became a superstar.

In 1991, Liefeld pitched a mini-series about Cable starring a team of time-displaced mutants called the Executioners. Its unclear exactly what happened, but disagreements over this seems to have been instrumental in Liefeld leaving Marvel entirely and focusing on Image.

As shown above, Liefeld originally planned to use the Executioners mini as was at Image (presumably minus Cable), but for some reason he didn't, and instead Youngblood #1 became the very first Image comic ever published, arriving in spring of 1992. So so our saga begins.

The very first Image Comic I could find that never manifested there is virtually no information about. Titled "Extreme: The Art of Rob Liefeld", this was solicited alongside the original Youngblood series, but never had an ad or any art shown that I know of.

Replies to letters in Youngblood #2 indicate "Art of" was scheduled for August of 1992. It never happened, and was never really discussed again. Why? No idea.

For brevity I will skip over a bunch of minor changes in solicits such as changing creative teams and different cameos, but one that is worth mentioning because it's so whack is George Perez on Youngblood Strikefile #1-3, 1993.

The Diehard arc in Youngblood Strikefile was the first solo outing for a YB character (on a flip book with a Chapel storyline) and was originally solicited to sport George Perez inks over Liefeld pencils. When the book was published, inks were by Danny Miki.

It's now 1993. Liefeld originally announced the ongoing Youngblood for this year, but it was bumped up to 1994 for scheduling reasons. What he also did was starting to advertise the upcoming Youngblood Cartoon, which was said to premiere in 1994.

These ads ran for a very long time, but the series ultimately went unproduced other than a brief show reel (available on Youtube) due to Marvel buying out the studio set to produce the series, thus edging Youngblood out of the running.

Another implausible media project from Extreme was Doom's IV. Heavily advertised as hitting in 1993, this was touted as a property developed in collaboration with Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment with the goal of making it a multi-million dollar movie franchise. Yeah, rly

The mini-series Doom's IV kept getting bumped up and didn't manifest until 1994, and the movie? Never happened and was quietly never mentioned again. Why? Maybe because Doom's IV was just a poor re-do of the Fantastic Four and Liefeld didn't even bother to draw it.

1993 saw Image establish a hold on the market, with Liefeld getting a few ongoings started like Supreme and Brigade (more on these later), but he was drawing very little himself, perhaps overwhelmed with his duties as studio leader and Image founder. And then came 1994.

"Oh there weren't that many canceled series in 1993" you say. And no, there weren't, but you also literally haven't seen anything yet.

The first canceled series I want to talk about for 1994 is "Extreme". It was advertised as a quarterly, 64-page comic anthology with the talents of Liefeld, Fraga, Miki, Horie, Rapmund and many others. Unlike "Art of" I believe we know exactly what happened with this book.

First bumped up to 1995 and then quietly canceled, I'm sure that "Extreme" would have featured the material that was published in the promotional Extreme #0 and Extreme Hero #0. These books are very thin, nowhere near 64 pages, which gives some clues on the fate of the original

Extreme #0 debuted a HUGE amount of different comics by the Extreme mainstays like Cybrid, Law and Order, Risk and others, none of which ever appeared in an Image Comics again, but many of which got Maximum Press features later. I believe "Extreme" was originally going to have...

...full-length ongoing stories with these characters, instead of launching a bunch of different titles, but the workload may have proven too much and it was scaled back to a "sampler" comic.

One 1994 announcement that I can barely find any information about is "Mark 5". Initially just advertised with a black page with the title and no creative team "Rob Liefeld's Mark 5" was eventually bumped up to 1995 and given a creative team, but I have found no art for it.

Solicited as coming from the writing team of Tom and Mary Bierbaum with art by Todd Nauck and Danny Miki it was said to come out in spring 1995... and that was the last we ever heard of it. What was it? maybe an early title for some other comic, but I have found no published

...comic that matches the solicit exactly. So it's a mystery until I interview one of the creators, I guess.

Now onto a comic we know a lot more about! Prophet 3000 would have been a 4-issue miniseries from original Prophet ongoing artist Dan Panosian and featured the character Exile, Prophet's brother, who was introduced in the promotional Prophet #0.

Prophet 3000 never happened and Exile was never mentioned again. What happened? Well I don't think Panosian stayed with Extreme beyond this point, so it's possible he fell out with Rob or left for some other reason. Not the last time you'll see the "3000" subtitle!

The Knight was a backup feature in early issues of Bloodstrike by artist Chuck Jones, and was to become an ongoing or a mini in 1994, but was never heard from again.

Speaking of Bloodstrike. As one of Extreme's first ongoings, it had enough issues in 1994 to participate in the "Images of Tomorrow" gimmick, which really didn't turn out that great for 3/4 of the participating titles...

"Images of Tomorrow" meant that four titles would skip ahead to issue #25, giving readers a cool glimpse into where the title would be in 1995. The titles in the event were Bloodstrike, Brigade, Supreme and Stormwatch. All but Stormwatch were Extreme Studios books.

Stormwatch managed to seamlessly integrate the IoT issue when they reached issue #24, but at that point both Brigade AND Bloodstrike were canceled, and thus never "caught up". Supreme did catch up but the story was so out of synch that issue #24 treated the IoT issue as a...

...fictional comic read by the protragonist. Uh-oh. Brigade also had suffered a MAJOR shift in direction during the period since the IoT issue came out, including KILLING OFF virtually all the characters who appeared in the issue. Double uh-oh!

As a result, many of the references to "past" events in the three Extreme IoT books ended up never actually happening, which in the case of Brigade was especially noticeable since the original team were all dead and couldn't have any of those adventures. What a total disaster.

Brigade was also the ONLY IoT title that was going to have a SECOND flash-forward issue in issue #26. This stayed in solicits for a month or so but was eventually dropped and I have been able to find no art or cover for it, so who knows what happened there.

Last but absolutely not least, if you opened up any Extreme Studios book in 1994 you probably couldn't miss this giant TWO-PAGE splash ad for YOUNGBLOOD YEAR ONE written by industry giant Kurt Busiek. Holy crap!

I wanted to read this book somewhat fierce, but apparently disagreements led to the book getting shelved. To make the loss even more palpable, this book was ALSO going to have some George Perez art, as seen in this advance solicit.

The Perez covers did end up getting published in youngblood Battlezone #2 in 1995, but Year One remained missing until the 2000s. "Youngblood Genesis" hit in 2004, putting out two issues based on Busiek's plots but with all-new art and scripting.

Apparently nobody bothered to consult Kurt on this which seems like a true douche move, and as a result he asked his fans to not support this book. Arcade Comics collapsed soon after, and the rest of the series remains missing.

That's it for 1992-1994, but before I continue I need a bit of a break to clear my head. Feel free to ask me anything in the meantime, I will deal with 1995-1997 in a new thread to avoid this one becoming endlessly long.

Thanks for reading!