One of the casualties of the sudden closure of Comics Alliance has made its way online – Dylan Todd and Ziah Grace taking a look at the first year of the new Valiant Entertainment:

Yeah, there’s a lot I like about Valiant. They tend to have solid creators working on their books and, for the most part, they tell stories that are at least competent, and, in the case of Archer & Armstrong and Bloodshot, are often fantastic. I like that almost all of their books manage to take the superhero concept and blend it with another genre; horror for Shadowman, sci-fi for X-O, action for Bloodshot, historical conspiracy for Archer & Armstrong. Their books are well-designed and the fact that they seem to be organically expanding their line is admirable.

There are some rough spots, though: the coloring across the board is kind of boring, and the “just get it out the door” mentality to the art is often problematic, making the art fairly interchangeable, house-style stuff which I feel diminishes the role of a penciler from a collaborator to just a cog in realizing the writer or editor’s vision. These problems that I feel are present across the industry, though. Also: Harbinger. I can’t overstate how disappointed I am with that book.

Lots, lots more in the piece, which is well worth reading. So go do that.

This feels like it could be important, or be nothing at all, depending on how it all works out:

The Valiant Entertainment Group has taken back the movie rights to a film based on its Harbinger character and plans to develop the film in-house.  It appears that Valiant, at the urging of Chairman Peter Cuneo, who was a former CEO of Marvel, is attempting to follow the Marvel Studios’ method of developing its own properties for the big screen.

Apparently, Paramount – which had been developing the movie – got cold feet at the prospect of potential legal action over ownership and credit for the characters a la Watchmen, considering creator Jim Shooter’s estranged relationship with Valiant as a whole. Part of me wonders whether there’s a there there; I’d always just assumed that Valiant owned the characters outright, but I haven’t seen any of the contracts, obviously…

Nonetheless, taking control of its own movies has worked out well for Marvel, so there’s every possibility that it could also do so for Valiant, especially considering the former Marvel staff working there (If nothing else, the current Valiant line of comics is far more exciting/interesting than I suspected it would be, and I speak as one who has no nostalgic attachment to the original comics at all). It all depends on who they get to develop the movies, and whether the audience will still be willing to entertain another superhero universe by the time their features get released.

Everything old is new again:

Valiant Entertainment and Rittenhouse Archives have signed a three-year deal for trading cards and collector albums based on Valiant properties, the companies announced today.  The first products will launch at San Diego Comic-Con in 2013.

The question is, will this generation of Valiant trading cards have the artistic line-up to rival the original’s? After all, Moebius, Steve Ditko, Barry Windsor-Smith and Adam Hughes is a tough line-up to beat…

This is just great:

Yes, that really is the US Luge team modeling their X-O Manowar uniforms, as designed by Patrick Zircher. The uniforms will be making their public debut at this year’s International Luge Federation Viessmann World Cup, which begins this weekend in Austria.

(Thanks, Hunter!)

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…