Yesterday saw the announcement of this year's Eisner Award nominees, and Image Comics came away from it with a huge portion of the nominations, highlighting comics such as Sexcastle, Bitch Planet and Southern Bastards. To celebrate, Image is putting on a huge digital sale that features all of its nominated titles, reduced in both their single issue format and collected editions.

One of the highlights of the sale is the work of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, with their most recent series The Fade Out nominated for Best Limited Series and Brubaker himself nominated for Best Writer. The Fade Out takes the classic noir sensibilities of Brubaker and Phillips and transports it the Golden Age of Hollywood, a world filled with broken dreams and desperate people.

If you're only going to get one comic in the sale, I'd recommend any of the Criminal collections, which can all be enjoyed individually --- but reading the entire series maps out an entire history of crime and how it runs through generations. "Bad Night" is my favorite, the tale of a forger-turned-cartoonist who gets way in over his head, but you can't go wrong with any of them.

Also in the sale is Velvet, by Brubaker and his Captain America collaborator Steve Epting, a gritty spy drama that's more Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy than James Bond. The series follows Velvet Templeton, who returns to the world of espionage to investigate a colleague's murder and winds up travelling the world to try and clear her own name.

Elsewhere in the sale, you can get twenty collections of Robert Kirkman, Cory Walker and Ryan Ottley's Invincible for $5 a pop, or check out the first trades of Injection, Outcast, or The Autumnlands. Image has had a phenomenal year creatively, and this sale is a great way to check out what you missed over the past year and beyond.

The Image Eisner Nominees Sale runs until April 25th.