Next week is the 3rd new comic book day of 2025! This post covers Image Comics January 15 2025 new releases. Missed this week’s releases? Check out last week’s post covering Image Comics January 8 2025 new releases.
This week in Image Comics: A hunk of Hack/Slash, Witchblade relaunched and collected, the Serpentor War, Sam & Twitch in hardcover, a Nights climax, a war across the dream realm, and more!
These posts will give me a chance to re-orient myself to what’s going on with Image after a few years away from reading any of their books!
The Krisis Pick of the Week: The Moon Is Following Us (2024) #5! I feel like the past two issues of this Johnson/Rossmo/Spicer jam got a little repetitive, so I’m hoping for some big revelations in this one. Plus, I’m utterly addicted to Mike Spicer’s colors!
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 15 2025 new releases!
Image Comics January 15 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 Image Comics January 15 2025 books today from a traditional bookseller they will still be pre-orders and will arrive in a few weeks.
G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, Vol. 2
(2025 paperback, ISBN 978-1534345546 / digital)
Even though Skybound’s new Energon Universe continuity G.I. Joe book just launched two months ago, their continuation of the classic Larry Hama continuity has been running for a whole years now!
This the second collection of that continuation, collecting G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero (1982 / 2023) #306-310, billed as a War With Serpentor. SIGN ME UP! I’m excited to pick this up from issue #301 and catch up.
Hack / Slash Deluxe Edition Vol. 5
(2025 oversize hardcover, ISBN 978-1534358034 / digital)
This continued line of Deluxe Editions collects Hack / Slash (2011) #12-25 and Hack / Slash & Mercy Sparx: A Slice of Hell (2010) #1.
(If you’re wondering “How did line this get to Volume 5?”, the original 2007 volume of the series was 32 issues long plus an annual and one-shots, and that was proceeded by a slew of one-shots!)
Hmm… does it sound like I need a Guide to Hack/Slash? I’m actually pretty far along in outlining it, so if you’d love to see that one leave a comment below!
Sam and Twitch Origins Book 2
(2025 “Origins” hardcover, ISBN 978-1534390416 / digital)
See Guide to Spawn. Sam and Twitch (1999) was a comic launched by Brian Bendis following a pair of detectives who work at the street level of Spawn’s world. This collects the back half of that original 1999 series, all written by Bendis save for a final arc.
It’s nice to have this back in print – and finally in hardcover – after a pair of Complete Collections that are over a decade old. It seems like Todd McFarlane is really serious about bringing all of Spawn’s history back into print in the coming years.
Witchblade Vol. 1
(2025 paperback, ISBN 978-1534360600)
A Guide to Witchblade is coming – once I get there in my chronological launch of guides to all of Image’s initial series! This collects the first arc of a brand new Witchblade (2024) series that reimagines the origins of Sara Pezzini.
Nothing is a bigger turnoff for me than a series with a login that begins “a reimagining of the classic storyline,” but at this point the amount of readers with affection for Top Cow’s 30-year-old continuity is vanishingly small. Plus, was Witchblade’s origin really all that great? I’ve read it, and I’d say her series mostly relied on art early on, and got cooking on plot later when a wider world of Artifacts started coming into play.
From that perspective, this streamlined origin in this volume sings surprisingly well, and I think it will read better as a trade than it did in single issues. It makes Sara Pezzini out to be instantly capable and questionably moral, and it leans hard into the supernatural qualities of the Witchblade and who might want to control it from the very first page.
In the service of streamlining the origin of Sara and her artifact, we forgo any kind of superheroic adventures to focus on establishing that the Witchblade makes her horny and then head into issues of training montage with a suddenly-appearing mentor who isn’t all he’s cracked up to me. For a supposed streamlining, it felt two issues too long. However, the final issue pays off all of that meandering with some fun reveals that seem to promise more intrigue to come in the next arc.
I was close to dropping this in singles, but I think by the end of the arc this convinced me to stick around for the next volume. More on that last issue below, since the next issue is also out this week!
Read on for summaries of Image Comics January 15 2025 single issue releases!
Image Comics January 15 2025 Physical Comic Releases
Doll Parts: A Lovesick Tale (2024) #2 (digital) – Major content warning on this comic for sexualization of pre-teen children, sexual assault of children, depictions of sexual assault, verbal/emotional abuse of and around children, and intense focus on disordered eating and body dysmorphia.
I believe understand what the first issue of this comic was trying to do: unflinchingly look at the burdens, pressures, expectations, and harm the world heaps on girls on the precipice of young adulthood (as they defined a character who would become a serial killer in a later book).
I’m sure some people are going to read it and see their lives in it, or see a justification for a killer in another comic they enjoyed. However, I found it often substituted shock value for narrative, even if it might have been accurate in many of the ways it depicted the lives of pre-teens.
This is one of the most disturbing and unpleasant comics I’ve read in my life. I’d recommend you avoid it unless you really want to immerse yourself in all of these themes explicitly for the purpose of being exposed to them and trying to process them.
Even acknowledging that potential value, I find myself seriously questioning if Image should be in the business of publishing content like this.
Feral (2024) #9 (digital) – I have become a Tony Fleecs devotee after loving his co-creation of Local Man (2023) and his unhinged “cartoons in the real world” comic Uncanny Valley (2024). However, I’m not the biggest fan of anthropomorphized domestic animals as lead characters, so I’ve never checked out his messed up animal book Stray Dogs (2021) (or any of his My Little Pony comics).
This book focuses on a trio of Disney-adorable domestic house cats rounded up for mysterious reasons by animal control as they deal with the feline version of The Walking Dead in the form of a rapidly spreading disease. Is it merely rabies as seen through the eyes of a naive housecat? Or, something scarier and more sinister? Major shades of Secret of NIMH in this one!
I read issue #1 and then browsed the rest of the first trade of this, and it’s well-made but just not my thing. I can’t get excited for an ongoing series about housepets. However, I did enjoy how all of the animals have a clean-lined, animated quality to them while the human world at the margins of their notice is more rendered. If you like animal-focused books
G.I. Joe (2024) #3 (digital) – To my ongoing shame, I do not have any existing G.I. Joe guides. Every year, they are the guides I schedule to try to launch the week of Christmas, because the memory of G.I. Joes is intrinsically linked to the holidays and the SEARS catalogue for me. But, every year the season just gets to busy to get them done.
They’re going to happen this year. I swear.
All of that is to say I am a massive G.I. Joe fan. I’ve read three iterations of the comic and I owned so many of the toys. They were my X-Men before I got into X-Men and after I quite X-Men.
In the endnote of the first issue of this series, Joshua Williamson says “The biggest challenge I’ve run into with this series is patience.” I definitely can feel that. This is a world with a cast and lore as deep as X-Men and Williamson is relaunching it from scratch into a single ongoing title. The chances of him using more than one of your favorite Joes from the start is slim to none – although it seems we may be shuffling through many cast members quickly.
However, because of how this book drafts off of the story in Transformers (2023), we start instantly deeper into the low sci-fi elements of G.I. Joe – things that took Larry Hama years to reach in the original 1982 run. And, that’s not just from the Transformers lore… Williamson started things off with some very intriguing definition of Cobra-La in Cobra Commander (2024).
That’s both a positive and a negative for this run. Early issues of the original Real American Hero comic were fully-formed, substantive missions that started with simple armed forces action before ramping up to more credulity-stretching actual. This book opened with a vague mission stretched across two issues that didn’t really move the plot along. Because we know so many other interesting things are happening in this world, it’s hard to get excited by that.
While you could pick this up without reading the preceding Duke (2024) and Cobra Commander (2024) mini-series, I think it’s worth it to start with them. They add so much color to this new Energon Universe and the place in it for the Joe and Cobra, along with all of their familiar uneasy allies.
Gunslinger Spawn (2021) #39 (digital) – See Guide to Spawn. This book follows the adventures of an Old West era Spawn currently stuck in the modern day, where he sometimes teams with members of The Scorched.
With a bevy of new writers steering the larger story of Spawn across many of the new Spawn’s Universe titles that have popped up since 2021, this has been the one book written exclusively by Todd McFarlane the entire time.
It shows. This reads exactly like Spawn (1992) did before the expansion of the line. McFarlane’s scripts are decompressed to the max, riddled with grammar issues, and always tell rather than show (despite the art being in the more-than-capable hands of Carlos Barberi).
Issue #36 recapped Gunslinger’s history in the process of him being arrested. Issue #37 was an entire issue of plainclothes Gunslinger Spawn being in jail. Issue #38 was an entire issue of the massive beastly Spawn creature Monolith giving us a recap of recent plots while interrogating the plainclothes Gunslinger.
On the plus side, that makes this comic extremely easy to just pick up and read with any new issue compared to the main book, which is feeling somewhat unparsable at the moment. However, I think this is really lacking for an exciting reason to exist at the moment – and, it’s also lacking in Gunslinging!
The Horizon Experiment: Finders / Keepers (2025) #1 (digital) – “The Horizon Experiment” is essentially a pilot season of one shots from known indie creators putting their own cultural spin on recognizable adventure and horror story tropes.
This is the last of those five one-shots, with Vita Ayala and Skylar Patridge following a “Puerto Rican reverse Indiana Jones” stealing artifacts from museums to return them to their originating cultures.
I think that’s the strongest log line of all of the one-shots. It will be interesting to see if this or any of the others yield further series extending their pitches.
I Hate Fairyland (2022) #19 (digital) – This is a second series of this Skottie Young fantasy book is billed as “Deadpool meets Alice In Wonderland,” though right now it’s very focused on the Land of Oz (a place where Young has spent time before in his Marvel adaptations of the Baum novels). This is part four of a five-issue arc, so you could jump in with issue #16.
The Moon Is Following Us (2024) #5 (digital) – When I read the first issue of this comic earlier today I was instantly in love. Then I read the next three issues and fell a little out of love.
Without spoiling all of the fun of that amazing #1 issue (and the subsequent “origin” in issue #2), this book is about a war in a forever-changing dreamscape. Riley Rossmo’s faces and figurework are perfect for that world, the way they look like melting wax. Then, when the book needs grounding, writer Daniel Warren Johnson sketches a more solid realm of reality. Mike Spicer’s colors unite their styles and makes the artwork sing, as he does on every DWJ book.
My falling out of love came with the rules of issues #1-2 versus the rhythm of issues #3-4.
I love a book with continuity and structure. I love a world with rules. Issues #1 introduced us to some intriguing rules of engagement in the dreamscape. Issue #2 grounded that in the rules of the real world we know. I was utterly delighted.
However, issues #3-4 showed that the wild nature of the dreamscape means it may likely produce the same story beats over and over. The heroes make a big and audacious entrance. The dreamscape fights back. There is a burst of mega-violence that is only possible in this fantastic world. Then, the heroes punch back bigger and barely escape.
Issues #1, 3, & 4 all follow that exact pattern. Issue #1 was fascinating because it was unfurling the rules of the world as we moved forward, but issues #3-4 didn’t carry that same fascination.
I’m going to keep reading with issue #5 for many reasons (not the least of which are Spicer’s colors), but I’m hoping that the limitless possibilities for the world that the close of issue #4 introduced don’t paradoxically lock us into a dull, repetitive structure for what should be an audacious book full of constant surprises.
Nights (2023) #12 (digital)– This is a odd duck of a comic, blending slice of life, alternate United States history, casual horror, and a narrative fractured across multiple time periods. It tells the story of a teenager who moves to Florida in 2003, which is still ruled by Spain and also happens to contain a handful of semi-friendly vampires (one of whom is a pizza delivery girl) and shy ghosts (one of which is a roommate).
I love the massive scope of world-building ideas combined with ultra mundane elements like catching the bus and cleaning rooms. I’m a big fan of the clean-lined, animation inspired art.
However, for me the dialog and narration was too all-over-the-place. I found that the dialog was hard to follow (and I was alive for 2003!) and often the dialog didn’t marry well with the moments of movement shown in each panel.
Also, it’s a LOT of dialog in each panel. I like that from a compression of storytelling standpoint, but when the dialog annoys me this much it stops being a positive!
I think if you really go for concept over execution and don’t get as hung up on art continuity as I am this could be a wonderfully weird read for you. I found the experience of reading the first two issues a bit annoying for my tastes so I didn’t press onward, but it’s not a bad book. In fact, I kinda wish I liked it more, because I love the world-building a lot.
This issue is an arc-ender and it promises some big reveals that will answer questions that stretch back to issue #1! That makes it a great time to sample this peculiar little series.
The Scorched (2021) #37 (digital) – See Guide to Spawn. I decided this would be the first Spawn’s Universe title I dug into in my attempt to catch up on nearly 200 issues of Spawn and it’s various supporting titles I’ve missed over the past few years. I’m only one arc in, but so far I am seriously digging it!
It starts out as an X-Force style “murder first, ask questions later” team lead by She-Spawn. Having a defined cast of regular characters to share the burden of both the narrative and the action really makes the Spawn formula sing.
It’s going to take me a long while to get all caught up, but I think I’ll keep reading an arc for every new issue that comes out!
Standstill (2024) #6 (digital) – I read issue #1 of this semi-sci-fi wry action thriller from writer/colorist Lee Loughridge, with art from Andrew Robinson an letters from Rob Tweedie.
For me, it didn’t pass what I call “The Asshole Test.” Basically, a book can have interesting writing, great art, and a decent plot hook. But, if the main characters are all assholes and I end the first issue wondering if they’ll die anytime soon, then I won’t keep reading the book.
I’m not saying every comic book character needs to be a lovable Care Bear. Our main character is a man with a violent resistance to toxic masculinity and being told what to do who can stop time. I loved his lesson on Marlon Brando’s queer history to a bar full of bikers. I just don’t want to hear from him ever again.
The Walking Dead Deluxe (2020) #105 (digital) – The twice-monthly colorized reprint of one of Image’s biggest hits of all-time continues through the “What Comes After” storyline that began in #203.
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!
Witchblade (2024) #7 (digital) – As I mentioned above, I came very close to dropping this series, but I powered through to issue #6 and I’m glad that I did to get to this start of a new arc.
The thing that issue #6 brought that the series had been missing so far was fun. It gave us the solution to an early mystery, unlocked a new element of Sara Pezzini’s past, and connected those dots into a confrontation that was vague on the page but which obviously carried some narrative heft.
That feeling of fun and satisfaction is what had been missing from this series since issue #1 for me. It was feeling like a by the numbers reconstruction of original flavor Witchblade with a welcome injection of feminism from Marguerite Bennett, but it feels procedural – rote and joyless.
“Rote and joyless” is a note I’ve had on a lot of comics from Bennett over the past decade of reading many of her comics. Maybe all of them? For me, she is a strong technical writer who has no problems with pacing or structure, but the inside of that structure always feels hollow. Despite a heavy emphasis on internal monologues and a lot of flowery language never makes me feel anything along the way.
Has Bennett broken that streak for me? I don’t think one fun arc-ending issue forgives a decade of underperformance, especially after the doughy middle of this first arc. But, for me it hints that there could be a more compelling motivation for Sara as a character now that the protracted introduction is out of the way
That’s for Image Comics January 15 2025 new releases! What were you already pulling? And, did I convince you to check out anything new? Sound off in the comments below.
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