Today, we head back 10 years to see how Valiant Comics triumphantly returned to the world of comics with X-O Manowar #1.
This is "Look Back," where every four weeks of a month, I will spotlight a single issue of a comic book that came out in the past and talk about that issue (often in terms of a larger scale, like the series overall, etc.). Each spotlight will be a look at a comic book from a different year that came out the same month X amount of years ago. The first spotlight of the month looks at a book that came out this month ten years ago. The second spotlight looks at a book that came out this month 25 years ago. The third spotlight looks at a book that came out this month 50 years ago. The fourth spotlight looks at a book that came out this month 75 years ago. The occasional fifth week (we look at weeks broadly, so if a month has either five Sundays or five Saturdays, it counts as having a fifth week) looks at books from 20/30/40/60/70/80 years ago.
Today, we go to May 2012 for the release of X-O Manowar #1 by Robert Venditti, Cary Nord, Stefano Gaudiano, Moose Baumann and Dave Lanphear (behind a brilliant Esad Ribic cover, which you can see in the featured image for this article), as Valiant Comics returned to the comic book world.
VALIANT RETURNED TO COMICS BY RETURNING TO ITS PAST
Founded by Jim Shooter in 1989 using some of the licensed Gold Key characters (Magnus, Robot Fighter and Solar, Man of the Atom) as the original basis for the shared comic book universe (to give the company a head start in recognizability), Valiant Comics soon became one of the hottest independent publishers in the business. For a while there, it really was like there was a "Big Four" of Marvel, DC, Image and Valiant, that's how big of a chunk of the market Valiant took circa 1992/1993. After a sale to Acclaim Entertainment in 1994, though, which was timed almost perfectly (or whatever the opposite of "perfectly" is) with the collapse of the comic book speculator's market, Valiant fell on hard times and went out of business.
In 2005, Dinesh Shamdasani and Jason Kothari bought Valiant's intellectual property (pretty much everything but the Gold Key characters) from Acclaim when the video game company went bankrupt a year earlier. The pair of entrepreneurs launched Valiant Entertainment and Valiant was finally relaunched as a comic book company in 2012 with the "Summer of Valiant," which had four titles launched one per month from May through August. The first comic book launched was X-O Manowar.
Valiant put together an excellent mixture of talent for its initial books, using writers like Joshua Dysart, Duane Swierczynski and Fred Van Lente and artists who had previously had success at Marvel and DC like Khari Evans, Manuel Garcia and Clayton Henry and, of course, the creative team of X-O Manowar, with Cary Nord recently coming off of an acclaimed run on Conan the Barbarian at Dark Horse Comics, making him the perfect match for Aric the Visigoth.
The first issue opened with a striking infographic by Rian Hughes that really drew the audience's attention...
And then we let Cary Nord and Stefano Gaudiano do Cary Nord and Stefano Gauadiano things (they're two of the very best in the business at just being excellent comic book artists)...
Wow.
Just wow.
X-O MANOWAR REFLECTS THE NEW STYLE OF COMIC BOOK STORYTELLING
As we are introduced to our hero, Aric, we can see right away that Venditti is adopting a much different storytelling approach than Jim Shooter and Steve Englehart were when they launched the original X-O Manowar thirty years earlier...
One of the biggest changes in comic book storytelling has been the so-called "decompression" of comic book writing, and you can see it at play here, as Venditti introduces us to Aric, lets us see his bravery in battle against the Romans and then see him get captured with some of his countrymen by some alien invaders...
Aric got a hold of the X-O Manowar armor by, like, page 10 of his original comic book, but in the reboot, things are done at a slower pace, as Venditti builds the drama by first showing that the aliens are trying to access the armor but find themselves unable to wear the suit...
The first issue therefore ends with Aric and his friends still in captivity, but one of the cool things about this nominal cliffhanger is that it, again, is only nominally a cliffhanger, as Aric is pretty darn convincing when he explains that he WILL escape and HE will take their own weapons and use them. Of course, what Aric doesn't know is that he will find himself in a whole new world and time when that happens, but it is still not so much of a cliffhanger as much as it is a preview of what this hero WILL do.
This was an excellent restarting of the Valiant comic book universe, and it really helped a larger audience of people to know how talented Venditti was (he would soon become one of DC's main writers).
If you folks have any suggestions for June (or any other later months) 2012, 1997, 1972 and 1947 comic books for me to spotlight, drop me a line at [email protected]! Here is the guide, though, for the cover dates of books so that you can make suggestions for books that actually came out in the correct month. Generally speaking, the traditional amount of time between the cover date and the release date of a comic book throughout most of comic history has been two months (it was three months at times, but not during the times we're discussing here). So the comic books will have a cover date that is two months ahead of the actual release date (so October for a book that came out in August). Obviously, it is easier to tell when a book from 10 years ago was released, since there was internet coverage of books back then.
