The story
Icon Comics was launched in 2004 with Michael Avon Oeming and Brian Michael Bendis' superhero/detective series Powers and David Mack's Kabuki moving to the imprint, both from Image Comics. In June 2005 the imprint's third title J. Michael Straczynski's Dream Police was launched, followed in September by The Book of Lost Souls, also from Straczynski. Criminal by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips is an ongoing crime comic also published by Icon.
Mark Millar has described the deal with Icon in relation to his Kick-Ass series:
The creative team get all the rights and you do all the promotion yourself.
You could end up out of pocket because some of the team get paid upfront under these deals whereas Johnny and I don't take a page rate. But it was a calculated risk as we both have pretty good reps and so anything over, say, 25,000 would basically cover our Marvel page rates.
From Wikipedia’s article on Icon Comics, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4