Question(s) for the VH1/90's crowd.

[The Chosen 1]

I almost forgot one of the weirdest moves ever. And I believe all of this was motivated by the fact that Bob Layton wanted to get away from anything Jim shooter had done story wise or character wise. I believe it was definitely fueled by ego more than anything else comet though it is noted that Bob Layton was having a drug problem during those years. And he always seemed like a major *SQUEE* in the staff videos. Imagine having what are the biggest books into back market, harbinger number 1, and having all of this momentum for that team and set of characters. And then by issue 26 you completely erase most of that story line and focus on a brand new team, that literally no 1 cared about, and no 1 asked for at all...
Literally one of the stupidest moves ever in the comic book industry was having harbinger take a serious turn after Jim shooter left..
Add on a side note, Death mate red came out about 8 weeks after deathmate epilouge if I remember correctly, maybe it wasn't that long but it definitely came out weeks after the epilog, that's how flat the death mate thing ended up being

I didn't know about the Bob Layton issues and what was happening at Valiant, except that Jim Shooter had left. But you are right about issue #26 of Harbinger. I religiously bought Hrbinger and when issue #26 come out, i thought WTF? That was the last Harbinger comic i bought and the other Valiant titles i used to buy all got the same reaction. I think the last Valiant comic i bought was Magnus #30.

[dornwolf]

Reading some of your comments is really interesting for me. I've only ever read the older Valiant stuff by tracking down back issues at cons recently and a lot of the titles you mention that you each feel signaled the end I rather enjoy. Timewalker and Dr.Mirage in particular. The only thing I will mention though as a very casual collector and reader, and something I've seen mentioned on this board in old threads, my god did they beat ideas into the ground. Almost all the spin-offs were just copies of the thing they spun out of which normally wouldn't really be bad since comics are kind of built on that it's just that that's all they had.

[elee79]

Coming from a different perspective, my parents operated a comic shop in the '90s. It was a period of growth in the early '90s fueled by the excitement of Image and Valiant and Ultraverse.

You had the excitement around Image and in our case the excitement for Valiant started with Unity. We had short-ordered the pre-Unity books and I can remember one of our pull and hold clients scouring the shelves for the pre-Unity books. He didn't find many. The excitement around Valiant continued at least into the late Summer of '93. There were definitely massive amounts of books being ordered even for a small town of our size. With that said there were a number of pull and hold customers who were purchasing those books and given how prices were rising it wasn't uncommon to see multiples on the pull and hold lists.

Our folks were pretty excited by Valiant and made a number of fan projects that received gold books. There were a few hard core collectors that held on to them but many of them sold them the second they received them. I've probably got ten of those books with the envelopes and notes from Valiant in my collection. One of the projects was an Eternal Warrior figure that a friend made. People were really creative in showing their love for Valiant.

The Acclaim deal I think really shot the story telling. It was more about producing large print runs than about the quality. I'd argue that the downturn in quality started right after Unity.

There were a lot of things fueling the market, it wasn't just Image and Valiant. You had Wolverine coming into his own, The Death of Superman, Knightfall, the DC movies, which at that time were the comic movies to watch. Batman Returns came out in '92 and that definitely brought people in the door. Ultraverse was interesting but it wasn't a big seller. Video games were also really popular and you had the comic tie-ins.

One of the things that Valiant had going for it was it's support for retailers. Paul Fairchild was, and always will be, a rock star. That man knew how promote the company and he helped make sure that retailers knew what was coming down the pipeline. From their promotion at the Diamond Comics conventions, to the semi-annual events like Falls Flings (and the spring event) they always had great material to present. You'd see material from everyone else but you didn't see companies trying to create the buzz that Valiant did. I remember one call that Paul arranged to talk to companies about Valiant where they wanted customers present. We went out and bought our first speakerphone for that call. I think in the early days Valiant really cared about the retailers. By the time Acclaim took over you didn't see that same support.

[Oxmyx]

Bloodshot #1 was when valiant went mainstream..ummm let's see.. literally by choas effect no one cared anymore.. it was like watching a flower wither and die before your eyes.. needed some shooter juice!!!

This is fascinating because the Bloodshot movie is very possibly the event where VEI goes mainstream.

In this post IMJ points to Dr Mirage to a "by that time" he knew the shift. I guess you both are talking about the same thing. IMJ describes it well.

See, I wasn't into comics back then.