Valiant 101: UNITY

When I decided to check out the current state of Valiant Comics, I was pointed to their ongoings and some miniseries. I dug around some more and found out their biggest stories: Harbinger Wars, Armor Hunters, etc. But as I learnt more, I found out about the pre-Valiant, VALIANT, stories. Fascinated, I wanted to read something from that era to get a better idea of what Valiant was and what it has become today; which is what prompted me to read Unity.

Although Unity is written by a number of writers, it clearly is a Jim Shooter story. This is not to dismiss the efforts of the legends involved with this tale. Bob Layton, Roger Stern, David Lapham are all masters of their crafts; but Shooter's imprint is hard to escape. Structurally, Unity reminded me of Secret Wars, another event, that Shooter wrote for Marvel. In Secret Wars, heroes and villains are pulled from different parts of the Marvel universe to fight, and perhaps work together, in order to defeat a bigger threat. Unity follows a similar formula. But instead of just bringing characters together from different parts of the VALIANT universe, Shooter takes it one step further and brings in characters from across time and space.

Solar, "the cornerstone of the VALIANT universe" (which is basically just a fancier way of saying he was their big guy) and the geomancer, Geoff McHenry, arrive at what prima facie looks to be a murder-suicide scene. Solar identifies the body as that of Erica Pierce, who was caught in the same explosion that gave Solar his powers. Geoff, however, thinks something bigger is at play. He believes Erica not only survived that explosion but is also onto something sinister. Although a little hesitant, Solar later agrees with Geoff's analysis and takes him to a land "beyond space and time and known reality".

Turns out not only did Erica survive the explosion, she blames Solar for all her misfortunes since the accident. She now wants to wipe away all parallel timelines -- creating a unity -- and rewrite reality. Geoff realises this a threat too big for Solar to take on alone. He jumps back to the regular timeline -- which happens to be 1992 -- to gather forces that include Harbingers, the Eternal Warrior, X-O Manowar, Archer and Armstrong.

The year 4001 is significant to Valiant universe for various reasons. Many of its biggest characters are billed to either be from the future or operate in the future. Unity cleverly involves those characters as well. Since every era in the Valiant universe has to have a geomancer, there must be a geomancer in the year 4001 as well. And thus, we are introduced to Rokland Tate. Like his counterpart from 1992, Rokland also realises that, well, it's about to go down. He gathers Rai, Magnus, and the Eternal Warrior to help Solar. (Yes, Eternal Warrior again. He's eternal.)

The heroes from the year 4001 join those from year 1992 to take on Erica, but as it turns out it's not so easy. This land "beyond space and time and known reality" where they are, was built by Erica herself. Here she is the "Mothergod". Everybody worships her with unshakable faith, and her forces, which include but are not limited to cyborg dinosaurs, are innumerable. Which is why I guess it takes 19 issues to defeat her.

One of the things that, in my opinion, makes Unity so good is how Shooter and Co. manage to bring in every Valiant character for this story. And by 'every' I do mean every. They find clever ways to involve characters like Turok or Shadowman: characters who do not necessarily translate directly into the story are brought in using some innovative methods. Also, the story is not told chronologically. This makes it both interesting (since you need to pay close attention to everything because you never know when one plotline would impact or influence some other plotline down the road) and repetitive (because every issue spoon feeds; the first few pages drag).

But what really impressed me is the colours on the books throughout. The palette on these books is not what we have generally come to expect in comic books. Colouring on this event is unconventional. Almost reminded me of old kindergarten books. And I mean that absolutely as a compliment.

My only quibble with this book are (what I found to be) unnecessary plotlines like Erica having "daddy issues" and the incest relationship between two characters. I understand the objective here. As I have come to learn, VALIANT Comics were known to weave their superheroes in "real world" scenarios and make them face "real world" challenges. (A common example is how characters that died in the VALIANT universe stayed dead.) But for me that didn't work. The "real world" drama that did work for me though, were the complexities of relationships that were explored when Kris gets pregnant with Torque's child and Pete thinks it's his. That, in my opinion, was done much better than this:

In the end, Unity manages to achieve what it set out to do. It pulled off a big spectacle of a crossover event. But more importantly, for me, as a first time reader, Unity provided excellent introduction to the VALIANT characters. If I had to pick, my favourite character was X-O Manowar. A complete douche, he didn't give a shit about other heroes' plan to defeat the "Mothergod". Rather, he built his own private army to plunder her off her riches. That was completely bonkers.