Plus it allows them to rest certain people and create new heroes in their absence. Maybe a new creative team will pick up the cast in a later book, but that will usually wait at least a year or so.Įven if the universe is ongoing, there’s more of a feeling of closure with these runs.

The creative team will eventually give the book some kind of ending. They don’t sit on the status quo forever. This goes for the likes of the “big name” comics too, such as Harbinger, Archer and Armstrong, and Ninjak. For their two main properties – X-O Manowar and Bloodshot – that means they pretty much have comics coming out all the time (X-O tends to be an ongoing while Bloodshot’s comics are constantly restarting at #1 with new names like Bloodshot Salvation and Bloodshot USA).įor everyone else, there’s usually somewhere in-between 4 and 25 issues before they call it a day. They tend to have a limited amount of comics going on at the same time. Valiant knows that by not being Marvel or DC, there’s only so much they can saturate the market with. This one is less about the fictional world of Valiant and more of how they are as a publisher. Even though the original Valiant stuff started coming out in 1989, the current rebooted continuity is as recent as 2012 and forward. Yes, Valiant is a world where we have Bloodshot, X-O Manowar, Archer and Armstrong, and countless others, but what are the concepts that make it up?įor this article, I’m going to focus on the current run of comics. DC has assorted Lantern Corps, Metropolis, Gotham, the legacy of Krypton, the Speed Force, etc. So what is the Valiant Universe? Sure, it’s a world of superheroes, but there’s more to a connected comic universe than just “it’s a world of superheroes.” When you describe Marvel to someone, you have to talk up SHIELD, the Infinity Stones, mutants, Latveria, and so on.

At the very least, there should be some people interested in reading Bloodshot stories and maybe stretching into the wider comic universe. If Bloodshot ends up driving enough interest, we might get another Valiant property on the silver screen to maybe push for a Valiant Cinematic Universe. As it is, Valiant has only been represented outside of the comic page via several video games in the ’90s (including an X-O Manowar/ Iron Man crossover, weirdly enough) and a web series from a couple years ago centering around the character Ninjak. With the release of Vin Diesel’s Bloodshot, we’re getting our first attempt at a movie adapting Valiant Comics. We’re at the point where there are dozens of Marvel movies, dozens of DC movies, and a couple Dark Horse ones sprinkled here and there.

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