Valiant’s Warren Simons is teasing more interconnectedness in the reborn Valiant Universe:
We just had our editorial retreat and we had Duane [Swierczynski] and Fred and Robert Venditti and Joshua Dysart up here. What’s happening for the next three months, the next six months, the next year, I can promise you should keep an eye on “Bloodshot” #6. We’ve got some key, key developments coming in that particular issue. It’s a really great question. How we introduce new characters and how we ultimately roll out the characters, but we’ve found we’re really trying to tie it into the core elements within the universe, the key points within the universe, the key points within the story itself. We’re going to be seeing a lot of that coming up in “Renegades,” which is the next arc in “Harbinger.” We’re going to be seeing it in the next arc of ‘Bloodshot’ and we’re kind of moving to a point where the strength of the Valiant Universe is going to be playing off of itself. So, you’ll see more characters interacting with them. The same way we introduced Ninjak in “X-O” #5 because we felt like it was a logical point in the story, we feel like the Eternal Warrior’s going to be in issue #5 of ‘Archer and Armstrong’ because we feel like it’s a really key moment in the universe. It’s really going to be a very important element. We’re not just throwing the characters in randomly, we’re really trying to make sure it’s an essential moment when we bring them in and there’s a real purpose behind what’s happening. I think we’ll be seeing more of both in the coming year.
I pretty much missed out on the original Valiant books way back when, so I say this without any true nostalgia, but: The new Valiant line is pretty much doing the original Marvel Comics formula right, isn’t it? The “Here are all these comics, and they all stand on their own feet, but we’ll slowly reveal the connections and crossovers between them” thing, I mean. I’ve found myself genuinely surprised by how drawn into Harbinger, Archer & Armstrong and especially Bloodshot I’ve become (X-O Manowar is taking longer to grow on me, I admit; it looks wonderful, but I didn’t really find myself digging the writing until the most recent issue – I think I wanted more dialogue and interplay), to the point where seeing the individual books mixing things up and introducing each other’s characters feels like something approaching an event.
If you’d asked me whether or not I’d call myself a Valiant fan before the relaunch, I would’ve said I didn’t think so, nor did I think it’d be that likely. But here I am, less than six months in, finding myself looking forward to meeting the Eternal Warrior, Ninjak and seeing what happens to Peter Stanchek this time around…
September 11th, 2012 at 11:13 am
“The new Valiant line is pretty much doing the original Marvel Comics formula right, isn’t it?”
No. They’re doing the original Valiant formula.
September 11th, 2012 at 4:49 pm
Yeah, this is exactly how the original Valiant launch worked – the only difference is that the original Valiant launch built their line around Magnus and Solar. Without those two properties, I’m having a hard time getting as excited about the current Valiant books – but that doesn’t mean they are perfectly enjoyable.
It’s a mistake to think that Marvel had any of their continuity planned out. It started out as a lark more than anything, and if you go back and read the first couple years of Marvel’s books it’s fairly obvious that the interconnectedness was mainly a way to goose up sales of lower-selling titles and properties (Ant-Man, the Hulk) by crossing them over with the Fantastic Four. Everything that followed after that came as a result of the fan reaction to the early crossovers, but it was all extremely haphazard – and really, would remain haphazard even after all the titles were supposedly fully integrated.