>>34101
In the late '80s and early '90s a lot of comic book artists started to get very popular. People were buying books because they were drawn by Todd McFarlane or Rob Liefeld, rather than because they were drawing Spider-Man or X-Men. Many of these artists realized they were getting fucked by working for the big companies instead of working for themselves, so they quit and formed their own company, Image Comics, where the creators of each individual work would actually own that work, but they would still work together for the business side of stuff, and also for crossover autism. It was big for a while. Spawn would be their biggest property, but you might have heard of others like Savage Dragon, and for a few years there they sold very well. But the comic book investment bubble burst and the whole industry crashed and never recovered. Image Comics is still around, and there were some other smaller but still significant (in terms of the tiny comic book industry) companies that popped up and are still around, but most of the original creators who started Image Comics gave up and went back to DC and Marvel. Jim Lee, whose work on X-Men got him to be big enough to become one of the Image Founders, is now one of the top guys at DC Comics, having sold his own creator owned stuff to DC years ago, and the stuff he quit Marvel to make independently is now part of the DCU. Rob Liefeld's reputation went down the drain as his extremely stylized influence got too popular and then backlash made it extremely unpopular, but he now gets regular work for DC. Todd McFarlane is too busy with toys and cards to still write Spawn on a regular basis, as far as I know, but Spawn does still come out every month, and McFarlane is still in charge, but he delegates to other writers and artists a lot. Savage Dragon still comes out every month too, but absolutely nobody reads it, even compared to other comic books. Its creator is a major SJW who just uses his comic that nobody reads to rant about Trump and insert his weird fetishes, then he gets mad about the fact that people think Dragon is a cop, and tries to tell people he was only a cop for like the first year of the series, and hasn't been for like 30 years, but nobody has read it in 30 years, so nobody knows that.
But the thing that's probably most relevant to this conversation that I should make more clear is that a lot of these artists got huge egos and stopped working at the same rate as before. Rob Liefeld was extremely popular, but not only did his style become unpopular, but his professional reputation was hurt badly by a bad habit of working slowly and not meeting deadlines. He's been open about how he had to realize that and get used to actually having to work properly and not rely on his inflated reputation.
And of course, as mentioned, none of these nerds who drew musclemen for a living really knew how to manage the business side of things terribly well.