Wheres this months Sequart article?

jk20000 · Post by **jk20000** » Sat Mar 25, 2006 11:19:56 pm

I really hope they get it up soon, its usually up by the middle of the month

I was really looking forward to it because it was going to be about Harbinger.

stephenpakula · Post by **stephenpakula** » Mon Mar 27, 2006 7:05:07 pm

The next article should go live some time this week. Incidentally, it's about Solar, and the next one is X-O.

For those that have been reading Sequart.com regularly, you know that we have many new columns and articles for everyone to check out. Hope you dig it!

stephenpakula · Post by **stephenpakula** » Tue Mar 28, 2006 11:03:30 pm

it just went live...check out sequart.com! What do you think?

xoken · Post by **xoken** » Thu Mar 30, 2006 10:52:06 am

http://www.sequart.com/columns/?col=13

xoken · Post by **xoken** » Thu Mar 30, 2006 11:14:31 am

Highlights

We've just hired a much larger staff here at the Valiant Tangent offices, so every message is guaranteed to get read, and very much appreciated.

If we were reading Spider-Man or Superman, the cops would probably thank the hero for capturing the villains before waving goodbye as the hero flies off to look for more evildoers. But this is the Valiant Universe, and the stories take place in a world that is supposed to be like ours, that is, in a world where it is unusual to see people flying and shooting energy from their hands. So it's only natural that when Doctor Solar wants to leave, the cops actually do mind. They tell him to stay because they'll "need to take a statement" and ask him questions.

Harada tells Doctor Solar that the world is experiencing highly unusual weather phenomena because of an explosion in Antarctica the day before. Scientists believe that a meteorite crashed and caused the explosions, but Harada believes that it was Doctor Solar that made it happen, and the images in Doctor Solar's mind of the arctic location that Harada can pick up on just prove his theory. (It looks like Harada has telepathy also.) And, because of the threat that Doctor Solar presents to the planet, Harada feels that it is necessary to stop him at any costs.

This illustrates another aspect or characteristic of the Valiant Universe as a whole—actions have consequences. Super-powered beings don't just battle in crowded city streets, knock down buildings and then leave as if nothing happened. Every thing that any character does or says has an affect on every other character in these books.

And, just a quick note about how his powers are illustrated—they don't appear as they would if this was a Marvel book. When Jean Grey moves an object with her mind or uses her telepathy to get into someone's head, we see funky energy waves around the object or her head to tell us that she is using her powers. Here in the Valiant Universe, there are no such things. When Toyo Harada moves something with his mind, it just moves. No blue or pink energy bubble around it. This is yet another way that the Valiant Universe is supposed to be like the "real" world, and it is very much related to the lack of sound effects in Valiant comics.

One more quick note about Toyo Harada. This guy makes Professor X looks like a child with a headache.

Doctor Solar wants to destroy Phil because he believes that Phil destroyed billions of people (which, in fact, he did, but it was an accident).

The next bunch of panels might look familiar, and they should. They are panels of Phil arriving at the plant, putting on a containment suit and heading towards the reactor—the exact panels from Solar #0 drawn by Barry Windsor-Smith. The dialogue is exactly the same. The only difference is that we do not get to see the captions of what is going on in Dr. Seleski's head (for those, check out #0). This process of repeated panels is something that will occur many more times in these early Valiant books, and I think it is a brilliant manner of storytelling. Sure, it would be easy for the artist to just draw the panels over again instead of taking the exact ones and reprinting them, but I think that reusing the existing ones solidifies the story more. Once we get to Unity (the massive crossover), you'll be able to see how well this process works. Entire scenes from one book appear in multiple books, each from a different point of view. What I mean is that if it appears in a Solar book we might have Solar's inner monologue. But the same scene appearing in a Magnus or X-O Manowar book might have captions illustrating other characters' points of view. It's very effective, and will become much clearer as we go further into these stories.

i miss valiant

Thanks so much for reading, and I hoped you enjoyed it. If you did, the greatest thing that you can do is to go to your comic shop and find some old Valiant books to read. I guarantee that you'll like them more than some of the crap that they call comics today.