By Jim Shooter, David Lapham and various (Defiant)
No ISBN:
If the 1980s was the decade where anybody with a pencil and a printer’s phone number could enter the business, the 1990s saw the rapid rise – and very often swift fall – of the small corporation publisher. Lots of businesses opened or acquired a comics division to augment or supplement their core business: like the Nintendo Comics that were packaged by and published in conjunction with Valiant Comics.
Jim Shooter founded Valiant with Bob Layton, and later went on to launch the short-lived but highly impressive Defiant Comics of which this book is – to my knowledge – the only collected edition.
That’s a great pity as the range of talent that briefly worked there as well as the titles themselves showed great promise. The legal war of attrition with Marvel that caused their early closure is well documented elsewhere, so I’ll swiftly move on to the product itself.
The Flagship title Warriors of Plasm was a powerful alien intervention tale set mostly in an alternate universe where a single race had taken genetic science to such extremes that their homeworld had become a voracious planetary organism which continually fed on the biomass of other worlds.
Society on The Org was hierarchical, imperialistic and ritually sadistic, where the credos of “survival of the fittest†and “evolve or die†had the force of fanatical religion. Ruled by a weak Emperor, the court lived a life of brutal hedonistic luxury, revelling in decadence, relentlessly jockeying for advantage.
Lorca is a Seeker, high in the court and charged with finding new worlds for the Org to consume, but something within him defies the official doctrine that personality is an aberration and that all bio-matter belongs to the greater whole. Bodies are mulched and recycled whilst individuality is an anti-social aberration, yet all organisms clearly would do absolutely anything not to die.
Spurred on by his corrupt rival Ulnareah, Lorca forms an illegal relationship with Laygen, a girl created without state-approval, and when caught he is forced to recycle her to preserve his own existence.
Bitter and discontented he returns to work, but when he discovers Earth beyond the transdimensional veil he sees an opportunity to overthrow the Org and take supreme control. The humans are strong, individualistic, fierce warriors, and with his genetic augmentation could to defeat any force the Org could muster. He teleports 10,000 test subjects to his private vats but something goes wrong.
Only five humans survive, mutated into superhuman beings, but the Seeker is unaware of this since he’s been arrested by the authorities who never stopped watching him…
How the transformed humans escape and the uneasy alliance they form with the unlikely liberator Lorca makes for a refreshingly novel spin on the old plot of revolution and redemption, and Shooter’s dialogue and characterisations of what could so easily have been stock characters adds layers of sophistication to this fantasy drama that many “adult†comics would kill for even today.
David Lapham’s incredible art and design inked by Mike Witherby, simultaneously understated and outrageous, captivates and bewilders, adding a moody disorientation to a superb, action-packed thriller, especially in the incredible, climactic four-page fold-out battle scene.
Originally produced as Warriors of Plasm #1-4, ‘The Sedition Agenda’ was preceded by an issue #0 daringly released as a set of trading cards and supplemented by a prequel tale outlining the social relevance of the gory global sporting phenomenon known as Splatterball, written and drawn by Lapham with inks by Bob Smith, and all these tales are gathered here for your delectation.
I have no idea where you can find a copy of this terrific little book but I hope you do, just as I wish that some smart publisher would pick up the rights for all the Defiant material: and then we’ll get the entire band back together and finish all the other stories and…
© 1994 EEP, L.P. All Rights Reserved.
Very nice to see someone brining up this gem of a story. Between his early, pre-Unity Valiant material and the Defiant line, Shooter really had some great stories to tell. It would be great to see more, wouldn’t it?
You’re absolutely right.
British writers have a great reputation for producing different kinds of story that stretch the medium, but often it appears that all American writers need is to stray off the DC/Marvel ‘fights in tights’ reservation to go to as many weird places and tell as compelling a story as any fan can withstand.
Let’s hope Shooter plans more and I certainly plan to revisit a lot more of his ‘independent’ material.
Shooter has been working wonders on the Legion again of late. It’s great to see him still getting it done all these years on. Pity DC has decided to kick him out again, but there you go…
Apparently, he has plans for other work in comics soon.
I already owned the original issues, but found this TPB in St. Mark’s Comics in East Village whilst on my honeymoon.
This is a great series, although Dark Dominion was even better. Jim Shooter is my favourite comic writer ever.
The newest Legion series was great – until #50 – that was terrible! I’m glad they didn’t try to credit him with that catastrophe of a final issue!