Violent Love

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.

Last week was tough for a lot of people, and as the US election results came in on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, a lot of us just didn't want to read comics or do much of anything as we adjusted to a changing world. Last Wednesday wasn't New Comic Book Day so much as "What Do We Do Now?" Day, and a lot of comics got lost in the shuffle. However, last week was packed with some really stellar comic debuts and new #1s, and many of them might not have got the attention they deserved due to the omnipresence of the election results. It was a bad week to launch a new book, and a weak launch can be very bad news for a book's future. With that in mind, we've gone back to highlight six new comics from last week that are worth picking up this week.

We're currently in the midst of what you could call a crime comics revival, with Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips reigning supreme as kings of the genre, David Lapham's Stray Bullets returning stronger than ever and Titan Comics set to launch an entire line of comics in conjunction with Hard Case Crime. Another new crime comic was announced today, as Frank J. Barbiere and Victor Santos' pulpy throwback Image Comics series Violent Love aims to tell the tale of two notorious criminals who could not be more different from one another, but find that opposites attract and the results are deadly.