Shutter

The end of the year is a time of reflection in many ways, and that often means thinking about and assessing what the very best releases in any particular medium were. As we prepare to cross the threshold into 2017, we've been collecting some of the best covers of the year by publisher for your perusal, and today we're looking at fifty of the best comic book covers released from Image Comics in 2016.

Throughout its run, Shutter has delighted in pushing the boundaries of comics. Leila Del Duca turned her pen to pastiches of everyone from Hergé to Winsor McCay to Richard Scarry. Owen Gieni separated his colors out into cyan, magenta and yellow to tell three stories on a single page. One memorable sequence depicted the creation of a single panel of the comic itself, from Joe Keatinge's script to final lettered product, before being printed, delivered, and finally read by someone in a coffee shop. By those standards, the storytelling in issue #23 is almost disappointingly conventional. It's the most straightforward the comic has been since it debuted. Since the very first issue, in fact. Come to think of it, doesn't that cover look a little familiar?

With Fables having just wrapped up after 13 years of combining fantasy characters and creatures with a more-or-less real world setting, there's no better time to pick up Shutter. Joe Keatinge and Leila del Duca's comic charts Kate Kristopher's reluctant journey through a world of ghost ninjas, fire-breathing Victorian robots and crocodiles in adorable bell-boy jackets, as she tries to uncover the mystery of her family's past – and save her own behind from the aforementioned creatures.

Since the first issue hit stands earlier this year, Joe Keatinge and Leila del Duca's Shutter has established itself as one of Image's most popular new titles. The tale of Kate Kristopher, a world-famous ex-explorer who gets embroiled in all manner of mystery and adventure, it's been winning over readers with its idiosyncratic blend of science fiction, urban fantasy, and good old-fashioned derring do. With the first paperback collection released this week, ComicsAlliance sat down with the series' creators to talk about developing the world's characters, the story so far, and pushing the limits of their self-created reality.

If there's one problem that we as comics readers all share, it's that we just have too much money. Sure, we keep trying to give it to publishers and creators, but sometimes there just aren't enough comics to buy, and that's why we always need more great books out there to pick up. Fortunately, the good folks over at Comixology are doing their best to make that as easy as possible, and this week, those efforts are taking the form of the Image Comics "New Hits" Sale. A ton of great new Image books like Southern Bastards, The Wicked + The Divine, Velvet, Burn the Orphanage and more have seen their first few issues dropped down to 99 cents each, and on top of that, there's a bundle of 20 first issues for just fifteen bucks.

Next month, Joe Keatinge and Leila del Duca are launching Shutter, an all-new adventure series about a woman named Kate Kristopher and a world full of strange adventures, and from the looks of things, they've decided to do it in style. Not only do they have colors by Owen Gieni, letters by Ed Brisson and a trade dress designed by Tim Leong (of Super Graphic and ComicsAlliance fame), they're also k