Start your speculation engines again. ICv2 talks to Valiant Entertainment publisher Fred Pierce, and he talks about the company’s growth over the next year:
We have so much to do and we’re trying to have a slow growth. We launched one comic a month for four months. We’re going to take a break from it. Sometime between now and April, which will be a year that we’ve been publishing, we hope to launch two more properties.
So six in the first year and then four in each year after that. Again, if we’re hugely successful maybe we’ll do more but the plan is really four. Let’s give everybody a chance to absorb the universe because Valiant is a universe. You can read any comic individually but you’ll get more out of the universe like you would with the DC or Marvel universe if you read more of the properties, and as things happen in one book you might see some passing reference to it in another book down the road. That’s really what we’re doing.
We already know that Shadowman is the fifth book, but what will be the sixth…? Earlier in the interview, Pierce lists “Shadowman, Rai, Eternal Warrior, Dr. Mirage, [and] Quantum and Woody” as titles that Valiant hasn’t yet dealt with when answering the question about whether or not they’ll try to get the Gold Key characters back from Dark Horse (Short answer: Not anytime soon), so should we take that as a list of the next titles in the offing, or…?
July 31st, 2012 at 11:14 am
The Gold Key characters were actually the least interesting to me during the 90s Valiant era. In any case, I could really care less which one is next, because they’ve all been phenomenal.
I slowly dropped all my DCnU and decided to try the new Valiant. Fresh takes on characters I used to love and well written stories that don’t pander to the audience. Count me in for the long haul!
July 31st, 2012 at 3:37 pm
As I understand it Dark Horse ended their agreement to do new books of Magnus, Solar, Turok and Mighty Samson, but they are issuing collections of the books they did publish. Whether that prohibits others doing new material remains to be seen. Mike Richardson made it clear that they ended the 4 new series because the license holder became too difficult to deal with.
July 31st, 2012 at 11:39 pm
I thought the rights to Quantum and Woody would have gone back to Priest and M.D. Bright.