The flagship hero of the Valiant universe was put on hold when the comic industry shut down, but X-O Manowar is finally set to continue his series relaunch with a second issue guaranteed to have fans talking. Because in the modern age, X-O Manowar’s greatest enemies are right here on Earth.
As just one of several Valiant superheroes enjoying a series relaunch, the noble time-traveler Aric of Dacia is being placed in the care of writer Dennis Hallum and artist Emilio Laiso. And while more months than expected have passed since the stellar arrival of X-O Manowar #1 and the entrance of a new, technologically advanced enemy, the story itself isn’t skipping a beat. To help catch up with the first issue (and set the stage for X-O Manowar #2), Screen Rant had the chance to speak with Valiant senior editor Heather Antos. Readers can find our full discussion–of the coming Manowar series, the return of Shadowman, and even a tease of Harbinger–along with preview pages for Manowar #2 below.
Screen Rant: You’ve overseen some very high profile, highly visible titles before. But this feels like a different alchemy at Valiant, at least from the outside. Has that been the case behind the scenes, on the creative side as well?
Heather Antos: I can’t really speak to what things were like before I was at Valiant, because I wasn’t. But I’ve talked about this a lot before, and there’s something really special about being at a company like Valiant where it’s still a cohesive superhero universe – obviously I have a lot of history working with these established universes. But Valiant is very different in that it’s so young; so new.
There’s a lot to be said in praise about Marvel and DC’s near-100 year long legacies, that’s amazing. But when you do have legacies and stories and continuity that are that long, it can become a bit cumbersome to find fresh takes and new spins on these characters. What I love about Valiant is it is so new; it is so young. Realistically, the universe has only existed for 30 years, and since Valiant came back in 2012 – we’re not even in fourth grade yet. We’re working on that first decade. There’s so much to explore and so much to discover.
The way I describe the Valiant universe personally is that we are a universe of consequence. Status quo matters in a way with Valiant that you don’t see anywhere else in comics and in these established universes. Bloodshot started off as a villain, as a bad guy, and now he’s one of our biggest heroes. And it’s not like, “We know at the end of the story, he’s going to be a bad guy again.” That’s not how this universe works. It’s constantly changing, it’s constantly evolving and constantly moving, and that makes it a fun challenge.
Dennis Hallum has said that one of the one of the highest priorities for Valiant was understanding and emphasizing who the characters are, and what they represent. In this series, you were instrumental in helping him with that process, and making that message clear. Can you speak a bit more about that, and where X-O Manowar fits in?
For sure, a comic universe is only as strong as its characters. That’s who we’re coming back to pick up and read every single month. And X-O is deceptively simple. Everyone looks at this guy, like he’s Conan meets Iron Man – I think that’s what we hear a lot of times. He’s a warrior from centuries ago in a super suit, and it’d be very easy to bullet point him down to just that. But there’s so many other layers to that. Particularly when when I was given this X-O Manowar relaunch to do, I went back and reread all of Venditti’s; I read all of Matt Kindt’s run. I dabbled into some of the ’90s stuff and really wanted to understand what makes this character different than a Conan or a Thor or an Iron Man. To me, what makes X-O and Aric so different is not really anything about him in particular. It’s more so about Shanhara, the suit. I feel like it’s so easy to write her off and just forget about her entirely, but this isn’t a super suit that Tony Stark built on his own and put on.
Shanhara is a living, breathing, sentient alien. She is a whole being in and of herself. It’s that partnership between the two that is so unique and so special. In comics, we talk about dichotomies of relationships a lot – everyone knows Batman and the Joker, and at the end of the day, they’re their mortal enemies. They probably know each other better than anyone else in the world. I like to think of Aric and Shanhara the same way. They both are isolated and lonely, and no one else understands them because they’re both people out of time and place. There’s something really beautiful and unique about that. That is what I wanted to explore with the series, with Dennis, and it’s been a lot of fun.
Dennis also spoke about a lot of lead-up time to really get these ideas where everyone wanted them to be. Was that a case of the timing working out, or was that a conscious decision to invest that time before putting the series into production?
A little bit of both. It did kind of just work out that way, because the publishing plan was already figured out for the year. I didn’t get a say on that; I had just started, and I think it was my second week. They were like, “Heather, X-O’s your first book. Have fun!” You know, no pressure, right? But one of the one of the things I love so much about Valiant is that we aren’t publishing 80 books a month. We can really sit back and plan our year very well in advance, and really think about the projects that we want to do and when. Dennis and I started working on X-O about a full year before the book’s release, and that’s been the case with about every single project I’ve been working on. We get about a full years of lead time.
It didn’t work out this way with X-O, but before Emilio started drawing, I think we had two scripts in the bag. With Quantum & Woody, we had the whole series written before Ryan Browne even started drawing it. We really get to sit back and tighten the whole thing and make sure all the Easter eggs are there; go back and seed this earlier and really plant this and make that thing super tight. That way, readers are really getting their money’s worth.
Issue #1 made it clear that Aric is still the ‘Conan meets Iron Man’ that fans expect, but issue #2 is really where a lot of this new series comes into focus. The sci-fi elements give us a new lens to look at the here and now, rather than focusing on the future. Is that going to be part of the main story moving forward?
That’s exactly what we wanted to explore with this. You know why? One of the things that I love about Venditti’s and Kindt’s runs are that they dealt so much with space: what’s out there, what’s in the great beyond or what wants to come to Earth to get us. But we’ve never actually really dealt with the giant man in an alien suit flying around planet Earth. We’ve never really dealt with how normal people feel about that and deal with that, and how the world would deal with that – not just our military, but people.
If there’s anything we’ve learned in 2020, it’s that the people have a lot to say about every little thing that goes on. There’s a lot of feelings, positive and negative. And there’s a lot of things that corporations get involved in and civilians get involved in, and those are the questions and fields that really explore [what would happen] if a man from 5th century Dacia showed up with a suit. How would we deal with that? How would we process that? We’ve all seen Arrival, and it’s a great film, but I don’t think it would end up exactly like that.
What can you say about the new status quo that Aric finds himself in, and his less conventional, but far more ‘real’ villain?
Oh, goodness. Without spoiling… How cheesy do I want to be here? I have some cheesy lines, but I might save them. I would say that we’re really going to test the limits of Aric and Shanhara’s relationship, whether that is the limits and bounds of their trust, the limits and bounds of their abilities, or the limits and bounds of the depths that they can go. Comics work as good guy versus bad guy – and it’s worked that way for nearly 100 years – for a reason, because there’s a lot of different nuances that you can explore around that. Aric of Dacia, X-O Manowar, is a very deceptively simple concept, as I said before. As we see an issue #1, we have good guy versus bad guy, and we explore that a little bit more in issue #2. It’s a very deceptively simple concept with a lot of complex, present-day nuance surrounding it. Which I think is very interesting.
If you are relaunching a comic requiring this kind of action in it, is there a more perfect artist that you could find than Emilio Laiso? Because this is a showcase book.
Emilio and I go way back; we worked on a lot of Star Wars stuff together. But Emilio never got to do a lot of big action sequences in our Star Wars work. He had a lot of character work in Doctor Aphra, and a lot of fun beats like that; there’s a lot of cool aliens he got to design. But he’s really good at face stuff, and he’s really good at character and expressing and emoting and acting.
I saw a little bit of the work he did, I think it was on Hercules, that allowed him to do some big superhero stuff. Between that combination of his work on Hercules and his work on on Star Wars, I was like, “Let’s take a let’s take a shot at this and let’s see what you can do.” Then we have this first five-page action sequence of Aric with the alien spaceships, and it just blew us all away. And Ruth’s colors on top of that are just gorgeous; just absolutely stunning, bright, fun. It really pulls your eye across the page, and it’s truly just a blast to work with these guys all together on this.
This really is a serious creative team for… not a reboot exactly, but this does seem to be framed as getting a bigger audience through reintroduction.
Absolutely. 100%. It’s super important to everyone at Valiant that we have a book for everyone. I know a lot of publishers – everyone says the same thing. We want to make sure that there’s something for everyone, and there is something for everyone. And that [means] using creators that we have never worked with before that have experiences in different genres and different mediums, and bringing in artists with different aesthetics and different styles. We want to make sure that every book feels unique and fresh, and doesn’t look like anything else out there necessarily right now, or like anything else that we’ve done. While still staying true to the core values of these characters and what makes the Valiant books Valiant.
We know that X-O will be meeting up with Bloodshot in his own series, but I understand you’re also dividing your time with the upcoming Shadowman. What can you say about that series and the similarity in approach between both?
I will say we don’t actually see X-O right away in the new Shadowman. These first arcs of these relaunches, we really want to reintroduce the characters and their new status quos to the readers before we dabble with each other. One of the things that is exciting about Shadowman in this particular series – aside from the outstanding work that Cullen Bunn, Jon Davis-Hunt, Jordie Bellaire and Clayton Cowles are doing, because God, this book is just beautiful. When I walked into Valiant, I was just like, “Who’s on Shadowman? If no one has it, dibs! It’s mine.” Because I love the character; huge fan of the character.
But I also understood that book had never been done as a straight-up horror. When you have a character like Shadowman, who jumps back and forth from the Deadside and fights demons, I’m just like, “Why hasn’t this been done?” I really wanted to lean strong into that genre. Who better than Cullen Bunn to tackle that? John Davis-Hunt has some great, great horror chops, as we saw with Gail Simone’s Clean Room a few years ago.
And I really wanted to take Jack out of New Orleans. I feel like he has been tied to New Orleans, that Baton Rouge, for as long as we’ve known him. But the Deadside isn’t just in Louisiana; if the Deadside is really this alternate plane of existence, then you can access it anywhere. And so we’re traveling literally around the world every single issue. We see Jack tackle the Deadside, and how it’s breaking through in other parts of Earth. There’s a lot of these spooky things to explore by establishing these new corners of the Valiant universe that, in the past 10 years, hasn’t been done.
Shadowman was one of those books. Cullen and I have been trying to do a horror book at Marvel for years; we’ve been trying, and we could never get the right people to approve the idea of doing a horror book. When I came to Valiant and was like, “Who’s got Shadowman? No one? Cool, it’s going to be horror. I’m going to get Cullen to do it.” This is happening. His pitch got approved right away, and I just stumbled upon John Davis-Hunt. I didn’t know him before this. I only knew of his work, and it was just pure luck that I reached out via his contact page on his website and was like, “Hey, what are you doing right now?” And it just worked out. And then we got that awesome Tony Moore promo image that just makes me so happy. It makes me so happy.
That is a perfect tee-up to my next question, because Valiant fans have never stopped asking about the potential return of Harbinger.
Yes. He’s coming. He’s definitely coming. We’ve teased it; you all have seen the tease. There might have been a reveal of some kind in the Free Comic Book Day issue in July, so if you haven’t seen it, definitely check that out. Get those Google fingers searching. But Harbinger is a character – or characters in the world corner – that obviously has a huge legacy in the Valiant universe. Especially, how can one top the amazing saga that Joshua Dysart wrote? It’s very intimidating.
I can’t reveal or spoiler or talk too much. But this new book is being approached with a lot of love and care and a lot of energy – and I wish I could say more, but I can’t. I guess everyone will just have to try and read my mind.
X-O Manowar #2 will arrive on November 25th wherever comic books are sold.
