Image Comics

In the late '80s and early '90s, hot professional comics talent had a problem: their creative genius and artistic virtuosity pulled down huge profits for their employers, but any new or original IP they cooked up over the course of doing this work became the property of the companies they worked for, and possibly having been stocking their stables of characters since WWII, DC and Marvel Comics had enough already. Inspired by the indie comics successes of eg. Dave Sim's [Cerebus] and Eastman & Laird's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, several key creative professionals left Marvel and DC roughly simultaneously in order to combine their talents and create a new, creator-owned comics company.

The original slate of founding creators were Rob Liefeld (X-Force), Erik Larsen (Amazing Spider-Man), Jim Valentino (Guardians of the Galaxy), Todd McFarlane (Spider-Man), Jim Lee (X-Men), Marc Silvestri (Wolverine) and Whilce Portacio (Uncanny X-Men). They set up separate creator studios within the Image Comics umbrella, briefly publishing under the auspices of [Malibu Comics]. Starting in 1992, the first Image titles were Liefeld's Youngblood from Extreme Studios, then McFarlane's Spawn, then Larsen's Savage Dragon from Highbrow Entertainment, Lee's WildC.A.T.S. from WildStorm Productions, Valentino's Shadowhawk, Silvestri's CyberForce from Top Cow Productions and (eventually) Portacio's WetWorks. These launch titles by the founding creators were followed by Dale Keown's Pitt, Liefeld's Bloodstrike, Lee's StormWatch, and Sam Kieth's [The Maxx], among many, many others (including titles such as Gen13, Witchblade and The Darkness.)

This comics industry rumbling was taking place roughly concurrently to the establishment of ACiD Productions and the emergence of the underground computer art community, many of whose participants were of the right age to be riding this wave of change among one of the few forms of entertainment media they paid money to consume. In 1993 and 1994 you knew when a new character was introduced in an Image comic because immediately starting later that month you would start to see reproductions of the character appearing in the latest artpacks in a blocky ANSI art form.

Addendum: the noseless thing -- for some reason, many of this company's biggest characters around the time of its launch oddly did not feature a nose on their face, which coincidentally rendered the subjects lower-hanging fruit for ANSI art adaptation by teenagers without strong visual art skills and a dodgy grasp on human physiology, neatly removing what might have been an obstacle or at least a speed bump in drawing the characters. A short list of noseless Image characters include: Spawn, Grifter, Pitt, the Maxx, Nautika, Openface and Superpatriot.