Bambino

Image Comics released Inkblot #1 on September 23, 2020, co-created by Emma Kubert and Rusty Gladd, with Kubert handling pencils and ink and Gladd contributing co-writing and color. Emma Kubert is the daughter of Andy Kubert and granddaughter of Joe Kubert, founder of the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art in Dover, New Jersey; the series marked her debut as a creator-owned property after years of cover and interior work for other publishers. The title cat is a tuxedo who escapes from the workshop of a sorceress called The Seeker and wanders through the elaborate fantasy worlds she has built using her magical ink. Each issue follows the cat into a new realm with mostly silent panels, drawing on a wordless storytelling tradition that Kubert credited to her grandfather's Tarzan and Sgt. Rock work. The Seeker frames each issue with brief verbal panels at the opening and close, with the cat itself functioning as a silent point-of-view character traversing landscapes that vary from medieval villages to underwater kingdoms to space stations. Inkblot ran for twelve issues into late 2021, with collected volumes published by Image Comics through 2022. The series was named one of the year's best new titles by ComicsBeat and Polygon in their 2020 year-end coverage. Multiver City Comics and other independent review outlets praised the silent-cat-as-protagonist conceit as a return to early Image creator-owned experimentation. Original art pages were sold through Kubert's personal store as part of the title's direct-to-fan economics, with single pages priced between two hundred and eight hundred dollars depending on cover or splash status. Kubert has continued working in creator-owned titles since Inkblot wrapped, including the 2022 Image follow-up A Town Called Terror with Steve Niles. The Inkblot character himself appears in Kubert's convention sketch commissions and in licensed merchandise released through Image's direct-market channels. The series remains one of the few creator-owned cat-led comics of the early 2020s to complete its planned run without missed shipping.