Image credit: Alien Books
We’ve reached the fourth (and so far final) comic in the reimagined world of Valiant, Valiant Beyond. I hate series that claim to be “new” or “all new.” Because it doesn’t take long before it doesn’t feel completely new anymore. Think New Teen Titans from the early 80s or the 2001 series New X-Men. These series are always referred to as “new works,” although they are never called “new works” these days.
All-New Harbinger #1 introduces the team and new members one by one as they are called in to deal with a terrorist called the Black Sheep.
While the opening sequence seems to be going well, the rest of the issue is spent rather laboriously introducing each member of the Harbinger team. There are a lot of people, places, and common jargon that can be very confusing and seem like they either don’t make sense or aren’t explained at all. We feel like we’ve been thrown into the somewhat detailed world of media res, but nothing is explained in proper detail, so it’s hard to know why we should care or even understand what’s going on.
For a first issue, it was a pretty disappointing failure, as it’s part of a manga series that is probably easier to read and simplified. Perhaps those with prior knowledge of the Harbinger characters or previous Valiant universes would be better placed to know what’s going on here, but that goes completely against the point of Valiant Beyond.
This is the weakest of the Valiant Beyond titles, but it doesn’t have the blatant transphobia of Bloodshot #1, so I’m willing to at least give it a chance. This is a real shame, as screenwriter Fred Van Lente is usually a pretty reliable guy, but he seems to have forgotten the point of this new series from the beginning, which was to make it accessible to newcomers.
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