Next week is the 7th new comic book day of 2025! This post covers Image Comics February 12 2025 new releases. Missed this week’s releases? Check out last week’s post covering Image Comics February 5 2025 new releases.
This week in Image Comics: Jason Aaron bugs out, I Hate Fairyland ends an arc and in Deluxe, Spawn heats up, nightmare fuel in The Moon is Following Us, the very clever Lucky Devils, a lovey-dovey Creepshow, Kill or Be Killed compendium, and more!
The Krisis Pick of the Week: I’m definitely excited to read more of The Lucky Devils (2025), but I’m even more curious to read Bug Wars (2025) #1! I enjoy when Jason Aaron tackles kids as protagonists, I love the idea of a brutal bug war happening in your own back yard, and he’s assembled an astonishing creative team with Mahmud Asrar, Matt Wilson, and Becca Carey.
This post includes every comic out from Image Comics this week on February 12, 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 February 12 2025 new releases!
Image Comics February 12 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 February 12 2025 books today from a traditional bookseller they will still be pre-orders and will arrive in a few weeks.
I Hate Fairyland Book 3
(2025 oversize hardcover, ISBN 978-1534382756)
The deluxe hardcover line of Skottie Young’s irreverent war on a gleeful fantasy land collects the first ten issues of its 2022 second series (which hits the end of an arc this week with issue #20, discussed below).
Kill or Be Killed Compendium
(2025 paperback, ISBN 978-1534333949 / digital)
An all-in-one collection of the 20-issue Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips, & Elizabeth Breitweiser series about a young man compelled to be a serial killer of other killers.
Self Help
(2025 paperback, ISBN 978-1534327542 / digital)
A mistaken-identity noir tale in a madcap world from writers Owen King & Jesse Kellerman and artist Marianna Ignazzi. This initial five-issue arc wrapped in October 2024 without a second arc solicited.
Silverlake
(2025 paperback, ISBN 978-1534327979 / digital)
This collects a brutal World War I horror tale from John Zuur Platten and Andrea Mutti
Spawn: Origins Collection Vol. 30
(2025 paperback, ISBN 978-1534328969 / digital)
See Guide to Spawn. The “Origins” paperbacks are the slimmest Spawn classic collection, always collecting six issues of his 1992 series at a time in sequential order. This pushes us to issue #190.
Read on for summaries of Image Comics February 12 2025 single issue releases!
Image Comics February 12 2025 Physical Comic Releases
Bug Wars (2025) #1 (digital) – This one has me intrigued.
Jason Aaron doesn’t do a ton of indie work and here he has amazed a super-team of collaborators: his Conan the Barbarian art partner Mahmud Asrar, his permanent Thor colorist Matt Wilson, and my current favorite letterer Becca Carey!
They’re telling the story of a kid from Alabama who gets sucked into a vicious, microscopic war in his own backyard in what the solicit describes as “a sprawling new dark fantasy epic.”
I always enjoy Aaron in hopeful mode, and usually having a young protagonist is the quickest way into that (as in his Sea of Stars (2019) co-written with Dennis Hopeless). I’m definitely a lot more curious to read this than I would be if he pitched the same concept but with an adult as the main character.
Creepshow in Love (2025) #1 (digital) – The Skybound horror anthology returns for a Valentines one-shot while we await the start of its fourth volume.
This issue features three tales from purveyor of sexy comics Mirka Andolfo, Patrick Horvath – the creator of 2024’s unexpected smash hit Beneath The Trees Where Nobody Sees, and Yul-Pyeong Oh & Puré.
Death of Copra (2025) #2 AKA Copra (2012) #47 (digital) – I got so hype about finally catching up on Michel Fiffe’s Copra last month after writing about the first issue of this final arc that not only did I finally dive in to reading it, I ordered the bigger-than-oversized hardcover of the first year!
As I always say, this is real indie comics. Sure, Image is distributing a version of it, but it doesn’t get more DIY than Fiffe’s version of Suicide Squad that he writes, draws, colors, letters, and (mostly) publishes all on his own.
Feral (2024) #10 (digital) – Tony Fleecs’s adorable but scary series of The Aristocats meets Walking Dead story about lost cats reaches the finale of its second story arc.
Geiger (2024) #11 (digital) – See Guide to Ghost Machine (eventually) (and maybe sooner than you think!). Geoff John’s story of a highly-radiated explorer in a post-apocalyptic world continues.
I dropped this after not loving the original mini-series or issue #1, but Rocketfellers (2024) was so good and hooked me so hard with its glimpse of the wider Ghost Machine multiverse that it might have pulled me back in.
Hack/Slash: Body Bags (2024) #3 (digital) – See Guide to Hack/Slash (eventually) (but maybe sooner than you think). I’ve been a fan from afar of Tim Seeley’s farce about resurrected zombie serial killers vs. a final girl and her monster-man partner. But, I’ve never done more than page through it – it’s been on my “long reads” list for five years now.
So, I figured, “No time like the present” and leapt into this current series, with mashes Hack/Slack up with Jason Pearson’s Body Bags, a 90s & 00s Dark Horse comic about a city full of assassins – including a buxom, mouthy teenage girl named Panda.
However, I’d say the bigger draw here is Seeley reuniting with original Hack/Slash artist Stefano Caselli, now a major comic art star who is drawing Ultimate Black Panther (2024)!
What I didn’t know about Hack/Slash is just how irreverent and purposefully provocative it is. The prurient fun here isn’t only about boobs, blood, and guts, but also Seeley leaning hard into having characters say deeply inappropriate things. I’m not sure if that’s a Body Bags influence as Seeley pays tribute to Pearson, who recently passed away, or if all Hack/Slash has this tone.
Caselli really sells it in ways that surprise me! He doesn’t stick to the clean, bold figures you’d recognize from his Marvel work. He mixes things up both with his character style and his panelling, and it’s a welcome surprise.
I think if you love that sort of purposefully transgressive world where horror movie killers are hunted by their final girl and bounty-hunters attend special assassin schools, this will hit for you.
The Hive (2025) #1 (digital) – A comic from A. J. Lieberman and Nailbiter artist Mike Henderson about crime and… bees?
Lieberman has been around for decades, but I’m not familiar with their work and the solicit for this issue doesn’t give much to go one, so this is a blind read for me!
I Hate Fairyland (2022) #20 (digital) – This is the big final of the “Happy End Game” arc that began in issue #16 and there are no further issues solicited. This isn’t the end of the story of Fairyland, but it’s ambiguous when and how it will continue.
Lego Ninjago: Shatterspin (2024) #3 (digital) – Apparently in Skybound Entertainment’s mad grab for power they not only landed Hasbro’s Transformers/GI Joe license, but also a license from LEGO! Read the “the secret history of LEGO Ninjago” full of illustrations of adorable mini-figs with tiny square feet!
The Lucky Devils (2025) #2 (digital) – Charles Soule & Ryan Browne have teamed up again with a truly whimsical take on heaven, hell, angels, and devils. Hear my one-minute(ish) review from Crushing Comics Live.
I struggled at first with issue #1, because the pair of human characters and their plots seemed SO BASIC. Right out of central casting with the most generic problems. The whole “ugh, I’m out of money and my credit cards are maxed” beat made me roll my eyes so hard that I dislocated something.
BUT. But, then the devilish twist in the plot arrived and I realized the generic characters and plot was the entire point of the setup. That’s the entire concept of this book. That’s what these devils have been doing to these people’s lives… turning them into a trope of sadsack losers with awful luck to try to inspire their ire.
Now, we get to watch as the devils begin to mix things up with a new kind of devilish deal: they’ll stop torturing their sadsack humans by giving them unending bad luck, but only if the humans grow a spine and take charge of their lives. The entire conceit is that most people want power for evil reasons, but what if instead people wanted power just so the devils on their shoulders would leave them the fuck alone.
I dig it. I love any kind of book about the structure of hell and what it takes to reign in hell, so once this pivoted in that direction I was sold in a big way. I enjoy that we’re playing in two different settings – the real world where our characters will have to figure out how to be bolder, but also a crowded urban setting in hell where our devils are nothing more than infernal insurance adjusters with their own quotas to meet.
The Moon Is Following Us (2024) #6 (digital) – The madcap dream war from Daniel Warren Johnson, Riley Rossmo, & Mike Spicer hit it’s halfway point last month, and I find my interest slightly waning. Hear my one-minute(ish) review from Crushing Comics Live.
It’s… it’s very Daniel Warren Johnson. If you’ve read his other indie comics, the rhythm of this will feel incredibly familiar even if the landscape of a child’s whimsical dreams is a new environment. There’s a series big, bloody fight. The over-the-top action gets real when at least one character we were really enjoying dies. There’s a twist in perspective to force us to reframe the conflict. It’s the same overall rhythm of Extremity or Murder Falcon.
That said, even if issue #5’s big twist wasn’t the hardest thing to anticipate, it does send us in a compelling direction for the second arc. Now Penny’s parents are fighting a war on multiple fronts in the land of her dreams… maybe with some unlikely allies.
Ultimately, I think I’m fighting my own expectations on this one. I think I was looking for something more about the rules of dreams as suggested by issues one and two, not just a G.I. Joe book full of disposable grunts in endless battles with seemingly no consequences. Yet, DWJ has maintained a heartfelt center here where even the big bad is a sympathetic character – and that’s why I’m still pulling it.
Spawn (1992) #361 (digital) – See Guide to Spawn. Issue #360 saw Todd McFarlane return to scripting duties. Despite my mounting sense of dread when I saw his name atop the credits, he seems much tighter and more focused than he was two or three years ago when I last checked in on Spawn.
The issue might not have been objectively “good” but it was fun as hell for me – it’s the kind of issue that makes me enjoy Spawn. In a weird way, I think it was the perfect place to jump in, because the plot began to cohere and it looked pretty great.
Maybe with the Toddfather overseeing an entire line of Spawn comics (including a whole second book for Al Simmons in King Spawn) he’s much less focused on overstuffing all of his commentary and canon into this one book. It can still be hard to parse who any of these players are, but the story seems much more straight-forward and comprehensible than it did in the past two issues.
In short: Hell is winning their war with Heaven but doesn’t want anyone to realize; the truce on Earth is similarly breaking bad and folks would be wise to align with the Vampires if their morals will allow).
Brett Booth’s art really hums along under McFarlane’s script compared to the past two issues. Colorist Robert Nugent seems to understand when to introduce some contrast into Booth’s art to emphasize the foreground and knock-back the detailed backgrounds, and it makes a huge difference.
Standstill (2024) #7 (digital) – Colorist Lee Loughridge’s tale of an incorrigible asshole with a military tech watch that can freeze time hits its penultimate issue. There’s already a deluxe hardcover of this series solicited for later this year.
Transformers (2023) #17 (digital) – Daniel Warren Johnson’s run on the “More Than Meets the Eye” Energon-powered robot aliens rolls along to its conclusion (or, at least, DWJ’s planned departure). Fans have gone absolutely wild over Jorge Corona’s art on this arc!
I’ve been very slowly catching up on this title, and I can admit that I may have judged issue #1 too harshly… but, as someone with zero nostalgia for this characters I feel like I’m often missing out on a lot of the fun of appearances and mentions. I’m sure a non-fan would say the same thing about reading G.I. Joe!
I will say that I find Rus Wooton’s lettering particularly unreadable on this. His sort of desperate-looking italics can work for me on some DWJ books to match their scrappy tone, but they feel tacked on here.
Witchblade (2024) #8 (digital) – I’m going to say the kind of thing that gets me labelled as having hot takes: I think issue #7 this is as good as the book can get with the creative team it’s got, which is on the high side of fine. Hear my one-minute(ish) review from Crushing Comics Live.
We got the first arc of origin story out of the way and it ended on a decent cliffhanger of blowing up Sara Pezzini’s civillian life – both figuratively and literally. It felt like we’d kick off issue #7 with a chance to see what this book is really going to be about in the longer team beyond remixing Witchblade’s origin.
Turns out, the book isn’t about very much. It’s was another empty confrontation and then a fight that seemed super and then sputtered out quickly. And then there was a convenient escape through a portal while monologuing.
That’s what this book is truly about – traveling between places while delivering monologues!
Yes, teasing the emergence of The Darkness is a thrill for old fans of original Top Cow continuity, but beyond that this issue was as directionless as the first arc. It doesn’t feel as though Sara has a perspective – even her mission to investigate her father’s death quickly recedes if there’s a chance to have her deliver a monologue about feeling conflicted.
I won’t pretend that Witchblade was ever great in the 90s – sometimes it was bad – but at least it was fun and you could root for Sara. At this point if this new series was really bad at least it would be doing something interesting!
That’s for Image Comics February 12 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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