“Help! We’re trapped in our company symbol!”
FCBD 2024–The Valiants
Valiant Comics/Alien Books (May, 2024)
EDITOR: Lysa Hawkins
“The Valiants”
STORY: Lysa Hawkins & Ryan Cady
WRITER: Ryan Cady
ARTIST: Al Barrionuevo
LETTERER: Ezequiel Inverni
“The Void”
WRITER: AJ Ampadu
ARTIST: Emilio Correa
LETTERER: Yasmin Govoni
General Capshaw wants to form a new team of heroes after Unity members either went their own way or died. (Kind of sorry they offed X-O Manowar.) With just one trainee, Eidolon, she tracks down Ninjak as he faked his death to take on the organization Webnet. He and Myna just finished securing one of their bases, which Capshaw wants to turn into a new base for this new team, which will include an android named R1 they found in the lab. Then Capshaw gets a call from agents at a large sinkhole in Washington, DC, because someone claiming to be a geomancer has shown up.
I don’t even know if this is the full team. R1 kind of resembles Bloodshot but I don’t think it’s meant to be him, and despite being dead we see X-O on the cover of this comic. If this is just a “clip” from The Valiants #1 I would still prefer a full story. This should introduce the entire team to get you interested for a full series with them, but instead I just see part of the story missing, good as the part we got was. FCBD titles are essentially promos for full series or graphic novels and this doesn’t quite do the job right.
In the second story, Ninjak is tracking a girl whose brain is somehow tied to the internet. Fittingly, she’s in the custody of a woman named Roku, but instead of streaming movies and TV shows she is Ninjak’s former handler, who was killed and later resurrected by Master Darque into a soulless killer. He’s still a jerk even in this continuity. Ninjak goes to rescue the girl, Marybeth, but someone else got to her first, and Roku is more than willing to take out her frustration on her former friend.
This is slightly better. The story ends on a cliffhanger, which always annoys me with FCBD titles, it does a better job of showing everything except the enemy, which should be teased, but gives us the important characters in the story. Where the first story feels like it left a few out, it’s Ninjak and Roku, the two title characters of Ninjak Vs Roku. The fight’s pretty good, or what we see of it. This is a better sales pitch at least.
Overall not a bad comic for what it is, a promo for two comics that the reader didn’t have to pay for, even though the comic shop did. Not sure about Drive Thru Comics, where this came from.
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