Working for Image Comics was a dream come true for the creative team of writer Saladin Ahmed and artist Dave Acosta, both of whom live in Oakland County and collaborated on “TerrorWar.”
“One of the great things about working with Image is that the scheduling was totally up to us,” said Acosta, of West Bloomfield. “Image is a fantastic place for creators to have control over their work. Super easy to work with and helpful with all the production issues that pop up between making the comic and getting it into stores.”
Ahmed, an Eisner Award-winning writer, has dreamed of working for Image since it was founded in 1992. Image is the third largest comic book publisher formed by seven popular artists who were working on some of Marvel Comics’ top books, including the “X-Men” and the “Spider-Man” titles. What makes Image stand out from Marvel and DC Comics is that creators own their intellectual property and its copyright, unlike the former two companies, both of which are owned by corporations, where it is work-for-hire. In the case of “TerrorWar,” Ahmed and Acosta co-own it, not Image.
“The nice thing about not being bound to a Marvel/DC monthly schedule is that you are much freer to follow the needs of the story and honor the human needs of the creators,” Ahmed said. “Lots of great work is being done in (the) big two superhero comics, of course. But the process can sometimes feel … synthetic. The schedule for ‘TerrorWar’ was occasionally irregular, but it was 100% raw organic.”
“TerrorWar” ran for nine issues. The entire series was collected in a trade paperback that was released on Wednesday, April 17.
“TerrorWar” takes place in the not-so-distant future. Terrors — creatures from people’s worst nightmares that have become reality — are running rampant in the fictional Blue City. Standing between humanity and chaos is Muhammad Cho, leader of a band of freelance soldiers who hunt Terrors.
“TerrorWar” originally was slated to run for eight issues when it was released in 2023; however, Ahmed and Acosta added an extra issue.
“We had a lot of big ideas that we wanted to flesh out. We decided to add an issue, rather than lose too much story stuff,” Acosta said. “(Image) would’ve probably let us go on longer, but I feel like this was a good place to wrap it up.”
Acosta said he’s proud of his work on “TerrorWar.”
“We did an issue that took place inside of the main character’s psyche and that was fun to experiment with visually. I kind of threw out the standard panel girds for that one,” he said. “But, honestly, I’m very proud of the last issue, No. 9. I think the inker, Jay Leisten, and I really found our groove. We were firing on all cylinders partly because we knew it was the big finale.”
Added Ahmed: “I’m quite happy, both with how we opened and how we closed. Our first issue was very much meet-the-team/get-to-know-the-world stuff with Dave and I working very tightly together, according to strict blueprints. On the other hand, our finale went totally in the opposite direction. It was a place we had landed by sort of driving our way through the logic of the story and Dave really took the wheel masterfully.”
While “TerrorWar” marks their first comic book project for Image, this is the second time Ahmed and Acosta have collaborated. Their first collaboration was 2022’s “DRAGON,” a crowd-funded hardcover graphic novel about Vlad Tepes, aka Vlad The Impaler, the inspiration for Dracula.
“I love collaborating with Saladin,” Acosta said. “As the years go by, we’ve learned to trust each other more and more. Sometimes the script will just have one sentence per page, and Saladin can trust me to break that into panels and to tell the story visually. Then he can script later, based on my illustrations. It’s a quicker way to work, which is great for monthly comics. But that kind of trust has to be earned.”
Acosta is open to revisiting “TerrorWar” again as a sequel down the line but said he’s happy they ended the series when they did. However, Ahmed has a different point of view on doing a sequel.
“I’m someone who thinks a lot about what happens before and after a story. I’ve done it since I was a kid before every single story had a prequel and five sequels. I love that stuff,” explained Ahmed. “But because everything now has a prequel in five sequels, it feels sort of painting by numbers to do it sometimes. To me, the sequel to ‘TerrorWar’ will be whatever collaboration Dave and I work on together next, just as ‘TerrorWar’ was in many ways a sequel to our unrelated previous collaboration ‘DRAGON.’”
Visit Acosta at davedrawsgood.com and Ahmed at twitter.com/saladinahmed.
