"They’re all over me like stink on poop!"
So I was rooting around in the store’s back room and turned up a copy of Darker Image #1, Image Comics’ aborted anthology book. But not just any copy, oh no…your standard issue, full color, polybagged release of this comic is about as common as a really common thing that’s common. I’m pretty sure the regular version had a print run larger than any given issue of TV Guide. Or The Bible.
But this is the RARE! VARIANT! L@@K! HOT! black and white edition of Darker Image, my friends, stripping the interior stories of color and sporting a snazzy embossed foil logo (which comes out a bit dark in the scan). I don’t remember what hoops we had to jump through to be gifted with one of these, but, well, we apparently did.
And apparently we’ve been stuck with it ever since, which doesn’t wholly surprise me. Darker Image tanked when it came out, and given this was the early ’90s, love ‘n’ comics speculation were in the air, and the investors, smelling “turkey” all over this book, avoided buying even the RARE! HOT! limited edition variant. Then the market crash came, and any hope of selling Darker Image went away.
As the years passed, however, a market did sort of appear for this particular title, as one of the stories featured within was The Maxx. For whatever reason…strength of the title itself, or pushed along by the short-lived MTV animated series…The Maxx still has an audience to this very day. The trades sell, the back issues still sell…and if you point out that Darker Image has the Maxx in it (or just drop a copy or two into The Maxx bin), they’ll move.
Certainly no one is picking it up for Jim Lee’s Deathblow story, and I doubt there are any Lobo…er, Bloodwulf completists out there seeking out this hard-to-find appearance:
Yeah, removing the color really did this story some favors.
So, anyway…Darker Image #1. The cover’s paper stock is much nicer on the variant versus the regular edition, and this version didn’t come polybagged with a Bloodwulf trading card, thankfully.
Something else I found digging around the store:
I miss this era of Valiant Comics, with their wrestling mags and their Nintendo comics. I could totally sell Nintendo comics, still…customers ask me for Mario Bros. comics all the time.
I never get asked for wrestling comics, by the way…but I enjoy the sheer goofiness of these Valiant ones.
