By Jim Shooter, Bob Hall, Don Perlin, Steve Ditko, Gonzalo Mayo, Stan Drake & various (Valiant)
No ISBN
During the market-led, gimmick-crazed frenzy of the 1990s amongst the interminable spin-offs, fads and shiny multiple-cover events a new comics company revived some old characters and proved once more that good story-telling never goes out of fashion. As Editor-in-Chief, Jim Shooter had made Marvel the most profitable and high-profile they had ever been and, after his departure, he used that writing skill and business acumen to transform some almost forgotten Silver-Age characters into contemporary gold.
Western Publishing had been a major player since comics’ earliest days, blending a wealth of licensed titles such as TV and Disney titles, Tarzan, or the Lone Ranger with homegrown hits like Turok, Son of Stone and Space Family Robinson. In the 1960s during the superhero boom these adventure titles expanded to include, Brain Boy, M.A.R.S. Patrol Total War (created by Wally Wood), Magnus, Robot Fighter (by the incredible Russ Manning) and in deference to the atomic age of heroes, Nukla and the brilliant Dr. Solar, Man of the Atom. Despite supremely high quality and passionate fan-bases, they never captured the media spotlight of DC or Marvel’s costumed cut-ups. Western shut up their comics division in 1984.
With an agreement to revive some, any or all of these four-colour veterans, Shooter and co-conspirator Bob Layton came to a bold decision and made those earlier adventures part-and-parcel of their refit: acutely aware that old fans don’t like having their childhood favourites bastardized and that revivals need all the support they can get. Thus the old days were canonical: they “happened.â€
The company launched with a classy reinterpretation of science fiction icon Magnus, but the key title to the new universe they were building was the broadly super-heroic Solar, Man of the Atom which launched with an eye to all the gimmicks of the era, but also cleverly realised and realistically drawn.
Hit after hit followed and the pantheon of heroes expanded until dire market condition and corporate chicanery ended the company’s stellar expansion. Gradually it fractionated and all but disappeared…
Now with a Bloodshot movie in the offing and reports of the company’s revival here’s a glimpse at one of their too few graphic novel collections from the early days of the format.
The Valiant Era Collection, representing Magnus #12, Solar #10-11, Eternal Warrior #4-5 and Shadowman #8, was released in 1994 as an introductory sampler and canny compendium of first appearances from the company’s burgeoning continuity which gathered a disparate selection of tales which had one thing in common: the debuts of characters that had quickly become “hotâ€.
In the collector-led era of the early 1990s – before one zillion internet sites and social networking media – many new concepts caught the public’s attention only after publication. The seemingly-savvy snapped up multiple copies of comics they subsequently couldn’t sell and many genuinely popular innovations slipped by unnoticed until too late.
This trade paperback from a company that valued storytelling above all else addressed that thorny issue by simply bundling their own hot and hard to find hits in one book…
‘Stone and Steel’ was written by Faye Perozich and Shooter and illustrated by Gonzalo Mayo, and found Robot-Fighting superman Magnus transported to a timeless dimension where dinosaurs and cavemen existed side by side. Once there he became embroiled in a battle for survival against his old enemy Laslo Noel: a rabid anti-technologist not averse to using modern super-weapons to force his point of view.
The Lost Land had other defenders, most notably two Native American warriors named Turok and his young companion Andar. The pair had been a popular Western Publishing mainstay for over a quarter of a century (see Turok, Son of Stone) and their initial (re)appearance here led to their revival in a succession of titles which even survived the company’s demise as well as a series of major computer and video games.
That spectacular and entrancing epic is followed by a two-part Solar saga which introduced an immortal warrior prince and paved the way for the disclosure of the secret history which underpinned the entire Valiant Universe.
Solar was brilliant nuclear physicist Phil Seleski, who designed a new type of fusion reactor and was transformed into an atomic god when he sacrificed his life to prevent it destroying the world.
His energized matter, troubled soul, coldly rational demeanour and aversion to violence made him a truly unique “hero†but his discovery of hidden meta-humans and a genuine super-villain in the ambitious, mega-maniacal form of ultra psionic Toyo Harada led Solar into a constantly escalating Secret War.
Solar #10, ‘The Man who Killed the World’ by Shooter, Don Perlin, Stan Drake, John Dixon & Paul Autio, introduced a raft of new concepts and characters beginning with troubled teen Geoffry McHenry – the latest in a long line of Geomancers blessed or cursed with the power to communicate with every atom that comprises our planet. When the world screams that a sun-demon is about to consume it Geoff tracks down Seleski only to determine that Solar is not unique and the threat is still at large.
Meanwhile, however, Harada’s Harbinger Foundation has sent all its unnatural resources to destroy the Man of the Atom, supplemented by a mysterious individual named Gilad Anni-Padda, an Eternal Warrior who has been battling evil around the globe for millennia and has worked with a number of Geoff’s predecessors…
The concluding chapter ‘Justifiable Homicides’ (Shooter, Steve Ditko, Ted Halsted & Mayo) finds Geomancer, Gilad and Solar battling for their lives against an army of Harbinger super-warriors but as always with this series, the ending is not one you’ll see coming…
Gilad quickly jumped to his own series and Eternal Warrior #4-5 introduced his immortal but unnamed undying nemesis in ‘Evil Reincarnate’ (Kevin Vanhook, Yvel Guichet & Dixon) a tale of ancient China which segues neatly into a contemporary tale battling the drug-baron who is his latest reborn iteration before the nanite-enhanced techno-organic wonder warrior Bloodshot explodes onto the scene in ‘The Blood is the Life’ (by Vanhook & Dixon); a blockbusting action epic which set up the enhanced assassin’s own bullet-bestrewn series and, tangentially, the 40th century Magnus spin-off Rai…
The final debut in this volume was not for another hero but rather featured the introduction of the Valiant Universe’s most diabolical villain. Shadowman #8 held ‘Death and Resurrection’ (Bob Hall, Guichet & Dixon) and changed the rules of the game throughout the company’s growing line of books.
Jack Boniface was a struggling session saxophonist trying to strike it rich in the Big Easy when he was seduced by Lydia, a mysterious woman he picked up in a club. Her sinister, trysting assault left him unconscious, amnesiac and forever altered by a bite to his neck. Lydia was a Spider Alien: part of a race preying on humanity for uncounted centuries and responsible for creating many of the paranormal humans who secretly inhabit the world.
Her bite forever changed Jack and when darkness falls he becomes agitated, restless and extremely aggressive: forced to roam the Voodoo-haunted streets of New Orleans as the compulsive, impulsive daredevil dubbed Shadowman – a violent, driven maniac, hungry for conflict – but only when the sun goes down…
This tale examines the deadly criminal drug sub-culture of the city as a new narcotic begins to take its toll: a poison which forces its victims to careen through the streets bleeding from every orifice until they die. Witnesses call them “Blood Runnersâ€â€¦
As Shadowman investigates he is unaware that he is a target of the drug’s creator – an ancient sorcerer named Master Darque – and that soon the world will no longer be the rational, scientific place he believed.
Soon Jack will have terrifying proof that magic is both real and painfully close and that the Man of Shadow is not a creature of exotic physics and chemistry but something far more arcane and obscure…
Despite being a little disjointed these stories are immensely readable and it’s a tragedy that they’re not all readily available. Still there are always the back issue comics and the hope that the new revival might spawn a few trade paperback editions. Until then you can still hunt down this and the precious few other collections via your usual internet and comic retailers, and trust me, you really should…
© 1994 Voyager Communications Inc. and Western Publishing Company, Inc. All rights reserved.