Valiant

Valiant's being a big tease again. I was sent the following graphic with the tagline, "Shadows fall this November."

Enough Marvel news for today. Valiant has slipped us a 5-page preview for the second issue of their surprisingly dark teen psychic book, Harbinger. Looks like the alternate cover gives us a peek at the new Harbinger uniform. Regarding the first page (and the extent to which this is a really dark take on the original) -- the young lady is our hero's early childhood crush and he sort of... gave her an attitude adjustment.

Archer & Armstrong will be the latest Valiant book getting the revival treatment. The original A&A was a Barry Windsor-Smith book. It was also a book with a sense of humor about itself. An immortal of slovenly bent and an uptight martial artist. Yes, this was the comics version of a buddy movie.

Valiant has released the following line with this image: "Are you different? Meet Faith Herbert this September, only in Harbinger #4."

Valiant Comics' relaunch has now expanded even further, with the announcement of an apparent new Ninjak series coming out in September.

Last month, Valiant had a pretty successful start, with X-O Manowar selling out 45K copies and going into a 2nd printing. This week, the second Valiant title dropped, in the form of Harbingers #1. Let's have a look at it.

I read (almost) every Free Comic Book Day title, and let you know what's the best!

Earlier this week the resurgent Valiant unveiled a redesigned logo, courtesy of logo king Rian Hughes.

I think we've all gotten to the point where we can accept that pullboxes are pretty big part of the market and an especially important thing for new indie books. Valiant seems to be taking that to heart and is offering a "Pullbox Variant" cover just for people with pullboxes. How directly tied that is to their pullbox form (see below), I'm not sure. Regardless, it's a way to have subscribers without a subscriptions department and retailers do pay attention to customer pre-orders.

Comeback kids Valiant are reentering the market with some good-looking material, based on what we've seen thus far, but is it enough to take them back to being the #3 publisher someday? CEO Fred Pierce chats with ICv2 on that, Cary Nord, and so on:

You're been hearing about the Valiant revival, but talk is cheap. Here's the first 6 lettered and colored pages from X-0 Manowar #1. And at no extra charge, the cover!

Word on the street was that DC and Marvel were starting to throttle back on the exclusive deals. The biggest names would still be exclusive, but as deals were expiring a lot of people you'd normally expect to be on an exclusive would be freeing up. And, of course, exclusive were more about not working at about DC and Marvel at the same same time than they were about being truly exclusive. Plenty of them had an out to do a creator-owned book at someplace like Image or Oni.