Antonius Axia, Rome’s first (and only) detective, is back with a new case: temple statues of the gods are coming to life and killing young nobles and a popular female gladiator is somehow connected. Can he solve the case before Emperor Nero loses patience and feeds him and his son to the lions?
Deadman cosplayer Master Darque wants to (sigh) take over the world – Shadowman to the rescue! …
Shadowman, Volume 2: Darque Reckoning loses the momentum set by the really good first book, instead delivering a vague and uninteresting story.
A world-famous footballer, his supermodel wife and their infant son crash-land near a tropical island – this is Savage aka Valiant Does Lost! Our plucky young hero must navigate the strange island’s dangers, like dinosaurs and bloodthirsty bikers, to survive and figure out how to get back home.
During the reign of Nero the Roman Empire stretched across Europe with its northernmost border in the foggy and dark island of Britannia. There the local savages have been acting up, attacking a Roman outpost with reports of demonic powers aiding them. On the advice of the mystical Vestal Virgins, Nero sends out Centurion Antonius Axia, the first detective, to investigate. But Axia is about to discover that monsters take many forms…
Bloodshot wakes up on a tropical island with no memory of how he got there – no, he wasn’t on a stag do! Before he can even contemplate bronzing up that alabaster-white skin and downing some tropical drinks with tiny umbrellas, he’s quickly on the run after being shot at by Deathmate, a flying Angel of Death! He’s also not alone – meet the Bloodshot Squad, made up of earlier Bloodshot prototypes who’re also being used as moving targets! But who is Deathmate and can Bloodshot and co. survive the island and escape?
A virus that threatens mass extinction of the human race is on the loose - it’s up to Valiant’s Iron Man, XO Manowar, their Hawkeye, Archer, and their joke Cyborg, Beta-Max, to save the day!
Dead Drop stinks. XO Manowar’s on the cover but he’s only really in the first issue. The second issue is Archer’s, the third is Beta-Max’s, and the fourth ties them all together.
Bloodshot continues to hunt down the remaining nanites that have infected some unwitting human hosts - until he realises there’s another out there also hunting the remaining infected in an effort to become Bloodshot themselves!
Spoilers ahead if you haven’t read Book of Death and are planning to. If you’re not, this one has a truncated version of that story anyway so you can get all caught up without suffering through that nonsense!
Though they’re a much smaller publisher, Valiant’s superhero event books manage to be every bit as crap as anything Marvel or DC put out!
The Eternal Warrior protects Geomancers (Earth wizards) like the little girl Tama who’s a Geomancer from the future. Together they must find the evil one to stop a terrible future from occurring. Yeah, it’s as bad and slapped-together as it sounds.
The evil alien warrior Control created the Armor Hunters to track down and destroy all Manowar armors like Shanhara but also came up with a backup plan if they should fail: Dead Hand. A planetoid-sized mass of killer robots, Dead Hand has appeared on Loam, the Vine homeworld, and has plans for the next nearest armor planet: Earth. Aric to the rescue!
Ray Garrison is a handyman at a Colorado motel, earning his keep by doing oddjobs for the owner. But in the night he’s tormented by horrible memories of murder and has resorted to self-medicating with hard drugs and booze. Ray Garrison isn’t his real name and nor is this one: Bloodshot. But that’s the cat he used to be - a bioengineered super-assassin with nanites in his blood that healed him from any wound!
Of the three Anni-Padda brothers, Ivar is definitely the most boring. Armstrong is a drunken adventurer, Gilad is a fighter - Ivar is basically a museum docent. He “walks” through time with people, showing them history, not altering it, and then doing it all over again. Well, lucky us for getting a whole series of that!
Gilad the Eternal Warrior is tasked with protecting Geomancers - mystics who “speak for the Earth” and “guide humanity to new heights” (whatever that means). But each time a Geomancer appears, so does The Immortal Enemy whose purpose is to kill the Geomancer and plunge humanity into a perpetual dark age - Gilad may be eternal but the Geomancers aren’t! Not great at his job then…
Yikes, XO Manowar has gone downhill lately! It used to be a great series. The first four volumes were awesome because they were this self-contained, compelling narrative of Aric fighting the alien Vine to free his enslaved Visigoth people.
Gilad Anni-Padda is the Eternal Warrior, Earth’s immortal champion, who fights whoever for whatever reason the Earth desires in its inscrutable master plan of guiding the human race. Gilad is informed of his orders via a Geomancer who can communicate with the Earth – except they are not immortal and frequently re-spawn through new human vessels. Why frequently? Because something Gilad imaginatively calls the Immortal Enemy (who is immortal and an enemy) has been killing Geomancers. And now, in the 21st century, Gilad’s new Geomancer is the latest target.
The country music hit from the 1920s, Big Rock Candy Mountain, is made real in The Delinquents as Valiant’s wackiest duos Archer & Armstrong and Quantum & Woody team-up for an adventure to find the Hobo King’s treasure!
Towards the beginning of this issue, the Eternal Warrior says that he’s tired with all of the fighting and, before it’s over, you will be too! The Eternal Warrior is Gilad Anni-Padda, Earth’s champion who receives commands through the Geomancer and fights whoever because the planet said so. He doesn’t know why, all he knows is that he’s part of a larger plan. The last Eternal Warrior series I read, he was the Eternal Emperor some 3000 years in the future but for this miniseries, Days of Steel, Gilad is back in the past, somewhere in eastern Europe in the middle ages caught in a conflict between the Franks and the Magyars.
This past summer’s Valiant event Armor Hunters was pretty light on the Hunters’ backgrounds (the villains of the series) and centred mostly on Aric, the hero of XO Manowar. Ironically, this XO Manowar book features the Armor Hunters prominently with but a brief appearance from Aric at the end.
This is the book that should’ve led up to Armor Hunters. What the event lacked was any grounding in the villains of the story – we didn’t really know who they were, we just knew that they travelled the galaxy destroying Manowar armors. This book takes a look at Reebo, the leader of the Armor Hunters, and Malgam, the man with the deformed Manowar armor who attacked Aric in volume 6, and reveals how they met/became Hunters, etc.
There sure are plenty of ‘rental issues in the Valiant universe these days! Quantum and Woody’s supposedly dead dad is coming back to haunt them; Bloodshot’s whole motivation is finding out his origins; and in Archer & Armstrong, Archer’s purpose in the series now is to find out who his biological parents were.
Archer’s quest takes him and Armstrong to the Church of Retrology in Hollywood (nothing at all like Scientology – the Retrologists are all about conning gullible celebrities out of their money) where a dead ringer for Jim Morrison, the Lizard King, sends them off to fetch the Holy Grail in exchange for seeing Archer’s folks. Except it’s held in a strange building (the Hotel California?) filled with dead celebrities who’re seemingly alive and well – what the hell is going on?!
Following suit with the comics big boys, Valiant have done their own summer event comic, this one called Armor Hunters – and, surprisingly for an event comic, it’s actually not bad!
The Armor Hunters are a group of mercenaries flying through space in a giant robot on an unending mission to destroy every single piece of Manowar armor in the universe ‘cos they’re dangerous. Now they’ve come to Earth to separate Aric from Shanhara – but he don’t WANNA! Time for lots of smashy-smashy action between toy-like figures with many things going BOOM!
