Jim Shooter returns to Magnus/Turok/Solar :gossip:

[Gatsby77]

Am I looking forward to it?

 

Yes. Very excited. Valiants were the holy grail for me back in the day, and I've got near-complete sets of both the Valiant and Acclaim series.

 

Can Shooter pull it off?

 

No. Because 1) as they said--it was lightning in a bottle. Beyond Wizard's propaganda, Valiant was popular because it was the yin to Image's yang.

 

2) the hard-core fans over at the Valiant board won't be satisfied with the new version and/or support them by buying them off the shelf because a lot of them are nostalgia-driven speculators (and I'm not immune--have posted over there since 2004 as "Rai-fan").

 

3) It didn't work ten years ago. Unity 2000 was a great idea, with Jim Shooter writing (beginning in Shadowman, vol. 3, # 5) and Jim Starlin drawing. Still, sales were so bad they didn't even finish the miniseries. If any of these titles makes it past issue 25, I'd be surprised.

 

What pre-unity Valiant was hardest for me to obtain?

 

Toss-up between Rai 4 and Solar 9. In my area (Philly) there were about 3-4 copies of the (supposedly rarer) Rai 3 for every copy of Rai 4. Likewise, Rai 5 was harder to obtain than Rai 3, although it was the second valiant I bought after Unity 0. For variants, I've still never owned either of the Unity trades, X-O 1/2 gold, or Chaos Effect Alpha Red.