valiant tagged posts

Writer: Jody Houser
Artists: Stephen Segovia and Barry Kitson
Colors: Ulises Arreola

Faith Herbert is a superhero in hiding after she was framed for murder, but now she’s been recruited by a time-traveler and her dinosaur-women partner to help save all of time. Unfortunately, it may take more than just one hero to stop the killer robot that’s threatening all of reality.

Faith and the Future Force confuses me as a first issue to a series. The concept is pretty simple: time-traveller recruits superhero to save reality, so you’d imagine you don’t really need to spend much time on the concept, and instead you’d establish the characters, especially since the title seems to suggest this comic will follow a team of heroes. Weirdly enough, Faith and the Future Force does pretty much the...

Writer: Rafer Roberts
Artist: Darick Robertson
Inks: Richard Clark
Colors: Diego Rodriguez
Publisher: Valiant

Detroit has been taken over by a group of super-powered children called Generation Zero, and renamed as the Free City of Rook. A group of mercenary soldiers are sent in free the city from “terrorists”, and a bloodbath with casualties on both sides ensues.

Issue #5 of Harbinger Renegade is the first part in the Massacre story arc, and it delivers on its namesake, with deaths left and right on both sides. Unfortunately, and this doubles as a disclaimer, I haven’t read any of the previous 4 issues, so these deaths meant nothing to me...

Writer: Eliot Rahal
Artist: Khari Evans
Colors: Andrew Dalhouse
Publisher: Valiant

Two soldiers out of time, kept alive as part of a secret project that turned them into weapons of mass destruction, have finally earned a day off after decades of service.

There are two major problems I have with Valiant as a whole. It’s very confusing and unwelcoming to newcomers, and attempts to explain backstory come off as poorly written exposition dumps. It’s also all very silly, which in theory is fine, but it’s all played straight and there’s usually nothing to anchor it and for the most part, the silliness all gets to be too much. Blood Shot’s Day Off is needlessly confusing, and incredibly silly, but it does manage to find an emotional anchor that makes those two issues easier to deal wit...

Writer: Eric Heisserer
Artist: Raul Allen and Patricia Martin
Publisher: Valiant

This is like jumping into a random episode of a TV show several seasons in. And for a #1, that’s really not a good thing. I’m not 100% sure of what happened, since Secret Weapons was very stingy with explanations or introductions, but it seems a powerful super powered being is hunting down teenagers with powers of their own across Oklahoma City.

About the only thing you get from Secret Weapons are the powers characters have, and occasionally their names. It’s assumed you know why they have powers, who they are, what’s going on, their relationships to each other, their past… But I knew none of that, and at the end of issue #1, I still don’t. I just vaguely know some of their powers.

To be fair, the...

Writer: Rafer Roberts
Artist: Francis Portela
Colors: Andrew Dalhouse
Publisher: Valiant

In the distant future, after the world is destroyed by war, humanity is kept alive by an AI called Father that controls them completely on the country of New Japan, orbiting above the planet’s surface. After Rai, a geomancer named Karana, and a knowledgeable old man defeat Father, they return to Earth to find the Book of the Geomancer, and discover the history of the world.

Truth be told, the story doesn’t exactly matter. It’s set dressing for what this comic really is, a walk through the history of the Valiant Universe, as the title might suggest. And getting this out of the way, as someone who knows nothing about the Valiant Universe, I got nothing out of this...