Another week, another dumpster dive…
Up this week is a book which I actually
overpaid for when I found it in a quarterbox.
Unity #0 published in 1992 by Valiant and given away for free. I think I might have had another copy or two of this book, but I’ve found it’s just easier to pay another quarter copy for a new book than dig through my long-boxes for my old one (or ones, as is probably the case.) This was a pretty cool book when it came out, and still sends shivers down my spine 12 years later. Let me explain.
The Valiant story is kind of a long and screwy one, especially where I intersected with it. When Valiant first started publishing in the early nineties, I was overseas in the Army and my sole source of comics was the local Stars And Stripes bookstore on base. I remember perusing the back of the store and finding a whole stack of European album style books featuring Nintendo characters and WWF wrestlers. I checked out the credits and found Jim Shooter’s name on it and dropped it like a hot potato. At the time, I hated Jim Shooter. To most people of my generation who actually read
Secret Wars and
Secret Wars II, the last thing we ever wanted to see was a story written by Jim Shooter. As far as I was concerned, he was the Anti-Christ. I pretty much forgot all about the books and they sat there for at least another year (at least they were still there when I discharged…) and I don’t think anybody ever bought a copy. Comic distribution then meant getting whatever books Stars and Stripes got that month, pretty much like your local corner store. They got most of the big names (Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, X-Men etc.), but it was hit and miss which book you’d get each month. For instance, they always got
Amazing Spider-Man in, but one month they might also get
Web of Spider-Man to go alongside it. Next month, you’d get Amazing and
Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man, but no Web. It was pretty much like that with all the major franchises. Forget mini-series. For those books and other “exotic” books like Annuals and such, you had to go into to town to the one comic shop that sold American comics and pay triple price. I ended up just getting subscriptions to my favorite books and catching up with the others when I got home. Anyways, getting back to Valiant, one odd thing that I noticed was that my local Stars and Stripes was getting tons of the early Valiant books. I mean stacks and stacks of the first issues of books like
Rai,
Magnus and
Solar, Man of the Atom. I always thought this was weird, and at the time, I ignored ‘em like most other people did. I figured they must be selling big numbers back in the states if they were getting so many copies over there. Plus, with the taint of Jim Shooter clouding the books, I just walked right past ‘em. When I got home a year later and started hearing about the prices these books were selling for, I just about shit my pants. I remember reading that something like only 6000 copies of some of the early issues of Rai were printed, and I must have seen fifty of them collecting dust on that magazine rack. D’oh!
At the time that the Valiant books originally came out, Marvel and DC had moved away from the concept of telling good stories and was riding the wave that would later become the original Image creators. Rob Liefeld, Jim Lee and Todd McFarlane ruled at the time. Jim Shooter believed that good stories always won out and based the Valiant line on that. He had used the albums from earlier to gain a quick cash infusion and rolled that over into creating his own superhero line to compete with Marvel and DC. His first goal was to find some established characters that he could license cheap. He contacted the owners of the old Dell/Gold Key characters and got the rights to publish
Magnus Robot Fighter,
Dr. Solar and
Turok and got them for damn cheap. Shooter and company launched Magnus and a re-titled
Solar, Man of the Atom along with new concepts
X-O Manowar (a cross between Iron Man and Rom the Spaceknight, featuring a sentient alien armor that crashed on Earth thousands of years ago and was found by a barbarian. The armor forced him into hibernation and then re-awakened him in modern times. Even the primary bad guys of the book, Spider-aliens or something like that, were pretty similar to Rom’s Dire Wraiths.), Rai, a futuristic Samurai book,
Shadowman, which I really don’t too much about and
Harbinger, which was essentially their version of
X-Men, but actually turned out more similar to the original concept of
New Mutants. (Harbinger is also notable for being Dave Lapham’s first major work, including his first stint as a writer.) Some creators of note who popped up early on at Valiant include Bob Layton, Don Perlin, David Michelinie, Steve Englehart and most importantly, Barry Windsor-Smith. Plus, Frank Miller and Walt Simonson did covers for various books. All of the above had worked at Marvel under Shooter and pretty “defected” to Valiant when it started up. Plus, Valiant is also notable for introducing Joe Quesada to the world. He actually started out in their production department doing coloring and touch-ups. The artwork on the books were never flashy (with BWS’s Solar being the most noticeable), but the stories quickly gained a reputation interesting and well-written. Originally, most of the books didn’t really seem to tie into each other at all, but that all changed with…
Unity!!!
Featuring a story written by Jim Shooter, penciled by Barry Windsor-Smith and inked by Bob Layton, Unity #0 kicks everything off with a bang. It’s pretty hard to get into the book cold if you don’t know anything at all about the Valiant universe or books. This is definitely a cross-over that involves everybody and everything and could pretty much be called “Valiant’s Crisis on Infinite Earths.” This book ties all the books together and sets up a “cohesive” universe. Events that occur in the modern day books affect the future books like Rai and Magnus. The whole story is set off by the origin of Solar, which featured not only Solar gaining quantum powers, but also a female named Erica Pierce who was involved in the same accident. Apparently, she gained similar powers, but instead of becoming a do-gooder, she was driven mad by the power and Unity chronicles her attempt to destroy the world, or whatever the hell she wanted to do. It’s been 10 years since I’ve read any of the original Valiant books, so my history of the whole thing is kinda hazy. Suffice it to say, even though it’s a good story, it’s definitely confusing if you don’t know much about Valiant history. Usually, company wide cross-overs come with hype stating that “Nothing will ever be the same.”, but they never really follow through. This time, they did it right. A major character died (but nobody really cared…), New books were launched (
Eternal Warrior and
Archer and Armstrong) and every book in the line actually had a reason to be published. It was actually quite nice. For awhile. Then Jim Shooter lost a power struggle and was removed from the company…
Valiant actually became more popular after Shooter, but mainly because of things that Shooter instituted and his successors ran with. Zero issues, coupons to collect for special issues, chromium covers (which I admit, were pretty cool…) and of course, sneaking new characters in by using cameos in other books. That was a cool concept the first couple of times they did it, but then things started getting out of control pretty quickly. The first time or two that they did it, you would find out that the next major character to get a book actually appeared six months ago for two or three panels in one of the other books. Kinda cool idea, made it seem like anything could happen and that nothing was unimportant. Then they started doing it all the time, to the point that they even started advertising it in the solicitations. “The left foot of a major new character in the Valiant Universe appears in this issue for the first time!!! Buy 100 copies and put your kids through college!!!” The one thing that Bob Layton and company didn’t understand that Jim Shooter did was that all the extra crap is just gravy. Flashy art, fancy covers and zero issues don’t mean anything if you don’t have a good comic book story to base it on. This proved to be Valiant’s downfall a few years later.
There was some cool stuff that came out of Valiant though. Does anybody remember Rai #0? I got a reprint of it when I bought the Rai TPB, and that book blew me away. In sixteen pages, it mapped out the past, present and future of the Valiant universe. It was a really cool idea at the time, and it caused all kinds of fanboy moments later on when things would happen in a book that had been foreshadowed in the zero issue. Of course, that was fun for a while, but the creators quickly learned that it also tied them into some sticky situations later down the road. The same thing happened to DC when they had to declare that Dark Knight was an Elseworld tale, just so that people would stop asking when and how Jason Todd was going to die. Sometimes when you extrapolate the future like that, you find yourself regretting it later. Even Dave Sim bemoaned the fact that he had painted himself into a corner when he stated that Cerebus would die alone and unloved. Yeah, it’s neat to look for hidden clues and stuff like that, but it limits the creators options in the long run.
After Jim Shooter left, Valiant suffered a pretty long drawn out death (or so it seemed, but it really wasn’t
that long.) Books like
The Second Life of Doctor Mirage,
Geomancer and a team book called
Secret Weapons were all garbage, adding nothing to the mix. I think there was even a second stab at creating a Unity type event, but by that time I (and most other fans) had completely given up. I remember at one point, Valiant tried to re-invigorate their line with an event called “Birthquake” which was more of an editorial shift than a crossover. Big name stars were brought into the main books and everything was re-vamped. I even remember hearing at the time that they tried to woo some of Marvels biggest names with high salaries (something like 45k an issue maybe?) The only two books that I remember even checking out were X-O Man-O-War by Ron Marz, Bart Sears and Andy Smith and Solar: Man of the Atom by Dan Jurgens. I don’t remember if any other books continued or who did them. Keith Giffen did a book called
PunX and even though I’m a huge Giffen fan, even I admit that this wasn’t his best work. This lasted about a year, year and a half, and then Valiant was put out of it’s misery. For a short time, at least.
There’s been a few other stabs at making Valiant a go since then, but they really don’t have too much to do with original line. Someday, I’ll go into detail about Valiant’s second life (or VH2, as it was called) which was a line that I really enjoyed, and bought just about everything from (hell, I was one of about 75 people who even went to the panel at the Chicago Comicon that announced the birth of the new line, so I was there for that one from beginning to end!) Another thread for another day would be the Defiant line that Jim Shooter started after being ousted from Valiant (which, sadly, I own every book from too.)
Enough for now though. Think I’ll go pull out some of those old Valiants and skim through them again…
