Great ready for the next X-O Manowar coming in March.

Robert Vendetti (Flash, GL) wrote the first 50 issues and a couple of others for the X-O title.

After him leaving, the last title had Aric going through kind of a crescendo and going to deep space for a break.

His new title will open with him as a farmer and eventually reintroduce him from this new state of being from the last issue.

Valiant is quietly producing comics at least as good as the Big Two without all the baggage and reboots, multiple titles, etc.

Being the littler guy producing a coherent superhero universe, who's not beholden to Big Corporate Owners, allows them more free reign like the Big Two used to have before they became part of a Media Giant.

Fresh, progressive and engaging.

TBH, every single title I read I think "No, THIS is my favorite Valiant."

until the next one I pick up

Matt Kindt is writing.

Both he and Jeff Lemire have done really incredible work @ Valiant.

I LOVED X-O Manowar (2017). Great first issue!

Our local shop is pushing the book hard. They had a customer who desperately wanted one of the high buy in variants (I can't remember if it was the 1 in 500 or 1 in 1000 covers, whichever the metallic variant was) and since this issue was fully returnable he decided to order the needed copies to get the variant for his customer, and offer a money back guarantee on it for people to try it. Unfortunately about half the copies he sold got returned by the customers who will not be getting #2 either and right now he said, it looks like he will be returning 90-95% of the copies he ordered to Diamond unless something drastically changes before the return date comes due.

Diamond's sales numbers won't reflect actual returns (they just assume 10% will be returned and adjust chart numbers that way when publishing their monthly sales numbers), so it will likely look like this book did much better for Valiant that it actually did.

I picked up a copy but haven't read it yet to decide if I will return it. I like the creative team a lot, I really don't like the concept or character and haven't liked any version of X-O I have tried ( I like Cary Nord even better than Tomas Giorello and his work wasn't enough to get me to keep on X-O when new Valiant launched in 2012, so I doubt Giorello can get me to stay on this, but I wanted to give it a try and support the effort to grow the audience my shop was doing, so I picked up a copy and will likely keep it even if I am not enamored with it.

-M

I felt the same way. I attributed it to the writer since that was my reaction to his other stuff.

The day after the Dr. Mirage news hit all the newssites, corrections came out to scale it back to say CW was in preliminary talks with Gary Daubermann, who would write and executive produce a pilot (not a series order, only a pilot) but no deal had been made. That was November, no further solid announcement of anything coming from those talks has been announced 5-6 months later, so don't hold your breath on that one.

As for the movies, it took them 2 years of development to land a director for Bloodshot, and that's the furthest any of the movies has gotten it seems. Since the major studios have slotted release dates for big budget movies all the way into 2020, I am not sure when there is a window for release of a movie of that nature ofr hte next few years, so you may be waiting a while for that too unless they throw it out there in one of the dead zones of movie releases with the stuff they don't expect to do big box office and give zero marketing budget for, but it isn't likely to be a summer or Christmas release in any of the next 3 years and a movie of that nature will need that kind of exposure to overcome the huh what's that reaction in mass culture who know nothing of Valiant or their characters.

-M