Dan Brown

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.

Robert Kirkman's concepts seem to be doing fairly okay for themselves right now, with The Walking Dead leading the way to two of the most popular shows in the world, and the small-screen debut of Outcast just around the corner. His latest project for his Image imprint Skybound is a new miniseries developed alongside Marc Silvestri that will be written and drawn by two of comics fastest rising stars. Demonic is about a New York City police officer who is an upstanding family man, great colleague, and stellar employee, who also happens to house a demon within his body that, if given its way, would break free and slaughter everyone in New York City. Written by Christopher Sebela with art by Niko Walter and Dan Brown, Demonic is set for release via Skybound later this year.

Teased for years and finally launched in 2014, The Multiversity is a universe-jumping series of DC Comics one-shots tracking the cosmic monitor Nix Uotan and an assemblage of star-crossed heroes as they attempt to save 52 universes and beyond from a trippy cosmic existential threat that, like much of Morrison’s best work, represents something far more mundane and relatable. Tying back into the very first Multiverse story in DC’s history, the heroes of these universes become aware of this threat by reading about it in comic books… comic books that, it turns out, take place in neighboring universes. Indeed, writer Grant Morrison continues his streak of highly metatextual DC cosmic epics with this eight-issue mega-series (plus one Tolkienesque guidebook). Described by Morrison as “the ultimate statement of what DC is”, The Multiversity naturally offers the reader much beyond the surface level adventure, and that means annotations. Rather than merely filling out checklists of references, my hope with this feature is to slowly unearth and extrapolate a narrative model for Morrison and his collaborators’ work on The Multiversity; an interconnecting web of themes and cause and effect that works both on literal and symbolic levels. We’ll be focusing here on the third issue of the maxiseries, The Just, written by Morrison with artwork by Ben Oliver and color assistance from Dan Brown (the excellent colorist, not the literary hack).

Happy Holidays from ComicsAlliance. Enjoy some links on what's hopefully your day off, after the jump.