Image Comics 30th Anniversary Review follows.
Black and White Volume 1 Spoilers!
The mini-series launched in 1993 with all of its issues being remastered in a Volume 1 collection in 1998 due to a successful Indiegogo campaign.
Volume 2 has been successfully Indiegogo’d as well in 2021 and is in production.
The pitch and premise: “The line between justice and vengeance is blurred when an ex spy and a brewery heiress join forces to take down an extremist with a growing army of robots.“
Also, from my letter that was published in Black and White #2 (of 3) in 1994.
…Art and Pamela [Thibert] have put together Image’s most successful blend of writing and art. The storyline is original; a breath of fresh air in a market saturated with with alien villains and manipulative shadow-governments.
Reed Blackett (Black), Whitney Samsung (White) and Brookes Grey (Grey) are all resolute in their beliefs and desires, but unlike other “team” books are not carbon copies of another. They do not share a hatred of the world, nor do they incessantly brood.
Blackett’s distaste for firearms, Samsung’s ferocity, and Grey’s maturity, experience, and humor bring something back to the medium that has been missing for years – fun and intrigue…
In hindsight I’m blown away (not in a good way) by my ballsy youthful arrogance and I’m more surprised the letter was even published since I trashed Image Comics to open it.
…Image as a whole has never been synonymous with quality comics… a group of artists trying to make credible comics minus “passable” story-telling… I think there is a general lack of original, and passable story-telling within this company (why does it seem that every major villain is an extraterrestrial, for example.)… I don’t think your competition is much better…
My view of those early of Image Comics has changed over time, not the every “major villain is an alien part“, but the quality comics parts. The plots, for the most part, of all of the Image Comics founders’ first creator-owned properties for the company were generally all solid on plot and definitely on art, but lacking on scripting in different ways; on a recent reread, Savage Dragon found the best balance in hindsight among the founders.
However, Black and White to this day was what I felt was Image’s first true blending of solid story and solid art; and it was from a creative team that didn’t include an Image Comics founder. The villain being an Asian businessman with robotics threats proved to be different and prescient considering the exponential proliferation of technological adoption, replacement, and evolution in the last 30 years in particular.
It is still a good read with original solid art, in particular, taken up a few notches due to the “remastering” efforts in this collection. 8 out of 10.
