Trungles

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.

This has been a dispiriting, painful week, and if you're like me then you'll have turned to the world of comics to offer you a spark of imagination, excitement, and investment. We're all dealing with the last few days in our own way, and at ComicsAlliance we're determined to continue generating the brightest and loudest spark of investment with the medium that's possible. So here we continue on with Weekender, unabated, delivering you a look at new comics, new podcasts, independent comics news, festivals and awards from around the world. This will continue to be a place where we give attention to the comics that deserve it --- and feature a range of different comics voices rising up to hopefully take over and make the next few years their own.

Journalist and editor Jennifer de Guzman convened some up-and-coming Asian-American writers for a roundtable discussion about the state of Asian representation in comics. Amy Chu is the current writer on Poison Ivy, a former writer on Sensation Comics, and the co-creator of her own self-publishing imprint Alpha Girl Comics. Sarah Kuhn’s novel trilogy about Asian-American superheroes, Heroine Complex will be released by DAW Books in July. She’s also written for Rosy Press’s Fresh Romance and is currently writing a series of Barbie comics. Jonathan Tsuei is the co-creator with Eric Canete of RunLoveKill, published by Image Comics.

New images emerge almost daily from X-Men: Apocalypse, the latest installment in Fox and Bryan Singer's X-Men film franchise, set in the 1980s. Naturally, this has led to much discussion about how the '80s version of the X-Men look, and whether they could look better. After all, the body armor they seem to wear through much of the film has as little relation to 1980s fashion as it does to X-Men comics. This led famously fashion-oriented cover artist Kevin Wada to tweet a suggestion that everyone should draw the X-Men in film-friendly '80s style outfits.

Beauties is a one-shot, available now from Rosy Press, written by Marguerite Bennett, with art by Trungles and letters by Rachel Deering. As you can probably tell from the cover, it’s a variation on the “Beauty and the Beast” story, but it’s a variation unlike any we’ve seen before. Beauties is unapologetically a fantasy romance. In fact, it’s more than that; it’s a fairy tale. It even begins with “Once upon a time.” Bennett takes the “Beauty and the Beast” framework in directions new and different and more complex, but she makes no effort to pull it down to Earth. The mythic power of the fairy tale remains, even as new dimensions are opened within it.