Valiant Comics

Valiant Comics is an American comic book publisher, the first incarnation of which was founded in 1989 by former Marvel Comics editor-in-chief Jim Shooter along with lawyer and businessman Steven Massarsky. In 1994, the company was sold to Acclaim Entertainment. After Acclaim’s 2004 bankruptcy, the company’s assets were purchased as part of Valiant Entertainment by entrepreneurs Dinesh Shamdasani and Jason Kothari in 2005. In 2011, Valiant received a capital infusion from private investment company Cuneo & Company, LLC. Peter Cuneo and Gavin Cuneo joined the company and a relaunch was announced.

Valiant Entertainment launched its publishing division in 2012 as part of an initiative dubbed the "Summer of Valiant", winning Publisher of the Year and being nominated for Book of the Year at the Diamond Gem Awards. Valiant has set sales records, and was the most nominated publisher in comics at the 2014, 2015 and 2016 Harvey Awards, releasing the biggest-selling independent crossover event of the decade with "Book of Death" in 2015.

Valiant was sold to DMG Entertainment in 2018. In June 2023, Valiant Comics announced a licensing partnership with Alien Books, which would take over publishing Valiant's characters.

The company's properties have been adapted to other media, including video games, digital series, and collectible figures. The character Bloodshot was adapted into an eponymous 2020 feature film starring Vin Diesel.

Steven J. Massarsky became acquainted with former editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics Jim Shooter when he hired him to write the script for an unproduced live-action Spider-Man television series. As the two worked together on the show, Massarsky floated the idea of Shooter starting his own comic company with the two cementing a partnership between themselves and Winston Fowlkes who had a finance background. According to Shooter, part of what motivated the founding of Valiant was his disillusion with the state of Marvel at the time. Describing his experience at the company at the time, Shooter said:

I think one of the things that went wrong at Marvel was that I got so far removed from all the creative stuff, I spent all my day upstairs arguing with the financial people and lawyers, trying to protect the creative people from being raped and devoured. At the end, I was walking around the place and I didn’t even know everybody’s name, because I delegated too much. Everybody hired their own assistants and then the assistants would get promoted and they would hire their own assistants. There were actually people working at Marvel who I didn’t even know. The people I hired were Louise Jones and Al Milgrom and Larry Hama and Denny O’Neil and Bob Hall- some people I thought came with a bunch of credentials. Toward the end there, as I said, I don’t know if those people had credentials or not, because I don’t know who they were.

In 1988, former editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics Jim Shooter, Steven J. Massarsky and a group of investors attempted to purchase Marvel Entertainment. They submitted the second-highest bid, with financier Ronald Perelman submitting the highest bid and acquiring Marvel. Shooter and Massarsky instead formed Voyager Communications in 1989 with significant venture capital financing from Triumph Capital. Valiant (an imprint of Voyager Communications) recruited numerous writers and artists from Marvel, including Barry Windsor-Smith and Bob Layton, and launched an interconnected line of superhero comics featuring a mixture of licensed characters and original creations. Through a handshake agreement with Richard A. Bernstein of Western Publishing, Shooter managed to secure the rights to characters from Dell and Gold Key Comics such as Magnus, Robot Fighter, Dr. Solar. and Turok: Son of Stone. In addition to the Western Publishing deal giving access to legacied comic book characters, Western also had deals with World Wrestling Federation and Nintendo which served as the basis for a children focused line of comics which managed to secure wider distribution beyond the direct market at Kmart, Woolco, Walmart and Toys "R" Us both as comics and in children's book format which achieved considerable success.

In 1991, Valiant released its first title, Magnus, Robot Fighter, cover-dated May 1991.^{[citation needed]} Solar, Man of the Atom, cover-dated September 1991 followed as the next release.^{[citation needed]} Both titles were licenses from Gold Key Comics. Rai became the third title published by Valiant and was distributed as a special insert in Magnus, Robot Fighter beginning with issue 5.^{[citation needed]} Harbinger No. 1 was listed on the top ten list of Wizard magazine for a record eight consecutive months and was eventually named "Collectible of the Decade" while Rai No. 0 appeared on Wizard's top ten list for a new record nine consecutive months.^{[citation needed]} In 1992, Valiant won the Best Publisher under 5% Market Share from comic distributor Diamond.^{[citation needed]} The next year, Valiant won Best Publisher over 5% Market Share, becoming the first publisher outside of Marvel and DC to do so.^{[citation needed]} In 1992, Valiant's Editor-In-Chief Jim Shooter was given the Lifetime Achievement Award for co-creating the Valiant Universe in a ceremony that also honored Stan Lee for co-creating the Marvel Universe. However, Shooter left Valiant by the end of 1992. According to Massarsky, "Jim had a different idea as to the direction of the company, and he was asked to leave."