What’s this? An Image Comics new releases post?! Indeed – we’re going to give this a try for a few weeks and see how it goes. Do you care? Do I? Let’s find out with my first ever Image Comics releases post, covering Image Comics January 1 2025 releases.
This week in Image Comics: The Massive-Verses’s multiversal saga, Samurai vs. Dragons, the penultimate issue of Saga Season 2, Walking Dead kicks off “What Comes After” in color, and more!
I have barely read any Image series in the past two years, so these posts will give me a chance to re-orient myself to what Image has been up to while I’ve been focused almost-entirely on catching up on Marvel.
I’ll say that this post in particular covers an entire slate of books I don’t particularly enjoy, but I sure do know a lot about them! I’ll try not to go too negative. I’m more excited for future weeks that include more new series rather than this line-up of mostly venerable entries.
The Krisis Pick of the Week: Saga (2012) #71! It’s a big deal that Season 2 is wrapping up later this month, and it makes a great time to binge on what you’ve missed.
This post includes every comic out from Image Comics this week, plus collected editions. This isn’t the typical comic releases post you can find on other sites. Why? I explain each collection and comment on every series with a new issue out this week to help you figure out if they’re for you. Plus, for some long-running series, I’ll point you to a personally-curated guide within the Crushing Comics Guide to Indie Comics to find out how to collect that title in full! There’s no other website on the internet that can claim that.
And now, onto Image Comics January 1 2025 new releases!
Image Comics January 1 2025 Collected Editions
Note: Image Comics collections hit the direct market 2-3 weeks prior to when they ship to the book market, so if you order these books today from a traditional bookseller they will still be pre-orders.
Invincible Vol. 7 [New Edition]
(2025 paperback, ISBN 978-1534375062)
This new line of slim paperback editions of Invincible (2003) have now fully departed from the mapping of the originals. The original Vol. 7 collected Invincible (2003) #31-35 and this new edition collects Invincible (2003) #35-41.
That means they’re slightly more efficient at collecting the series than the original paperbacks, but there are so many collection options for Invincible that these still are one of the least efficient ways to pick it up.
Are there so many options that I need a Guide to Invincible? Sound off in the comments if I should add it to my list of guides for 2025!
Radiant Black Vol. 6: The Catalyst War – Infinite Earths
(2025 paperback, ISBN 978-1534397248 / digital)
The Massive-Verse flagship title has an innovative take on a multiverse story, with this paperback collecting both the A and B versions of Radiant Black (2021)#28-30 (the “B” versions are numbered as “.5” issues) to wrap up “The Catalyst War” storyline.
The B issues come out on the same date as the A issues, are titled the same, and tell the same story in the same time period beginning from the same splash page – but in different realities!
I fell off of this book early on, but I’m impressed that what started out as “loser stumbles into superhero technology” has escalated all the way to multiverse shenanigans in just 30 issues.
Do I need to add a Guide to the Massive-Verse to my collection of indie guides? We all know my weakness for shared universes, so it’s definitely tempting!
Read on for a summary of all of the Image Comics January 1 2025 single issue releases!
Image Comics January 1 2025 Physical Comic Releases
Knights vs Samurai (2024) #4 – This is a rare Todd McFarlane productions comic that is not a part of the Spawn Universe! Multi-hyphenate David Dastmalchian created and writes this series, which can be succinctly described as “Shogun with giant monsters and magic.”
I can’t say the quality of this comic matches the universally-lauded Shogun. What I would say si that it’s not just the theme of the that is a match with Shogun, but the deliberate pace and focus on small moments between characters in the middle of an epic story.
Saga (2012) #71 – See Guide to Saga by Brian K. Vaughan & Fiona Staples. This is the penultimate issue of “Season 2” of Saga, which has run for three years since January 2022 and will total just 18 issues (compared to six-and-a-half years and 54 issues for Season 1). It is no Vaughan’s longest-running series of all time, having eclipsed Y The Last Man during this second season.
I bought all of Season 1 of Saga in trade paperback as it came out starting in 2012, and read and re-read it many times before moving to New Zealand in 2017. In 2019 after moving my entire comic collection to my current house by myself, I pulled out all of my trade paperbacks and binged it all in one go.
By the end, I’d gone a bit soft on my view of the series. I think you could feel how tired Vaughan was (less so for Staples) by issue 40, and Volume 8 (#43-48) was downright unpleasant to read. Add to that the big twist at the end of issue #54 closed off of my favorite plots and I was perfectly happy assuming the series was over.
And, of course, in 2019 there was zero hint of when it might return – their hiatus could’ve been a whole decade!
Now that Season 2 is coming to a close after such an effect run of three arcs in three years, I’m very tempted to return to the series to see if it recaptured that old magic. I might binge all of Season 2 digitally later this month when issue #72 hits on the 29th.
Despite my frustrations with Volume 8, I do think it’s worth reading at least the first 18 issues of Saga if you’ve never read it before. The entire setting is ingenious, and Fiona Staples arrived after a relatively slim resume of indie work to blow the doors off of the comic industry.
Savage Dragon (1993) #274 – See Guide to Savage Dragon. Erik Larsen has kept his original Image flagship alive just as long as Todd McFarlane has with Spawn, though some gaps and delays mean Larsen is now nearly 100 issues behind the ruthless machine that is the Toddfather. Larsen continues to release only 6-7 issues per year, so the gulf between them will only continue to grow.
Savage Dragon has gone on a peculiar journey along the way. It reached a climax in 2011 that heavily cribbed off of Invincible, its sibling at Skybound. Even before that, Larsen leaned into making the book extremely (and sometimes uncomfortable) gory and raunchy. That continued as the title shifted focus to a next generation character (having progressed in more or less real-time since the original 1992 mini-series!) and became somewhat of a queasy humor comic.
I’ve tried to dive into Savage Dragon a few times in that queasy humor era, and it’s just not for me. Despite my love of early Image, long runs, and shared universes, this one just stopped hitting for me. At this point, many women appear with their nipples fully engorged – or sometimes just accidentally exposed, along with their often-dripping genitals. Curiously, the male characters rarely get the same treatment, though the book is always eager to remind us of our Dragon’s regular sex life.
Recently, a major plot point turns on a Steamboat Willie era Micky Mouse sexually assaulting a character, as depicted with unflinching detail on a splash page in issue #271.
That all said, every issue is still hand-crafted by Larsen on script and pencils. The bordering-creepy obsession with sex aside, the guy’s still got it. His scripts are tighter than on that other long-running Image flagship, and his art has matured into rough-hewn pencils that wear their Kirtby influence on their sleeves.
There’s just a lot of women with exposed, dripping genitalia.
If you’re an established Dragon fan looking to make your return, I’d say you should start with issue #251 – which changes up the status quo a bit and puts the book’s horny qualities on full display. However, if you’re new to this series, you ought to simply start at the start and hang in for as long as you love this fin-headed, green, regular guy from somewhere other than Earth who often has no choice but to play superhero.
Spawn (1992) #360 – See Guide to Spawn. I just updated the Spawn Guide for this post, and.. whoa. In 14 years of running Crushing Comics, I have never seen a single guide explode with as many new series and collections in a single update other than Spider-Man, X-Men, or Batman! Spawn is about to have a big year in 2025.
That makes it an interesting time to drop in on Image’s longest-running flagship series. I’d suggest starting from issue #351 if you’re curious, which kicked off a new status quo as written by Rory McConville with classic image artist Brett Booth on pencils. Currently Spawn is considerably depowered and dealing with a Heaven vs. Vampires turf war that he’s not entirely sure he wants to wade into.
Booth’s art is thrillingly familiar if you were a Wildstorm reader in the 90s and the colors from Robert Nugen are really good the past few issues. McConville’s scripts are less wordy and more grammatically correct than McFarlane’s, but maybe not as much pulpy fun. The last two issues really struggled for coherence in their action sequences, but that classic Spawn narration in caption boxes remains intact.
I’m really curious to explore the broader Spawn Universe in 2025, with three other ongoing titles in continuity with the flagship, as well as the 2099-esque Rat City and a massive amount of limited series.
The Walking Dead Deluxe (2020) #104 – The twice-monthly colorized reprint of one of Image’s biggest hits of all-time has recently crossed the half-way mark on the march to color every comic in the #193-issue original black-and-white run.
Each issue not only adds colors from Dave McCaig, but also end notes from creator Robert Kirkman. This version of the comic is not being collected, so single issues are the only way to experience it!
Issue #103 kicked off the “What Comes After” story in Volume 18, which found the survivors under Negan’s leadership (though larger collections begin with issue #97). If you know the world of Walking Dead well from the TV series, this is a point where you could pretty easily jump into the comic and catch up on the differences between the two as you go.
Do I need a Guide to Walking Dead? Surely this is a solved problem at this point, yes? But, do you want to see me solve it?
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