Posted in: Comics, Comics Publishers, Current News, Image | Tagged: eric stephenson, joe casey

The Image Comics Crossover That Didn't Happen Five Years Ago

The Image Comics Crossover That Didn't Happen Five Years Ago... and what Joe Casey would have done with it all.

Published Mon, 11 Aug 2025 11:57:05 -0500

Article Summary

Image Comics once planned a major shared universe crossover event that never materialized.
Joe Casey and Eric Stephenson discussed relaunching the Image Universe with multiple new series.
Getting all remaining Image founders to agree on using their characters proved too challenging.
Many crossover concepts were reworked by Joe Casey into his current Blood Squad Seven comic series.

A while ago, Bleeding Cool started getting teases that there was an Image Comics crossover being planned, running across the most unlikely of books published by Image, as well as some old favourites. But it didn't come to pass. Donny Cates and Geoff Shaw's Crossover series promised much but wasn't able to deliver exactly what it teased. But more recently, in Joe Casey's comic book from Image Comics, Blood Squad Seven, he wrote something that was probably what we were hearing in 2020, with Image Comics publisher Eric Stephenson involved.

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"A few years ago, Eric Stephenson and I talked very seriously about how to bring back the Image shared universe in a much bigger way, launching multiple new titles, all of them operating in a way that would be extremely (no pun intended) conscientious of continuity. But, to be honest, as we played out the hypothetical scenario, the same challenges that the original founders faced were still there… and we couldn't quite crack the code of the necessary mechanism to counteract those challenges in a way that made sense. That doesn't mean it can't be done, though. For a great example of it done right, see Kyle Higgins' Massive-verse, also published by Image Comics."

And in today's Substack newsletter, he is asked about it, and gives a few more details.

"Well, that whole thing started with Image publisher, Eric Stephenson and I attempting to do a big "event book" that reunified the shared Image Universe in a thoughtful, considered way, re-establishing the continuity so it all still made sense. That book would've featured all of the remaining founders' characters, in one way or another. To be honest, those plans never got very far. I mean, they didn't even get on the launch pad. Getting the remaining founders to agree to let us borrow their characters for the story we wanted to do — and the specific way we wanted to do it — was already a big enough ask, and didn't get very far when they were approached with the idea. So, the "new titles" that were going to spin out of it never materialized, even in theory, except for what became the DUTCH mini-series that I ended up writing. But the intention was to recruit some newer creators who we felt might be open to playing in that shared universe sandbox. But, like I said in that letters page, we couldn't quite figure out how to do it without running into the same problems that the founders faced. Besides, I was eventually able to apply most of the ideas I'd worked out for that project to the current BLOOD SQUAD SEVEN series."

You know, there is probably a way…

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