Posted in: Boom, Comics, Comics Publishers, Current News, Image, Walking Dead | Tagged: kyle higgins, radiant black

Radiant Black Collections Are Image Comics' Latest Big Hit

A little bird over at Image Comics has shared that the news that sales of Radiant Black collections have gone through the roof.

A little bird over at Image Comics has shared that the news that sales of Radiant Black collections have gone through the roof and are now pacing Saga's sales trajectory. Now I'm told Radiant Black trade paperbacks sell from Image Comics in the high hundreds every single week. Stores are racking them together and the reorders just keep rolling in.

Radiant Black was originally pitched as "Power Rangers meets Invincible" and was created by the Boom Studios Power Rangers series creator Kyle Higgins when he fell out of sorts with Boom. It was basically "Power Rangers done right" from his perspective. But while those types of elevator pitches can be a catchy way of targeting a readership, nobody imagined how directly the Invincible fever pitch would end up positively impacting Radiant Black's positioning with stores – it's a book completely unrelated to the Invincible IP and created by a different creative team.

Our contact inside Image further shares that, early on, Radiant Black gained a foothold with reps and retailers who saw Higgins' sales track with Power Rangers and knew they could get customers on board with Massive-verse's similarly designed shared universe of superheroes. What came as an added bonus to that strong showing was how Invincible's recent success would actually provide a further rising tide for the Massive-Verse line. The comics share similar sensibilities and retailers caught on early that they could pair the two together when handselling.

But Radiant Black isn't the only one receiving a lift. Geoff Johns seems to have hooked his wagon to Image Comics at just the right time. We're told his Ghost Machine Day went over very well for retailers' piggy banks and the crew snagged a triple sell-out right out the gate.

Tony Fleecs' new launch caught a lift too – we've learned that Feral #1 launched over 64,000—not bad for a little cat/horror book. But by comparison, he just launched Uncanny Valley #1 at Boom and pulled in only 26,000 for that. Which is surprising knowing retailer habits typically lean toward mimicking a creators' most recent launch. Image Comics saw this happen previously when The Walking Dead created a gold rush mentality with creators flocking to the publisher for their own IP to claim-jump some of those Kirkman riches. It seems to be happening again.

Now we've heard that filming is already underway for Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' Criminal adaptation. Given that Prime rolled out the red carpet in pushing Invincible to the top of the charts, we suspect they too have figured out that you can strike gold if you dig through Image Comics' list for available IP…  Wytches, Revival, and Sex Criminals are all well into the pipeline at this point – along with half a dozen more apparently that I'm still trying to get confirmation on – so it'll likely be one of them next.

Image just dropped a listing for a Compendium for Revival, and published a collection of the Sex Criminals complete series, so we're placing our money on either of those in particular.

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