If you love Valiant, now you can spend the day for love with your favorite Valiant characters in A VERY VALIANTNE’S SPECIAL, a 56-page anthology spotlighting four tales of love, including Doctor Mirage, Bloodshot, Faith and Archer, and “The Many Loves of Ninjak,” which is, frankly, a story that had to be told.
Now let’s back up a bit. What ever happened to Valiant Comics? You might recall that the publisher licensed out its characters to Alien Books, a newish publisher of graphic novels, manga and more. They’ve been putting out Valiant titles over the last few months, including the Valentine’s special and X-O MANOWAR UNCONQUERED #6 and the ETERNAL WARRIOR SCORCHED EARTH trade paper back, and NINJAK SUPERKILLERS, and have even been omnibizing some Valiant titles.
I’m not enough of a Valiant expert to know how much of this was material from the pre-Alien days, although the Scorched Earth trade had a rather fraught history after being Kickstarted all the way back in 2021.
At any rate, the New Valiant has announced a few new books for the spring including:
PUNK MAMBO: The Punk Witch Project a one-shot by Peter Milligan and Andres Ponce, cover by Dan Panosian.
BLOODSHOT UNLEASHED RELOADED, a four issue mini series by Deniz Camp, Mauro Mantella and Al Barrionuevo, with the first issue coming out March 13th.
THE DARQUES: Soulside a one-shot by Fred Van Lente, and Sebastian Cabrol, cover by Salvador Sanz
X-O MANOWAR: Unconquered a collection of the mini series written by by Becky Cloonan and Michael W. Conrad with art and cover by Liam Sharp.
Other upcoming books include the return of Britannia and more of your favorite Valiant characters from back in the day. Alien is also publishing non-Valiant things, like Machine Girl And the Space Invaders by Matts, which was also once published by Red 5 Comics, who we were just talking about the other day.
At any rate, comics just aren’t the same without Bloodshot, so it’s nice to see him brooding around again.
But back to love and A Very Valiantine’s Day Special. Some of the stories are a bit “saucy” but here’s a few tamer pages. The book came out last week but as mentioned, it’s a 56-page “prestige” format collection, so still fresh on the shelf. Creators include Lysa Hawkins, Ryan Cady, Buddy Scalera, Will Pfeifer, Aj Ampadu, Andres Ponce, Emiliano Urdinola, Emilano Correa and Diego Giribaldi.
