We had a brief conversation with new Image publisher Erik Larsen about Image's plans for Free Comic Book Day, the projects he's most excited about, and how he's feeling about his new publisher gig.

What's Image doing for Free Comic Book Day?

We're dong a new comic book and the idea on my end is to have various people who are doing ongoing Image titles give you sort of an 8-page sampler of the kind of thing that you might expect in their regular ongoing books.  So, for instance, Robert Kirkman and Ryan Ottley, who are doing the ongoing Invincible book, gave an 8-page story that told you something about the characters and gave you an idea of what's coming up in the title, kind of giving you a little taste of 'this is who we are, this is what we're all about, this is the kind of adventures we have, and follow us into our regular book.'

I did a new 8-page Savage Dragon story that pretty much does the same thing, and there's a new Spawn story and a new Witchblade story in there as well.  But that's the idea, so that a reader who will read this will get an idea of what these guys are all about or get a summary of where these characters have been and where they're going next.  And from what I've seen so far, they're nicely done little stories that give you a taste of what these characters are.  And I think it's kind of neat that while everybody else is doing these Free Comic Book Day stories that are essentially reprints of stuff that's a year or more old, here you've got somebody who's doing something new.  Although I expect somebody to get pissed off at us.

Because?

There's always somebody, you know.  'You finally gave us a book we could sell, and we have to give it away.  What's wrong with you.' 

Anything going on at Image that you're particularly excited about?

It's hard to kind of boil it down into a 2-second blurb, but...

We have a book coming out that was put together by a number of guys that worked in animation, and guys who wanted to do their own thing, and tell their own story, and it's called Flight, and it's 208 pages long and it's just one of the most awe-inspiring comics I've ever run across.

I came across these guys at APE, and they were showing their wares and at that time they didn't have a publisher and I had just become the publisher at Image.  It was a situation where the timing was right there, and I was able to put together a deal that made sense to them and made sense to us.  And it's just one of those books that I expect retailers to not immediately recognize as what it is, and what it is is just a terrific comic book from cover to cover.  It's 208 pages of brand new material by a bunch of guys who are really, really good.  And that's really exciting to me. 

When's that coming out?

That will be coming out in July. 

Around the same time will be the return of Jim Valentino's Normalman.  And again, here's something that's near and dear to Jim and it's something that he really got into this business doing back 20 years ago. And it's his 20-anniversary return to this character.  It's an exciting thing to have somebody get back to doing something that they've got that enthusiasm for.  And that's when Jim really shines, when he's doing this kind of stuff.  It's just great to be there and watch it all happen.

John Romita, Jr. is doing The Gray Area and it's just...  the pages come in and you just look at them and it's amazing.  He's doing just outstanding work on this, and again it's one of those books you just go, 'Look at this thing, Jesus, we're publishing this!'  This is just an awesome thing to behold. 

It's really great to be in this position.  To be able to, in some cases, find artists to work with writers and do a little bit of match-making, and to talk with other people to try and pull good books into the fold.  There are a lot of things coming up that people are going to be very excited about seeing.  And I'm just happy to be here, really.

Sounds like you're enjoying the publisher gig.

You know, I really am.  It's a lot of fun, and it's just cool to be able to do this. 

You know, I love comics; I'm a comic book fan, I show up at my store on Wednesday every week.  They don't have a pull slot.  I buy stuff off the shelf and talk to the people who are working at the store and all the rest.  I like the idea of being able to get the books off the rack and not have it be that it's all taken care of for me.  I like browsing.  I like looking for stuff.  Then when I miss issues, scrambling to fill in those gaps is just part of being a comic book fan, I guess.