A Valiant Return

When I was an adolescent, I used to have to get the majority of my comics from the local convenience or grocery.  Suffice to say, selections were often limited.  I had to experience a lot of great comics not published by the Big Two secondhand through articles and comments in Wizard Magazine.

Suffice to say, I come to Valiant as a tabula rasa.  I picked up Archer and Armstrong not knowing what to expect, aside from all the snarking and panning I remember from those aforementioned copies of Wizard back in the 90's.  So that right there was a point in its favor from the get go.  A millennia old drunk doomed to walk the earth paired with a teenaged akashic assassin trained by a satanic cult engaged in a world-wide ancient conspiracy?  I'm loving this.  The duo go globe trotting in an effort to save the world's population from being slain by a prehistoric artifact and the action ranges from barroom fisticuffs to martial artist ninja nuns to Tibetan monk trained Nazis.  And that is just the first arc.

The next book I picked up was Harbingers.  Here we have a pair of men on the run from a psychiatric ward, one of whom displays obvious psychic powers.  It starts off slow, but it's build up for something much grander as our protagonist, Peter Stanchek, ends up on the run from two organizations wanting to use him for their own ends.  While on the surface, this does seem like standard fare, but it deals less with powers and fighting and more about the ethics and morals around the use of power to get your way.  Does might make right?  Do the ends justify the means?  Ironically, the heavier themes are balanced in more recent issues with the introduction of Faith, an overweight psion with the ability to levitate and fly.  I'm looking forward to a grand story with this title.

Finally, we have X-O Manowar.  I was expecting typical Iron Man-esque sci/fi and tech fare, but I swiftly learned not to judge a book by its cover.  Aric of Dacia is a 5th century Visigoth warlord who, along with many others, are abducted and enslaved by an alien race called the Vine that travels the stars, seeding its species among sundry worlds in their travels.  After years of abuse, he engineers a slave revolt and gains control of a powerful exoskeleton that grants him the strength to fight back.  Fleeing the damaged ship, he returns to Earth to find that over 1600 years have passed and he is now a stranger in a strange land facing the threat of complete annihilation at his pursuers.

Suffice to say, these three books have wowed me and have easily earned a place in my monthly must-haves. I'll be checking out other Valiant titles in the near future and going through their backlog to read the originals when I'm able.  My only gripe is that I've waited so long to experience such great storytelling and world-building.