Valiant Previews for 1/14!
It’s a big week for Valiant this week, with three of their more-unique titles hitting shelves Wednesday.
First off is Rai #6, from Matt Kindt (Mind MGMT, The Valiant) and Clayton Crane. Rai is grippingly beautiful science-fiction, and if you’re a fan of visually striking future-noir worlds like Ghost in the Shell or Blade Runner, you’ll like what you find in this book. The book is set in the year 4,001 in New Japan, a floating island that launched the entire Japanese nation into orbit as the world started to fall apart. Rai deals with a lot of the existential issues you’d expect to see from this kind of sci-fi – questions about the nature of humanity in a world filled with robotics, questions about privacy in a world tied together – in fact, forged from – an enormous computer network – but it also carries over a lot of the questions that Bloodshot raises about agency and morality in the life of a soldier. (Kindt is also co-writing Bloodshot’s latest exploits with Jeff Lemire in The Valiant.)
The book is gorgeously painted by Clayton Crane, which not only lends it an immediately distinct look, but it stands in sharp contrast to the digital nature of the book’s world. There was a gap of nearly half a year between the end of the last story arc and the beginning of this one, but as the preview pages below illustrate, it’s well worth the wait to get a book that looks this good. If you want to jump on board Wednesday, it shouldn’t be too hard to find the first arc in a trade, or just grab December’s issue. It’s well worth it.
Next up is The Death-Defying Doctor Mirage #5. When Shan Mirage first appeared in the rebooted Valiant Universe, I was saddened by the absence of her husband. The original Second Life of Dr. Mirage was one of my favorite Valiant titles, largely because it depicted a working, loving, functional marriage. You don’t see a lot of that in media – outside of The Thin Man or The Addams Family, couples are usually falling in or out of love instead of just being awesome together.
The answer to “Where is Hwen Mirage?” turned out to be, basically, Hell. Shan has been wandering the Deadside for three issues now trying to find her husband in a truly affecting Orpheus story. Now that she’s found him, she’s torn between saving his life or stopping a demonic invasion of Earth, and she’s running out of time. Of course, the story of Orpheus rarely ends well. Jen van Meter has beautifully laid out a love story for these two, and now that she’s set conditions on Hwen’s return, I find myself legitimately questioning how this will end, which isn’t something I get to do very often. Her story is well-complemented by Roberto de la Torre’s art, with its dirty line-work and careful shadows adding to the frenetic horror atmosphere.
One of the things I respect most about the new Valiant is the fact that it hasn’t been beholden to the original stories, but it has very much respected them. Look no further for proof of that than Q2: The Return of Quantum and Woody. Valiant has suspended their own, in-universe Q&W to allow original creators Christopher Priest and Mark Bright to finish the story that they started telling over ten years ago. Their willingness to risk brand dilution in order to honor the original work speaks volumes about their integrity, and their assumption that their audience is smart enough to differentiate between them is a risk that a lot of publishers wouldn’t take.
Q2 makes a lot of the “lost” years, both in-story through flashbacks, and with jokey, fake covers for issues that never happened. It adds depth to the story, but it also demands some work on behalf of the reader- the storytelling style has always been very loose with time. Flashbacks unfold so often and briefly that they can be a little confusing, and the order of scenes often has more to do with when Priest wants information parsed out than with traditional narrative flow. But Quantum & Woody is worth the work, and it’s well-worth reading. Priest’s sympathy for marginalized people extends from his usual race issues now to issues of gender identity, with a young sidekick’s questioning treated with the utmost sympathy by the book, even while the ostensible heroes are dismissive. It’s a hard tightrope to walk, but that’s always been one of his strengths – unflinchingly portraying these types of tensions as they are, and leaving how they ought to be as a strong suggestion to the reader.
NOTE – as the Q&W preview is surprisingly spoiler-y, I’m just gonna leave these covers here. 
