Which company is closest to the big two?

Image, dark horse comics or valiant? I think I have them listed in the order with image being the closest. None of them will ever reach the greatness of marvel or DC anytime soon if at all but I was wondering how good they are compared to each other. In terms of quality of their series, popularity and sales, which do you think is the closest?

In terms of popularity and sales, its Image. Valiant is extremely small in these areas. The numbers support this.

In terms of Quality, Valiant and Image are both better than Marvel and DC, if you ask me.

If it was 1997, I would tell you that Image may one day make it known as the 'big three'.

But now... they're all so far behind I have no clue.

When it comes to quality, the smaller companies are often better.

BB

IPC/Fleetway/Rebellion in regards to heritage and body of work, these other companies haven't been around long enough.

In regards to popularity and sales Fleetway are pretty much bottom though, probably Image win in that area.

In regards to quality, Marvel and DC are at the bottom of the barrel themselves anyway :P

Currently it probably would be Image.They have released some pretty good books that deserve admiration and they are also pretty consistent.

Valiant doesn't have 1% of the market share.

Valiant is the most similar in terms of format since all of their stories happen within the one shared universe like Marvel and DC. Image has some smaller universes like the Invincible Universe but nothing company wide as most of their books are mutually exclusive of each other. I think Dark Horse is pretty similar with the Mignola-verse and their Star Wars universe but not a cohesion between the two.

That's because they only plan to have 9 books and don't want to go over that number

I don't know a lot of other companies than DC and Marvel, but Dark Horse is pretty good.