Geiger #19

History

Geoff Johns and Gary Frank — long-time collaborators on titles such as Action Comics, Doomsday Clock, and Batman: Earth One — launched Geiger as their first creator-owned project at Image Comics in April 2021, with colorist Brad Anderson and letterer Rob Leigh rounding out the core team. The 2024 ongoing series (sometimes designated Vol. 2) relaunched under the Ghost Machine imprint, the creator-collective Johns and Frank co-founded at New York Comic Con in October 2023, where all members jointly own and operate the company and share in publishing, media, and licensing revenue. Issue #19 carries forward a storyline seeded from the very first issue of the 2024 run: Ashley Arden had been name-dropped as someone who might hold a cure for Geiger's uncontrollable radioactivity, and her physical debut in #10 (January 2025) sold out at the distributor level and went to a second printing. The Jim Lee cover swap — originating from a conversation between Frank and Lee at Italy's Lucca Comics convention years earlier — was announced publicly in May 2025, confirming #19 as a marquee release months before its December on-sale date.

Trivia · 8 facts

• Published December 10, 2025 by Image Comics / Ghost Machine; written by Geoff Johns, art and Cover A by Gary Frank and Brad Anderson, lettering by Rob Leigh.
• The issue is a full spotlight on Ashley Arden (The Glowing Woman), shifting the main Geiger title's POV away from Tariq Geiger for an entire issue — the first time the series had done so.
• Ashley's mission in this issue: operating off the grid, she hunts and confronts child traffickers — the same criminal network that victimized her when she was young, adding backstory depth to the character introduced only nine issues earlier.
• The closing pages reveal that Simon Pure (Redcoat), the immortal British soldier from Ghost Machine's companion series Redcoat by Johns and Bryan Hitch, has arrived in the post-nuclear future and is tracking Ashley — the first time Redcoat appears within the Geiger ongoing series and a direct tease of inter-series crossover.
• Cover B is by Jim Lee (with Scott Williams inks and Brad Anderson colors), depicting Ashley Arden; it is Lee's first cover published by Image Comics since Spawn #200 in 2011, and part of a compositionally mirrored 'cover swap' with Gary Frank's simultaneous cover for DC's Batman #163.
• Additional variant covers: Cover C by Christian Alamy and Morry Hollowell; Cover D is a 1:50 retailer-incentive black-and-white version of the Jim Lee image.
• The Geiger ongoing series (Vol. 2) is part of Ghost Machine, a creator-collective co-founded by Johns, Frank, Anderson, and others in October 2023, in which all creators jointly own and run the company — described at launch as an industry first for shared publishing ownership.
• The issue is included in the trade paperback Geiger Vol. 5, collecting issues #16–23 of the 2024 ongoing series, scheduled for June 2026.

Full credits

Variants (2)