This is "Look Back," a feature that I plan to do for at least all of 2019 and possibly beyond that (and possibly forget about in a week, who knows?). The concept is that every week (I'll probably be skipping the four fifth weeks in the year, but maybe not) of a month, I will spotlight a single issue of a comic book that came out in the past and talk about that issue (often in terms of a larger scale, like the series overall, etc.). Each week will be a look at a comic book from a different year that came out the same month X amount of years ago. The first week of the month looks at a book that came out this month ten years ago. The second week looks at a book that came out this month 25 years ago. The third week looks at a book that came out this month 50 years ago. The fourth week looks at a book that came out this month 75 years ago.
We'll be doing October in a day!
Next up is October 1994's Image Comics X-Over!
The concept of Image Comics was that it was like the United States - individual states (studios) working together as one entity (Image Comics). So there was not a ton of overlap between the two studios at the start of the company's history (the biggest overlap occurred with Chapel, from Rob Liefeld's Youngblood, being the killer of the human identity of Todd McFarlane's Spawn and Marc Silvestri and Jim Lee originally had their characters relatively close knit).
Occasionally, though, they would try to do stuff together and in October 1994, they did a fun crossover where each of the six then-current Image Comics founders would swap titles with each other.
Erik Larsen wrote and drew WildC.A.T.s #14...
And Jim Lee (along with Brandon Choi and a whole pile of artists to finish Lee's pencils, mainly Richard Bennett) did Savage Dragon #13...
Jim Valentino wrote and drew Youngblood #9...
Dan Fraga inked the issue...
Rob Liefeld plotted and penciled Shadowhawk #0...
Karl Alstaetter laid the book out and Robert Napton scripted it...
Spawn #25 was penciled by Marc Silvestri and inked by Batt and Billy Tan. McFarlane made sure to write the story, though, to keep it consistent...
Cyberforce #8 was written and penciled by Todd McFarlane (with Eric Silvestri co-plotting to keep it consistent) with inks by Greg Capullo, Mark Pennington and John Cleary...
Notice the nice bit with the covers homaging each other.
The tricky thing about the books, though, is that since each studio that made up Image Comics owned their respective titles, they had to figure out how to handle these books. The way that the creators decided to handle these swapped titles is that the creators behind the book would own the book, even if it was not their own series. In other words, Erik Larsen would own the copyright to WildC.A.T.s #14 and Jim Lee would own the copyright to Savage Dragon #13. As you might imagine, that could cause some issues down the road, as what if suddenly you couldn't even use your own comic book? Lee, after all, sold all of his copyrights to DC, so technically DC owns the copyright to Jim Lee's Savage Dragon #13.
Anyhow, it was a fun event and showed the sort of freewheeling spirit that Image had that other companies really didn't.
By the way, Spawn #25 amusingly came out the same month as Spawn #20 (McFarlane was, in effect, backdating his comics at the time).
If you have any suggestions for October (or any other later months) 2009, 1994, 1969 and 1944 comic books for me to spotlight, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com! Here is the guide, though, for the cover dates of books so that you can make suggestions for books that actually came out in the correct month. Generally speaking, the traditional amount of time between the cover date and the release date of a comic book throughout most of comic history has been two months (it was three months at times, but not during the times we're discussing here). So the comic books will have a cover date that is two months ahead of the actual release date (so October for a book that came out in August). Obviously, it is easier to tell when a book from 10 years ago was released, since there was internet coverage of books back then.