Copy and paste from elsewhere


What a completely ridiculous, poorly crafted book.

There was so much going wrong by page five that I started taking notes. I won't point out every typo and error because there's about one per page, but here's some of the crazy.

*The cover is horrendous. The title and Valentino's name get completely lost in the mess of random mini cover images.

*80+% of this book is cover images pulled from the internet with the actual timeline taking up less than 1/4th of 37 pages

*The font is an absolute eye sore

*Except for Valentino's Forward which has a completely different, but far more readable font (but a font change nonetheless)

*Valentino's Forward reads like he's still 1993-level defensive

*Notes X-Men #1 was a record for a "single title" instead of "single issue" (wording which should have just been cut and paste from the wording on Spider-Man and X-Force)

*February 1 1992 info starts as part of January 9 1992 paragraph, then starts again in bold the next page

*Claims sales numbers on Youngblood #1 are 1.5 million, which, based on multiple sourcing, is likely #0's sales as #1 sold just over 300k at Diamond, 75k at Capital and likely some other modest amount at the other distributors for less than 500k total.

*mcfarlane.com notes sales of Spawn at 1.7 million, not Valentino's rounded up 2 million

*WildC.A.T.s #1 does not "shatter all sales records." It's unclear if it even outsold Spawn #1.

*Completely left this sentence dangling when you remove the creators, "Meanwhile, Mars Attacks Image..." Need at least a verb there Jim.

*Wetworks #1 debuts "June-July." Apparently they don't even know?

*If the fax from Liefeld shown is the "letter of resignation" mentioned on the same date, that is not a letter of resignation.

*Claims Jim Krueger "invented" the landscape format for Liberty Meadows #27 in September 2002 despite Marvel publishing their three 2001 X-Men annuals in the same format a year earlier.

*Mentions the launches of two series in one sentence. Following sentence notes "It will win..." Which will win?

*Old Guard was a movie, not a series.

*After 20 pages of relentless "timeline" entries about awards won, there's a footnote in two of 2017's entries to "see page xx." Wait, there's a whole list of these? And why are we suddenly referencing it with three years of timeline to go?

*Look forward to the "months of secret meetings" comment being used against Image in the union's lawsuit.

*Prophet #1 facsimile edition brings the "Image story full circle" how?

That's not even everything I wrote down. Not even close to all the thoughts I had on how dumb some of this was despite Valentino saying he spent "the better part of 2021" working on this. Honestly, pretty much any of us that were alive and fans at the time could have scraped together a better version of the first five years than this from memory and quick Google searches over a long weekend.

After 2002, the entries basically become a list of who does their first work at Image, who finally works with Image, and what awards were won. It's a complete waste, especially with the redundant five page awards list summary immediately following. There are so many allusions to events that could use additional context and detail. There are so many more details that should have been shared regarding the early years. The reality is there are two Images - the first 10 years, which is all founder related, and the next 20 years, which is mostly writer and new creatives focused . They are practically separate entities.

At most this should have been a $1 or freebie in a better format because this is little more than a blog post in quality. And at $8, we've all been suckered like 1990s Image-style hype all over again.