Valiant - The Last Of The Exclusive Distributor Announcements

[Rich Johnston]

Back in the days of the distributor wars of the mid nineties, you couldn't move without getting a press release about another publisher going exclusive to one distributor or another. Usually it was Diamond. But I can't remember such an announcement for quite some time.

Well, today, I got one from Valiant, the new company trying to revive Valiant/Acclaim characters from, well, around the same sort of time when I would get those exclusive publisher press releases.

I'm getting a really big nineties vibe right now.

Anyway, as we know, Valiant will be publishing X-O Manowar, Bloodshot, Harbinger and more. The press release cites "several new monthly comic book series, with new trade paperbacks and hardcovers planned for release later in the year." And comic shops will only be able to get them from Diamond.

Yes, retailers, look surprised.

[chris2002]

I'd be surprised if these are good. The X-O preview art looks generic (genAric?) and the way VEI has dealt with the original Valiant creators and announced for years that new books are on the way shows a lack of professionalism.

[GreyMouser]

good luck to them, i hope thier new books are a thousand times better then the old stuff. they will need it, the old stuff was just so horrible. back then i was just reading indy stuff and gotten sick of the big 2 and superhero stuff in general. after giving Valiant a try i was ready to go back to Marvel & DC, they were just that bad. but good luck to everyone at Valiant in the future. i just wish they had totally new ideas instead of rebooting all that garbage.

[darkspark]

Deja vu Valiant is going to publish a bunch of stuff that no one wants to read again.

[ahlhelm]

Didn't they announce some other distribution plan non-Diamond a couple months ago? Wonder if that was all a push to get more favorable numbers from Diamond.

I still wonder why we haven't heard a lick about the creative teams on these....

[Mike H.]

The Valiant era was a flash in the pan during the early '90s and THAT WAS IT. None of the characters or concepts were particularly original and from working in comic shops at the time it seemed like their readers were only responding to two things: the gimmicks (trading cards, zero issues, CHROMIUM COVERS!) and the inter-connectedness of the titles (which quickly fell by the wayside once Shooter was ousted). I also don't think it was a coincidence that the rise of Valiant happened at the same time as the launch of Wizard Magazine, who featured the company heavily for the first several years.

I'm not saying this new version of Valiant can't be successful, but I do think the odds are stacked against them ever higher than they were during the scattershot and lackluster Acclaim years.

[Mike Phillips]

...what is the point of this news?

[Wallabee Champ]

I'm kinda excited for this. I've been re-reading old Valiant comics recently and they *really* held up as excellent comics. (Everything through Unity was excellent, from Unity to BWS was solid, then from Deathmate on was painfully bad with occassional bright spots.) There's a lot of good material to work with in there. I always liked how it was kinda superheroes with a strong sci-fi twist.

On the other hand, all the good Valiant stuff was so strongly the voice of certain creators. The pre-Unity stuff was pure Shooter, Archer & Armstrong was BWS, Quantum & Woody was so Priest.... And it's *really* hard to try to recapture lightening in a bottle when using material like that. I think best case, I'm hoping the new Valiant stuff takes the old characters and presents them in new ways that take advantage of the voices of the creators.

[die-yng]

Really big news here, wonder when Diamond will drop the titles 'cause they sell just 1000 copies per issue.

[Evilsmurf]

good luck to them, i hope thier new books are a thousand times better then the old stuff. they will need it, the old stuff was just so beyond my education level. back then i was just reading indy stuff and gotten sick of the big 2 and superhero stuff in general. after giving Valiant a try i was ready to go back to Marvel & DC, I was just that bad. but good luck to everyone at Valiant in the future. i just wish I had something worthwile to say instead of continuously spewing garbage.

Fixed that for you.