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Welcome to the first episode of Ivar’s Longbox, the show where we look back at the original Valiant and Acclaim books and talk about the good, the bad, the ugly, and whether the book holds up in today’s fast-paced comic book industry. The crew is comprised of Joshua Eves from the Valiant Effort podcast (and fellow Valiant Central contributor), as well as Paul Tesseneer and Martin Ferretti from the Valiant Central podcast.
In our first episode, Josh, Paul and Martin discuss Eternal Warrior #33 as Gilad tackles the mystery of Jack the Ripper and his connection to modern day killings of the women closest to Gilad.
You can follow us on Twitter, @iwantvaliant, @whospaul and @valiant_central. You can contact us via the comments or email us directly at vepodcast@gmail.com! Join us next time as we discuss Acclaim’s Shadowman (Volume 2) #17…oh boy 🙂
Why on Earth are you guys spending an entire podcast discussing a single issue? It’s pretty wasteful. This is especially annoying when it’s a completely random issue! Unless you’ve read the previous sixteen issues of Acclaim’s Shadowman, you’re not in that great of a position to critique Issue #17, as there’s sixteen whole stories you know nothing about. ESPECIALLY Issue #17, which is the conclusion to an ongoing storyline that the whole series has been building up to! Also, while Valiant rarely bothered with character development, Acclaim did, so if you look at, say, Issue #15 of XO Man-O-War at random, that’s a disservice to the series. Also, what if you get a random issue of Eternal Warriors? That was a miniseries, so the problem will be exacerbated, like if you pick up only Issue #4 of The Valiant and critique it solely on its own, without having read #1, #2, and #3. If you’re going to do these reviews at random points in a series’ history, at least do the full span of the story arc/miniseries, otherwise you might as well not even talk about them.
Also, “today’s fast paced comic book industry”? That’s not a very good thing to say. The written-for-the-trades era is the last thing you can call fast paced.
OK, onto a more positive topic. When you get around to doing your piece on Shadowman #17, I hope you don’t assume that the rest of Acclaim’s remakes are bad, because despite the toxic lies and misconceptions that fill the internet, they’re actually all really good for the most part (with Shadowman being the freak bad one). I highly recommend Bloodshot, which is an intelligent and extremely thematic series, though the art is a bit cluttered, and the character could be seen as Liefeldian (although I don’t think so, because the character is meant to be big in story, and he never looks as bad as the likes of Youngblood. In fact, from Ninjak, to Trinity Angels, Troublemakers, Shadowman, XO, Eternal Warriors, and others, almost every single Acclaim cover avoids that balloon-muscle art style, so there’s not that much to derisively laugh at.).
Chris, your point is well taken. If you notice on episode 1, I ended up reading the entire Mortal Kin arc of Eternal Warrior to get more on what was happening, partially because I was so interested in the first issue of the arc, #33. This is a format we’re playing around with, so there may or may not be some adjustments we make going forward. Thanks for the input!
As for Shadowman #17, there are a few more issues left in the series (the run ended at #20) but your point is well taken. I’m not sure what Paul and Josh think, but you may be surprised at my take on the book. I have always avoided the Acclaim books because of the amount of trash everyone always talks about them, but I’m going into this with a fairly blank slate and REALLY excited to read them all!
I thought it was a good short episode. It went along with Jim Shooter’s statement that every issue can be someones first so it is an interesting concept to read something randomly and see how it holds up as a single issue. Great job.
Thanks Mike. We definitely discussed this in our second episode 🙂
This sure is a tough topic. It really does my head in. On one hand, it seems unfair to criticize a comic for being confusing despite one jumping in at Issue #40 or whatever with no context, but on the other hand, Stan Lee’s “Every issue should be someone’s first” edict is really true. Definitely a subject worth talking about in your next episode.
Episode 2 is out Monday and we briefly discuss it, but it will be a topic on its own on the other show.
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