Valiant Entertainment, Superhero Comics’ Strangest Success Story
“I was sick of superheroes,” comics writer Matt Kindt told me as he sipped his coffee at a midtown Manhattan café. In 2012, he was doing contract work for superhero giant DC Comics and chafing under its tight creative controls. But in the midst of his caped-crusader fatigue, his brother called him with some bizarre news: “He’s like, ‘Hey, do you know Valiant is back?’”
As a kid, Kindt had been a fan of Valiant Comics. Founded in 1989, it became the first credible threat to Marvel and DC — the so-called Big Two — in decades. Series with delightfully '90s-style titles like Bloodshot,Harbinger, and Ninjak boasted massive sales and critical acclaim. For a short while, Valiant was the third-biggest company in the industry. Then it collapsed. In 2004, after years of irrelevance, it formally dissolved. Its superheroes became historical footnotes.
So you can forgive Kindt for being baffled to hear Valiant was, in any form, “back.” He quickly learned that his old favorite characters had their own books again, with completely rebooted stories made by all-new creative teams. “I was reading Bloodshot and Harbinger again, and I was like,Wow, this is good!” Kindt said. “I guess I don’t hate superheroes. I just hate the kind of superhero books that are usually out.”
Today Kindt isn’t just a fan — he’s one of the company’s star writers. He’s participating in one of the strangest experiments in comics history: the resurrection of Valiant, a brand that had long been a failure and a punch line. It’s an experiment that involves message boards, mysterious auctions, time-traveling Visigoths, filthy cubicles, and Moneyball. The goal is to create a superhero universe that can challenge Marvel and DC’s supremacy. It’s an experiment that could very well fail. But right now, against all odds, it’s working.
***
Dinesh Shamdasani wouldn’t be CEO of Valiant Entertainment today if his best friend hadn’t run a con on him.
When the original Valiant launched, Shamdasani was a child living in Hong Kong. He loved American superhero comics but didn’t know of any comics shops in which to buy them. So he had to rely on his pal Jason Kothari, whose father would go to the U.S. for business trips and bring back suitcases full of comics. Jason used those shipments the way a drug kingpin might use imports of cocaine.
“Jason — and I should’ve known he was going to be a consummate businessman at that point — picked out the ones that he thought would be worth the least amount of money and would give them to his friends who didn’t read comics, one each,” Shamdasani told me at Valiant’s cramped midtown offices. “So this is the one I got, this Valiant comic, X-O Manowar No. 6.”
Excerpt from Archer & Armstrong No. 4. Art by Pere Perez.
And perhaps most important, Valiant is dependable. As of this month, it's put out 18 different comics series, comprising 202 individual comics issues, and every single one of them has shipped on time — something unheard of for the Big Two. Valiant tries to offer comics that match any potential reader’s preferences: There are team books, solo books, sci-fi books, supernatural books, and so on.
“I know when I pick up a Valiant book I'm going to get my $3.99's worth out of the story,” Dan Pittman, a longtime comics reader, told me. “I think [there’s] a focus more on just the comics themselves and less on marketing pushes for movies and big events and other things that DC and Marvel are guilty of.”
However, he thinks Valiant still has a big hurdle to overcome: “The only knock I have against them right now is the lack of diversity that is cropping up in their line, both in terms of characters and the creatives behind them.” He has a point: Few of its titles star women (and the ones that do are either team books or limited series), and its creative staff is overwhelmingly male.
Even Kindt, who’s currently writing three Valiant series, thinks his company has catching up to do on diversity. He recalled going to his first Valiant writers’ retreat, which was “maybe six or seven guys, and the first thing we said was, ‘We need to get a woman in here, it's ridiculous.’”
Shamdasani agrees that gender diversity is a concern. “We don’t have an equal split of male and female creatives or male and female talent [in the comics industry],” he said. “And I think because certain publishers are owned by large corporations, there are certain demands on them from an optics point of view. They value more highly female talent, and so they pay more for female talent, and they more aggressively court them. So it’s been very difficult.”
Whatever Valiant’s future looks like behind the scenes, its output is certainly getting artistically diverse. Although Valiant continuity is easy to follow, the company’s storytelling is getting more ambitiously weird. This year saw the relaunch of Rai (which is somehow even more insane and high-concept than its ’90s predecessor), and next year we’ll get Ninjak, which will be told in multiple time periods simultaneously. And in a very coming-of-age move, it's launching a series about an all-new character with no ’90s counterpart: Divinity, starring a lost Soviet cosmonaut who returns to Earth with godlike powers.
Valiant may still lag behind the Big Two in sales, but Shamdasani says he’s playing the long game. Standing in his office, surrounded by the piles of documents and comics that litter his train wreck of a desk space, he told me his ambition: “Being the third-biggest publisher in the business is our goal. Hopefully in five, ten years, whatever it takes, we'll get there.”
“We have yet to have a big flop,” he said, beaming. “It’ll come. I’m sure it’ll come. But it hasn’t come yet.”
“I was sick of superheroes,” comics writer Matt Kindt told me as he sipped his coffee at a midtown Manhattan café. In 2012, he was doing contract work for superhero giant DC Comics and chafing under its tight creative controls. But in the midst of his caped-crusader fatigue, his brother called him with some bizarre news: “He’s like, ‘Hey, do you know Valiant is back?’”
As a kid, Kindt had been a fan of Valiant Comics. Founded in 1989, it became the first credible threat to Marvel and DC — the so-called Big Two — in decades. Series with delightfully '90s-style titles like Bloodshot,Harbinger, and Ninjak boasted massive sales and critical acclaim. For a short while, Valiant was the third-biggest company in the industry. Then it collapsed. In 2004, after years of irrelevance, it formally dissolved. Its superheroes became historical footnotes.
So you can forgive Kindt for being baffled to hear Valiant was, in any form, “back.” He quickly learned that his old favorite characters had their own books again, with completely rebooted stories made by all-new creative teams. “I was reading Bloodshot and Harbinger again, and I was like,Wow, this is good!” Kindt said. “I guess I don’t hate superheroes. I just hate the kind of superhero books that are usually out.”
Today Kindt isn’t just a fan — he’s one of the company’s star writers. He’s participating in one of the strangest experiments in comics history: the resurrection of Valiant, a brand that had long been a failure and a punch line. It’s an experiment that involves message boards, mysterious auctions, time-traveling Visigoths, filthy cubicles, and Moneyball. The goal is to create a superhero universe that can challenge Marvel and DC’s supremacy. It’s an experiment that could very well fail. But right now, against all odds, it’s working.
***
Dinesh Shamdasani wouldn’t be CEO of Valiant Entertainment today if his best friend hadn’t run a con on him.
When the original Valiant launched, Shamdasani was a child living in Hong Kong. He loved American superhero comics but didn’t know of any comics shops in which to buy them. So he had to rely on his pal Jason Kothari, whose father would go to the U.S. for business trips and bring back suitcases full of comics. Jason used those shipments the way a drug kingpin might use imports of cocaine.
“Jason — and I should’ve known he was going to be a consummate businessman at that point — picked out the ones that he thought would be worth the least amount of money and would give them to his friends who didn’t read comics, one each,” Shamdasani told me at Valiant’s cramped midtown offices. “So this is the one I got, this Valiant comic, X-O Manowar No. 6.”
Excerpt from Archer & Armstrong No. 4. Art by Pere Perez.
And perhaps most important, Valiant is dependable. As of this month, it's put out 18 different comics series, comprising 202 individual comics issues, and every single one of them has shipped on time — something unheard of for the Big Two. Valiant tries to offer comics that match any potential reader’s preferences: There are team books, solo books, sci-fi books, supernatural books, and so on.
“I know when I pick up a Valiant book I'm going to get my $3.99's worth out of the story,” Dan Pittman, a longtime comics reader, told me. “I think [there’s] a focus more on just the comics themselves and less on marketing pushes for movies and big events and other things that DC and Marvel are guilty of.”
However, he thinks Valiant still has a big hurdle to overcome: “The only knock I have against them right now is the lack of diversity that is cropping up in their line, both in terms of characters and the creatives behind them.” He has a point: Few of its titles star women (and the ones that do are either team books or limited series), and its creative staff is overwhelmingly male.
Even Kindt, who’s currently writing three Valiant series, thinks his company has catching up to do on diversity. He recalled going to his first Valiant writers’ retreat, which was “maybe six or seven guys, and the first thing we said was, ‘We need to get a woman in here, it's ridiculous.’”
Shamdasani agrees that gender diversity is a concern. “We don’t have an equal split of male and female creatives or male and female talent [in the comics industry],” he said. “And I think because certain publishers are owned by large corporations, there are certain demands on them from an optics point of view. They value more highly female talent, and so they pay more for female talent, and they more aggressively court them. So it’s been very difficult.”
Whatever Valiant’s future looks like behind the scenes, its output is certainly getting artistically diverse. Although Valiant continuity is easy to follow, the company’s storytelling is getting more ambitiously weird. This year saw the relaunch of Rai (which is somehow even more insane and high-concept than its ’90s predecessor), and next year we’ll get Ninjak, which will be told in multiple time periods simultaneously. And in a very coming-of-age move, it's launching a series about an all-new character with no ’90s counterpart: Divinity, starring a lost Soviet cosmonaut who returns to Earth with godlike powers.
Valiant may still lag behind the Big Two in sales, but Shamdasani says he’s playing the long game. Standing in his office, surrounded by the piles of documents and comics that litter his train wreck of a desk space, he told me his ambition: “Being the third-biggest publisher in the business is our goal. Hopefully in five, ten years, whatever it takes, we'll get there.”
“We have yet to have a big flop,” he said, beaming. “It’ll come. I’m sure it’ll come. But it hasn’t come yet.”
