Image30 Chapter 22: Michael Turner’s FATHOM Brought the Sexy Back

By B. Radtz

on June 13, 2022

Welcome to Image30, Comic Watch’s celebration of three decades of Image Comics! Throughout 2022, each week we’ll take a look back, chronologically, at the comics that built the publisher into the powerhouse it is today, and changed comics forever! In doing so, it’s our hope to paint a clear and definitive picture from a finished product perspective how the company originated, grew, evolved, and changed into the diverse juggernaut it is today.

Image30 Chapter 22:

Fathom

Note: this chapter was intended to run last week, but our Pride coverage superseded it. Enjoy, because Chapter 23 hits TOMORROW!

After exploding on the comics world with the launch of Witchblade and helping Top Cow with The Darkness, artist Michael Turner could do no wrong. Fathom came out at a point where Top Cow was on top of the world: with Image suddenly without WildStorm to anchor it, they were suddenly the company’s biggest imprint. “The Cow,” as it was known, was taking over the independent title market with Witchblade, the Darkness, J. Michael Straczynski’s Rising Stars, as well as licensing Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, they just kept giving fans hit after hit. Honing his craft on Witchblade over the course of three years and twenty-five issues, Turner decided it was time for him to show his fans what he’s really capable of, and gave us his creator-owned Fathom.

The series revolved around Aspen Matthews, a marine biologist who was the sole survivor of a missing cruise ship called The Paradise, who would eventually be put into a centuries-long drama involving this underwater civilization called the Blue and its strained relationship and the surface world. Turner and co-writer Bill O’Neil’s world-building would attempt to build a fully realized and fleshed-out world that would borrow themes heavily from the 1989’s James Cameron film, The Abyss, which would give the title more gravitas than could be expected from an artist so green to having complete creative control on a title that Turner had. The team seemed to come at the concept trying to create something deep, and epic that could become an intrinsic part of the Top Cow universe.

Turner came out on this series playing up his strengths; statuesque, beautiful women, hyper thyroid drawn men, and out of this world tech, mixed in with a focus on trying to giving Aspen, and the rest of the characters introduced in this world the necessary depth needed to make the book be more than just a flash in the pan, stereotypical ’90s bad girl book that would burn itself out after a couple years of storylines. Turner would gradually turn Aspen, Cannon Hawke, Killian, and their world into their own franchise, and eventually be the cornerstone for the Aspen MLT.entertainment, where Turner would just about go full-on nuts unleashing the full spectrum of his own creations.

The first volume of Michael Turner’s Fathom under the Top Cow banner would last fourteen issues plus a zero issue and a Wizard Magazine #-1, which would be published between 1998 and conclude in 2002, and would detail the eons-long war between the underwater civilization the Blue and the surface world, dragging Aspen into the mix and putting her at odds with two halves of her identity. The title would go on for four years, but would unfortunately go on hiatus after Turner was diagnosed with cancer. He would co-write the tie-in miniseries Fathom: Killian’s Tide, with series co-write, Bill O’Neil alongside neophyte artist Koi Turnbull. After Turner’s cancer diagnosis went into remission, Turner would butt heads with Top Cow management over the rights and ownership of Aspen and the rest of the Fathom cast, leading to Turner leaving the publisher and forming his own company, Aspen MLT, after his lead character and most famous creation.

The first title Turner would produce for Aspen would be Michael Turner Presents: Aspen in 2003, a three-issue miniseries that would be his final project with Aspen and her world, focusing instead on developing the rest of his intellectual properties and try to make Aspen MLT a multimedia company that would have included films, animation, and more. Fathom would prove to be so popular, it would be greenlit for a feature film helmed by James Cameron, but unfortunately nothing developed from there, and the project fell through.

From here, Turner would go on to create other properties, like Soulfire, and other titles associated with the Fathom line, while bringing on both new and veterans to the comics business, like J.T. Krul, Scott Lobdell, and Ron Marz to help shape his company and legacy, while he in turn would crush work-for-hire assignments from Marvel and DC, doing work for mainstream comics, contributing covers, and reintroducing Kara Zor-El to the post-Crisis DC Universe with Jeph Loeb on the Superman/Batman title. He would then continue to lend his talents to other publishers, while continuing to contribute to his own, when tragedy struck: his cancer, long in remission, had returned. Continuing to work up until he longer could, he would leave the comics world in 2008 a titan. His his legacy continues to live on through not only his many creations and contributions, but also through the fans and friends he made along the way.

NEXT: Image sets the stage for its post-WildStorm existence with J. Michael Straczynski’s Rising Stars, as the era of the auteur author begins in earnest!

Click the links below for previous Image30 chapters: