Valiant-comic book company in the early 90's

[oranthal]

what happened to it? i was looking through some of my comics yesterday and i don't know where the company went. i was never really a collector of their comics but i have a few. i remember reading through the Wizard and all the Valiant stuff was rising in price; why was that?

one more question, are the characters all semi-related? i was looking through the early issues of Bloodshot and he looks a lot like Rai with the red circle on their chests. they also mentioned magnus, robot fighter and a few others.

[Christopher N. Denner]

Wasn't that Jim Shooter's first Non-Mainstream company?

[MachSabre]

Originally posted by oranthal
what happened to it? i was looking through some of my comics yesterday and i don't know where the company went. i was never really a collector of their comics but i have a few. i remember reading through the Wizard and all the Valiant stuff was rising in price; why was that?

one more question, are the characters all semi-related? i was looking through the early issues of Bloodshot and he looks a lot like Rai with the red circle on their chests. they also mentioned magnus, robot fighter and a few others.

Whhooo... Okay, I'll give it a shot here. I'm sure someone knows more than me, but here's what I know.

Valiant comics was at the time before Image arrived "The Third Horseman" of the comic industry. (Marvel, DC, and Dark Horse being the other three.) Valiant had a history of being a fresh take on shared universe idea, with interesting characters and comics that was story driven as opposed to art driven. (Which was beginning to be a trend at that time.) THey did experiments with coloring and often had rather cataclysmic events occur in thier universe. All the characters were related in some way or another, seeing how they had "two timelines" to deal with. One was the present day time line, which had characters like Bloodshot, Ninjak, and the fan favorite X-O Manowar. And other had future characters like Magnus Robot Fighter and Rai. (Rai was a decendant of Bloodshot.)

Anyways, the books were really good and were attracting a LOT of attention at the time, especially after doing a really awesome story called Unity, which was kind of like Crisis of the Infinite Earths but with more purpose than just continuity clean up. ANd people started to flock to the books. (Even more so when big names like Joe Quesada and Bart Sears started to arrive on the scene.)

However all good things came to an end. Valiant did a miniseries with the young and fledging company Image called 'Deathmate' which was NOT the reason Valiant fell from grace, was a good marking point to when it happened.

Then everything went to hell in a handbasket.

Jim Shooter left Valiant under some questionable means, and quality control fell at the company. (Kind of like when Katzenberg left Disney... Shooter went to form Defiant Comics, which failed. And so did his next company Broadway Comics.) Then they tried to "shake" things up a bit by chanings all thier likable characters. (Solar became Solar the Destroyer, X-O Manowar became female, ect. This failed.) Then Valiant attempted to redefine thier books under a new concept called "Birthquake", in which it had a bunch of jumping on points for readers and new bi-weekly schedules for the popular books with rotating but similar art team. (This failed too.) And then Acclaim bought Valiant and launched a new take on all the books, pretty much scrapping everything we had before. (Turok the Dinosaur Hunter was a young kid, Shadowman was more Vertigo-like, and X-O was a Captian America/Iron Man amalgam.) THe company changed thier name to Acclaim as well.

Even with the poularity of the Turok game, it all just didn't pan out in the end and the comapmy failed. Rumors are aboud that they're attempting a THIRD relaunch, but at present, I hadn't heard anything more. (Hopefully X-O will be done right again.)

It's not much, and there's a LOT more to it all than that... But like I said, hopefully someone will know more than me.

-Dave

[Derekwc]

Yeah that third relaunch you're reffering actually happened
(and failed miserably) a long time ago.

A few years back Acclaim got Jim Shooter to write and Jim Starlin
to draw Unity 2000. This was to be an actual crisis-like 6 issue mini
that would launch a new line of Acclaim comics. Unfourtunately
they only got to issue #4. They was a falling out of sorts with
finance and Shooter wasn't paid for #4 script yet when they asked
for #5 and 6, so he wouldn't give it to them.

It was cool if you had been a fan of the various incarnations of the
universes. Course I was a big X-O fan and he (or a version)gets
wasted by Magnus midway thru. :(

[MachSabre]

X-O got wasted by Magnus?

Yeah. Right.

The only time Magnus was ever impressive was his crossover with Nexus, even then Horatio Hellpop was still more impressive than Magnus.

X-O would have trounced the crap out of... Ah why bother. You know it, I know it, and anyone with a brain knows it.

It's funny, you're right. I had totally forgotten that third relaunch! Now I see it was for the best! Gah!

-Dave

[Derekwc]

I guess you could take solice in that it was suposed to be
the post-"Birthquake" X-O.....

[halinar]

It's sad that such good books died in a horrible way. I loved X-O and Magnus. The whole neanderthaul in a hyped up iron man suit was great.

[Joe Wagner]

For a while Acclaim was working on a net-exclusive site for some of the comic titles (primarily Quantum and Woody) but I don't think it ever panned out.

I guess I was the opposite of most of the Valiant fans as I only started reading the Valiant stuff whenever it was in most stores quarter bins. I thoroughly enjoyed Bloodshot, X-O Manowar and Solar and thought that all three series could have had a much longer life than they did. I really think that if they did a complete relaunch and basically re-started the universe they could bring in fresh talent and re-create one of the greatest comic universes with new ideas. Unfortunately Acclaim doesn't really have any desire to do new comics unless they are included within their video games.

-Joe!

[Joe Tully]

The only Valiant books that I read were their Nintendo-related comics. Super Mario was hilarious and was a huge favorite of mine. :D

[oranthal]

that really was too bad that Valiant went out the way it did. it is pretty rare that a company would concentrate on story as as opposed to drawings. that concludes it, i'm going to read my older brother's comics which he had a lot of the older valiant stuff. the hurdle is that i have to dig for it in a backroom under a lot of junk.