Valiant Comics

One of the things I've been excited recently is the announcement that Valiant Entertainment will relaunch their comic book line next year.  A brief history - Valiant Comics existed from about 1992 to about 2000 and at one point, was the third largest comic book company.  They got bought out by the video game company Acclaim around 1996 who decided to flush all of the good things about Valiant down the toilet in order to make the comics more adaptable to video games.  It worked, kind of - with the success of Turok and Shadowman, but eventually the comic book market crashed and Acclaim went bankrupt.

The run of Valiant Comics lasted about the same length as my foray into actively collecting/reading comic books.  I liked the books they produced a lot - partly because they weren't Marvel or DC comics.  Their characters were a bit more realistic (origins, body types, problems, etc.) and also the entire universe had a tight continuity to it.  You didn't need to read all of the books they published, but you had a real sense all of these characters existed in the same universe.

In comparison, take the Marvel character Wolverine who currently stars in his own monthly book, and is a part of the team books Avengers, X-Men and X-Force.  That would almost be like one quarterback playing on four different teams in the same week.  I know, I know, they're comics, but still.

Anyway, back to Valiant.  The rights to the vast majority of the characters eventually lapsed and were snatched up by a group intending to relaunch the comic book line in 2012.  I'm not able to pinpoint it exactly, but I am very excited by this.  I may even venture into a comic book store again and pick up some of the relaunch on the days they come out.  I've been re-reading the old Valiant stories and enjoying them and have also been buying some older back issues to fill in some gaps in my collection.

I'm very curious to see what they pull together for next year and hopefully it will last.  They're supposed to release some information in the next week or two on what their overall plan is.  Stay tuned to the official website for details, all of you comic book fans that read my blog.