Blogs:

Newsarama Blogs Home > Article: Valiant is the New Marvel?

Valiant is the New Marvel?

July 10th, 2012
Author Graeme McMillan

From the New York Times profile on Valiant:

Home to superheroes like Spider-Man and the Hulk, Marvel achieved one of the most spectacular rallies in media history. With its shares trading for as little as 93 cents, Marvel went from bankruptcy in 1997 to Hollywood heavyweight in 2009, selling itself to Disney for $4.3 billion, or about $53 a share.

Now two professed comic book geeks — with backing from the turnaround specialist Peter Cuneo, who spent 10 years at Marvel in various roles, including chief executive — are trying to make lightning strike twice with Valiant, a comics company that was a force in the 1990s but fell victim to legal quarrels and bankruptcy. Valiant, which is based in New York, restarted its comics line in May, achieving strong sales, and has five movies in development.

“Think of us as Marvel 2.0,” said Mr. Cuneo, whose résumé includes turnaround work at Black & Decker and Clairol.

The story goes on to explain the the comparison is more one of business model similarity to explain the company to investors than anything else, but it’s still an interesting claim to make…

5 Responses to “Valiant is the New Marvel?”
  1. M. Says:

    They should bring back the video games too which were pretty sweet.

  2. Ziggy Says:

    So Graeme, your only input into this is to say “the article goes on to say this doesn’t actually mean what my snippet and headline alone would imply, but I’m going to misrepresent it anyway”

    Good job as always.

  3. akachris Says:

    I doubt that Merrill Lynch or anyone else is going to give Valiant a $450M line of credit with their stable of characters as collateral.

  4. youwanti Says:

    Got ex and current Marvel guys working on the creative teams and editorial. Technically its not a shock.

    Quality wise, I hope not.

  5. Riley Says:

    Bring back Jim SHooter.

Leave a Reply »