It’s too hot for original thought. Thankfully, we can revisit the past; that always takes less effort.
That was a wee bit snarky, perhaps, but I have to admit I’m kind of interested in the apparent return of Valiant Comics. At least, I’m interested in what it might lead to.
Reprinting Harbinger is a pretty good start. It wasn’t a great book – certainly not “classic and beloved”, as claimed by Valiant Marketing Guy Chip Carter – but it was a fun teen superhero book, the sort of thing Marvel used to be really good at 25 years ago: Alienated teen superheroes on the run from an evil corporation and fighting off space aliens.
The new Jim Shooter story – an origin of villain Toyo Harada – doesn’t excite me terribly. It’d be nice if they could have grabbed original series artist David Lapham to draw it, but that’s hardly a dealbreaker. I’d probably pick up the new hardcover if I didn’t already own the trade of the first 6 issues.
Mind you, Jim Shooter kind of bugs me. For instance, there’s this quote:
“Basically I learned it all from Stan (Lee). In those early days of Marvel it’s what he did (there)…he made continuity when no one else was doing continuity. He had everything related as much as he could.”
That pretty much sums up what I can’t stand about many superhero books these days, though perhaps he wasn’t envisioning Civil War or Infinite Crisis. At any rate, the early Valiant books actually did this sort of thing very well: There was plenty of overlap, and the occasional crossover, but for the most part books stood on their own.
As I said, I find the Valiant revival more interesting for what it could lead to: Specifically, I want a nice hardcover collection of Archer & Armstrong, which Barry Windsor-Smith started with Shooter and then continued (quite ably, and probably better than the first couple of Shooter issues) on his own. It was a perfect example of the sort of thing Valiant did so well: A quirky and unique kind-of-superheroey book that had ties to other books but mostly just did its own thing.
Some of the other Valiant books would be worth a reprint, though probably not in hardcover. Solar and Magnus: Robot Fighter had some interesting stories, though I believe their rights are somewhat complicated. Shadowman was a cool book, though I haven’t read it in years and I’m not sure how well it would hold up; perhaps my memories are just tainted by the Aerosmith team-up, though. Rai was a pretty neat idea, too, though the Bloodshot extension just seemed to turn into another Punisher template.
Valiant comics seem to get separated into two categories, neither of which is entirely accurate: Many of the early Shooter issues are nigh-deified, while later books fall into the generic “90s Crap” group. While it’s true Valiant got very bad very quickly, they started off quite well: Not revolutionary or even particularly original stories (with a few exceptions), but good, solid superhero stories. It’s worth revisiting, if not exactly worshipping.