Story: Becky Cloonan, Michael W. Conrad

Art: Liam Sharp

$3.99, 32 pages

Valiant Entertainment

Review: Kris Lorenzen

What It Is: First issue of the new series starring Valiant’s flagship character, X-O Manowar, to coincide with the character’s 30th anniversary. Which, not to nitpick, was technically last year. I remember plunking down hard-earned paper route money to buy that first issue back in ’92 from the chain-smoking granny that ran the register at my local comic book shop.

The Good: The story dives right into the current plot and sheds all the details of previous entries. Which is a plus. This has always worked best as a premise book—Aric is an ancient Visigoth warrior displaced into modern times with a stolen suit of sentient alien battle armor that might be the most powerful weapon in the galaxy and together they are X-O Manowar. Also, he loathes aliens (and Romans). That’s all you need to know.

The art is great. Fully painted comics is not always my bag, but this fits the character and the settings well. The art never loses understanding or readability, as fully painted stuff often can. There are real panel-to-panel storytelling chops here, not just pretty pictures.

The Bad: I miss the days of more than one Valiant title a month. Outside of the 1990s the peak would be 2012 through 2015 or so. Those were the best—half a dozen or more titles a month, some kind of fun event or miniseries running all the time. It’s not this book’s fault, of course, but it is hard to build any kind of momentum or attract more readers if you put out less and less titles.

I wish Valiant could focus on being a comic book company. Chasing Hollywood is always a race you’ll lose.

The Score: 8 out of 10 capes

Further Reading: Valiant is a personal favorite publisher with tons of highlights, past and present. Sticking to recent history, most of their first volumes trades our $9.99 retail, including long, standout runs on X-O by Robert Venditti with Cory Nord, and Matt Kindt with Tomas Giorello. Great stuff.