Image comics is an american independent comic publisher where the creator owns the rights to their comic and its IP, making it very different from Marvel and DC who owns all the characters, but image comics itself is the third biggest comic distribution company in the west. It was founded by seven popular and well regarded comic artists including Todd McFarlane who was famous for his artwork for the spiderman comics in the 80s-90s. The company was created for the purpose of creator rights as many of the founders worked at Marvel and found that they were considered disposable if their comic wasn't successful and limited in their creativity if the comic was successful, the polices and pay for their hired work was also unfair.
I want to go over the development and history of image comics, some of their published works and how they are in the modern day.

The group of comic artists Todd McFarlane, Jim Lee (X-Men), Rob Liefeld (X-Force), Marc Silvestri (Wolverine), Erik Larsen (The Amazing Spider-Man), Jim Valentino (Guardians of the Galaxy), and Whilce Portacio (Uncanny X-Men) were the first comic creators since Stan Lee to become household names in the 90s. These artist were some of the main reasons why Marvel is such a strong company as in the 80s and 90s the comics sold 100,000s of issues while the ones that the creators above created sold in the millions, due to this Liefeld felt like now each of them had the most influence on the future of creators rights in comics so he started suggesting to them about the idea of a company that would form into Image comics.
McFarlane, loving this idea overtime, got the other creators on board but it took some time as he would have to convince them to leave their comfortable work at Marvel and try to start a new publisher which was incredibly risky. Jim Lee was considered crucial to get this idea started as he was working on X-Man which to this day still has had the most sold first issue for a comic, with him on board they started the first steps to creating image comics.

At first the artists went to Marvel to quit their jobs and gave them the reasons why and the unfairness of how they were treated, they even went to DC who they weren’t working for and warned them with the same reasons. In 1992 the final work for image comics being founded was done and they were advertising the new distributor and the artists icons who were creating comics there being nicknamed the Image boys by Jack Kirby who was a large supporter of image comics as they wanted to prevent what happened to him at Marvel.
The rules of image comics is that they owned the image logo only and no partner would interfere with another partner's business. With the Image boys creating their own independent studios under the publisher. The first comic published under the image name was Youngblood which sold over a million copies for its first issue, then came Spawn which sold double that at over 2 million with its first issue and is nowadays still a recognizable character. Each of the Image boys’ comics had similar success for their launches as well. This led to Image being a whirlwind success story even getting movie and television deals for the creators and in only 4 months Image was selling better than DC which to this day is an incredible feat.
Though all this success it should be noted the founders were artists not businessmen so there were tons of problems on this side and missed deadlines and delayed comics were commonplace. Though the troubles were mitigated quickly through hiring a manager for Image this did hurt the reputation of the distributor for the fans.

Soon after creators started coming to work for Image, such as Alan Moore, one of the most famous comic writers in history (Watchmen, Swamp Thing, 80s Batman, etc.) Though this helped there were troubles with the Founders as the ones with Studios were often late while the founders who worked on their own were on time but still dealing with the troubles of the reputation damage, as well as they all had different personalities that conflicted with each other.
The biggest troubles came in 1996 when the famous Comic Book industry crash happened due to the fact some bought comics as collectable but trading cards became more lucrative for this. This led to internal conflicts between the Image boys and the stress of dealing with the crash led to Lee and Liefeld went back to Marvel to work for hire while still at Image which caused a lot of internal strife. This caused inkers, letterers and other workers to leave, some of the founders to distance themselves but the straw that broke the camel's back was Jim Lee selling his studio to DC effectively leaving Image comics for good in 1998.

The next few years were uncertain for image, most of the founders started working on separate businesses or just generally being less involved with the business side of image. The troubles of which questioned the longevity of Image comics. However in 2003 Robert Kirkman, who worked as a writer there for some superhero comics like Invincible, brought to Image his idea for a zombie comic series. Though skeptical about how well it would sell image agreed to distribute at least 5 issues. Though it would instead last 16 years and be one of the best selling comic series of the early 2000s and Television show of the early 2010s, The series was The Walking Dead. This led to a resurgence in image comics taking more risks in non-superhero comics which paid off as many of the best selling books then and even now by image are not superhero focused or even at all. Due to the Walking Dead, image comics still exist to this day.

Image comics nowadays are still publishing works for Spawn but have had breakout success with works such as the Space opera comic Saga and most recently in 2020 the launch of the department of truth which was the best selling non-superhero comic of the month it launched. Image comics has allowed indie comic creators to own their comics and have an easy outlet to publish it without it taking too much away from their profits, it has also influenced Marvel and DC to give more creative rights to their Artists and Writers. Overall in terms of western comics Image was important for both Independent creators and big distributors to give creators more rights.