New Men (Image Comics)

New Men
Cover of the first issue
Publication information
Publisher	Image Comics
Main character(s)	Reign Pilot Dash Charade Kodiak Bootleg Sundance John Proctor Byrd Exit Dusk Narcisse
Creative team
Created by	Rob Liefeld Jeff Matsuda

New Men was a comic book series published during the 1990s by Image Comics. It was one of the many titles co-created by Rob Liefeld, and released as part of his Extreme Studios imprint. Like many of Liefeld's creations for this and his Maximum Comics line the New Men bore striking similarities to characters from mainstream comic companies; in this case New Men was very similar to Marvel Comics' X-Men franchise. After an initial launch the series underwent a re-design and revamp by writer Eric Stephenson and the addition team Chris Sprouse and Al Gordon.

The New Men debuted during the Extreme Prejudice imprint wide crossover. Following the end of the crossover story they were given their an eponymous 5-issue mini-series. This was a commonly used technique within Image, not just by Liefeld's Extreme Studios, but by most of the co-founders and their imprints. Many notable and top-selling Image titles including The Savage Dragon, Cyberforce and Gen¹³ started in this manner.

The 1994 mini-series was written by Eric Stephenson with art by character designer Jeff Matsuda. Matsuda, Stephenson and Liefeld were also credited as 'co-plotters'. New Men was then granted an ongoing series. Matsuda did not take up the art duties and most of the first 20 issues were pencilled by Todd Nauck.

Both mini-series and ongoing series kept a much better schedule than a number of Extreme Comics titles, notably the imprint's 'premiere' title Youngblood. This could be attributed to the minimal role that Rob Liefeld played in the production of the series. Like all of the Extreme titles, a number of issues were taken up by the various imprint-wide crossover storylines, such as Extreme Sacrifice and Babewatch, and the characters, though not the series, were an integral part of the Extreme Destroyer crossover.