Valiant

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.

The teasing is over and here's the revamped Valiant's launch lineup. The team on Bloodshot is Duane Swierczynski (Immortal Iron Fist, Birds of Prey) and artists Manuel Garcia (Checkmate, Spider Man: Breakout) & Arturo Lozzi (Immortal Weapons), while Archer & Armstrong is being handled by writer Fred Van Lente (Amazing Spider-Man, Hulk: Season One) and artist Clayton Henry (Uncanny X-Men).

Another mystery team!

MYSTERY CREATIVE TEAM ALERT.

Here's today's Valiant cover preview!

Valiant is releasing some teaser images for its relaunch this summer, and here's X-O MANOWAR.

Well, looks like this Valiant relaunch is going to go places we've never gone before. The first issue of X-O Manowar will have a QR Voice Variant—"the world's first QR code-augmented, talking comic book cover!" Jelena Kevic-Djurdjevic supplies the art. On Wednesday, a preview poster will be shipped to local comic shops so you can preview the technology, which involves a QR code, a smart phone and a steady hand.

The newly resurgent Valiant Entertainment is taking action to get the retail community on it side, hiring former retailer Atom! Freeman to the position of Sales Manager and starting a campaign to contact all the 2500 retailers in the US. This kind of goodwill tour should pay off quite a bit—in our experience, all it really takes to befriend a retailer is to listen and then maybe learn.