"Drinking and naming a company don't mix," Top Cow CEO Marc Silvestri cautions at the beginning of our studio tour with the publisher. All joking aside, as you'll see in the videos below, Top Cow has a very long and distinguished career in comics...virtually producing from their studio many of the hottest artists today. It all started in 1992 with the founding of Image Comics, when 7 talented comic book artists, including Silvestri, broke away from Marvel Comics and started their own company. Within Image each artist had their own company, and Silvestri's was Top Cow.

"To be polite, it was kind of an F-You to the status quo," Silvestri says in the 2-part video. "The status-quo back then was: we literally created all these characters for the two biggest publishers -- the pretty much 2 only publishers that mattered in comics back then, Marvel and DC. They had the biggest characters, they were the biggest gorillas, and you either worked with them or you didn't work in comics."

Now the highly-successful comics publisher of a number of high-profile titles like Witchblade and The Darkness, Top Cow has also seen their properties appear in everything from video games to TV shows and toys. Check out our studio tour below to learn about the inspiring story of Top Cow Publishing! Read more...

Tags Image Comics, MTV Geek Studio Tour, The Darkness, Top Cow, Witchblade