Speaking of Valiant and Image, the illfated crossover Deathmate has such a comedy of errors behind it
> Jim Lee is friends with the owner of Valiant, decides they’d do a crossover with
>No one else on Image is on board with the idea except Rob Liefeld, Larsen outright says his reason is he thought Valiant books were awful and saw no reason to crossover with them.
>Valiant, who worked on a consistent, solid schedule, figures they can split the work with their artists
>Jim Lee and Liefeld both evidently decide they didn’t want to work with the artists they considered lesser than them at Valiant, and didn’t want to hit the deadlines valiant was expecting. and likely didn't want to share original pages with artists outside their studio. They stall and delay the work for so long Valiant's art director Bob Layton has to go to Liefeld's house and ask for the pages so he can ink them, which Liefeld tries to get out of, implicitly because he didn't want anyone from Valiant inking him.
> It messes up the solicitations to the point all hype was gone and people were left sitting on books they ordered when these were hot titles; now they're not- even allowing retailers to cut orders they were still sitting on a bunch of expensive books
I don't think Vaiant was totally innocent , I'm sure they saw hooking up with Image as a huge payday and wanted to get to work on big selling pages.And I do get wanting to be inked by specific inkers. But ultimately its a series of bad decisions stemming from Jim Lee promising more than he could deliver(which also killed the 1963 annual)
>>149149563
more so due to not producing the material the market demanded than anything else,though.