The entertainment industry has been stunned into a near-total shutdown by the Coronavirus pandemic, with studios and publishers sending orders to stay at home, along with any audiences or consumers that might fund the industry to begin with. And as both a publisher of comics and the birthplace of what is hoped to be a new movie universe, Valiant Comics faced a reality nobody could have seen coming.
After almost a decade, the release of Bloodshot — with Vin Diesel in the lead role as Valiant’s most lethal and unkillable super soldier — should have been reason for celebration. The plan was the launch of a potential Valiant movie universe. The reality saw the film arrive in theaters just as moviegoers in North America and Europe were warned to stay in their homes to minimize the scale of the inevitable Coronavirus outbreak. The weeks that followed made the film a historic release nonetheless, with Sony Pictures shifting Bloodshot‘s theatrical run to digital streaming… before the pandemic brought Valiant Comics to a halt along with the rest of the comic industry. Now, Screen Rants speak with Valiant Publisher Fred Pierce about the strange fate of Bloodshot, the current state of Valiant, and the future.
A veteran of the comic book industry who led Wizard Press for fourteen years, Pierce’s past is tied to that of Valiant, with fifteen years spent as part of Valiant in both its former incarnation during the 1990s and its current form (“It’s sort of like when people get divorced. How long have you been married? Well, either 30 years from the first date…”). Having seen Valiant’s rise firsthand from 2011, Pierce was able to give readers a look behind the scenes — during what will surely be a unique chapter in Valiant’s history, and the comic business as a whole.
Screen Rant: Hopefully you’ve never had a more unexpected week or two than these past ones. But can you put this into perspective for not only your industry, but Valiant in particular?
Fred Pierce: Well, I think two things for the industry. The thing that strikes me closest as having been like this in the industry, and probably for a good part of America, was 9/11. When 9/11 happened, and the whole country came to a stop, nobody knew what was going to happen.
First of all, you had the image and all of the people who died. We were in the office together at the time, and one of our designers had a brother who was one of the top firefighters; he was a rescue firefighter. If a firefighter was in trouble, he was the guy who went in and saved them. I remember we were talking, and he said to me, “I haven’t heard from my brother. This is not good.” And his brother actually perished in 9/11. Another guy, one of the sales guys, lost a cousin in 9/11. That is sort of like this. The huge difference is that we were together then. We were in the same room; we were talking, we were consoling each other. Now, you really can’t do that.
The strange thing is when we had the recession in 2008, from my perspective at Wizard, we actually did better. Because I think when people can’t go on their big vacations, they can still buy comic books, they can still go to the movies. The entertainment is not the big expense, and you have to do something to pass the time. Also our industry is as much a religion as anything else. So, they were going to get their fix; they were going to do what they were going to do. And socially, I would say for most of the people in our industry, this is their social group. For a lot of people in the industry, especially a lot of professionals, when they go to a convention, it’s really like going to class reunion. This is their social matrix, and that’s part what they’re feeling now. And that’s part of why the industry finds it’s so easy to come together and support each other. I know you’re a comic book fan, so I know you feel it.
The recent release of Bloodshot had to be an unexpected scenario. You spend years hoping this movie will get made, and that it will be good, and people will like it. Then it’s released, and it doesn’t actually matter if it’s good. It doesn’t matter if people like it. Because if they’re smart and if they’re being cautious as people are telling them to, they can’t even go and see it anyway.
I have to tell you, first of all, the Valiant that created Bloodshot – with Kevin VanHook, Bob Layton, and Don Perlin – all of us are still very close, by the way. We’re very dear friends still, as is the old Valiant. I remember when we were standing around in a room, the whole company, coming up with this. I think it was Don Perlin who said – and this is now almost 30 years ago, “You know, this nanites thing, we should be able to use it for superheroes.” That’s really what it was. This whole business was constructed out of that. I think it was one of the colorists who said his eyes were bloodshot or something, he said, “So why don’t we call it Bloodshot?” It was like that. I’m not 100% sure that’s exactly how it happened, but imagine that that happened in 1992 [or 1991].
Then fast forward, and a lot of the people who did it like Kevin VanHook… it was half his life ago that that happened. Then Valiant the company, because the characters were so fun, was bought by Acclaim Entertainment, and they did a lot of games with the characters. And then you fast forward to now, in 2011 and going forward, you have all these people. When Dan [Mintz] came in the movie got greenlit, but Dinesh [Shamdasani] and Jason [Kothari] and Peter and Gavin Cuneo got it teed up. Dan was able to really be the force and the vision behind getting it actually done.
But, yes, it’s a long journey. And you’re figuring, “Alright, if I was going to pick a week in 1991, when I would launch the movie that this character that we love was based on…” It’s sort of like being in a bad movie. “Let’s pick the worst week possible,” on some level. But to Sony’s credit, they’re getting it to video on demand. We actually sold – even as bad as the week was, we were the number one movie worldwide. We sold, I think, in the neighborhood of $24 million worth of tickets. That’s a testament to Sony’s promotion and to the strength of our characters, and of course to Vin Diesel. $25 million for a lot of movies is nothing to sneeze at. We clearly expected a lot more than that. And then the video on demand – I believe the video on demand will be successful.
It’s a movie that people – especially people looking for a movie like this – will find very satisfying. I’ve never seen Vin Diesel better in any movie that I’ve seen him in. And I have a daughter who’s a Fast & Furious fanatic.
Giving audiences that option seems historic: people who want to actually go out and physically see the movie can do it, but people who want to watch it on their digital device are able to do that, too. It’s actually the same question that the comic industry has been dealing with for some time; drawing that line between getting the physical comic and getting it digitally. Has that conversation come back full steam?
I will tell you, those of us who are involved in the industry… our industry revolves around the local comic book shops. Our industry revolves around ink on paper – your monthly book that you show up every Wednesday [for]. As we were saying, this is our social fabric. This gives us a sense of urgency. I have to go and I have to get my fix. And there’s something different about holding something in your hands, as opposed to seeing it. It’s much more ephemeral on the screen.
And I think there’s a whole different experience when you see a movie in the movie theater or an IMAX than if you see it at home. First of all, there’s a reason the Romans built coliseums. We like seeing things in groups. It’s very natural to the human condition to see things in groups. It’s not quite the same experience when you’re sitting in your room and watching it alone. And I think if you see it in the movie theater, and then you rent it, that’s much more likely. I think, in the comic book industry, it’s always been the ink on paper monthlies as much as possible, but often the trade paperbacks and hardcovers that we do, that really keep the industry fresh all the time.
I love digital, and I think digital is great. But to me, I remember buying the first Fantastic Four comic on a spinner rack. My mother threw it away, but I actually remember doing that and having that physical copy and having the ‘lottery ticket.’ If you bought The Walking Dead when it was a black and white book selling for $1000, and you still had it, you could maybe buy a car. You don’t have that lottery ticket digitally.
There’s no question Marvel and DC are the the giants in the comic industry, and then there are the sort of ‘Dirty Dozen’ publishers that have to stand apart, to some extent. But over the past few years, it seems like Valiant has been moving more towards a core roster of both characters and monthly books. Bloodshot is leading the charge for the same reasons that make him a great movie character. But it feels like a very specific mission to get a core group of properties – X-O Manowar, Shadow Man, Rai, Bloodshot – and distill what makes each of them strong. Was that a concentrated effort on the publishing side?
On some level, we all need to understand how long it took for Marvel to get books from a very successful comic book company to the screen. And for DC’s product to go from the old Batman series, which was very cartoony, to let’s say Michael Uslan’s first Batman comic book so many years later – to treat it like the medium treats it was a long road. Yes, we are on a long road, but we’re not on a much different road than everybody else. Marvel and DC have paved the way to show that, yes, these are fully fleshed-out characters that have feelings and aren’t cardboard or cartoons. That’s where we are also.
What we do in the publishing side is we create great characters for the comic book industry. And then Dan with his passion for creating movies – that’s Dan Mintz who’s our owner – he has a passion for the industry and has a passion for the universe. Dan, very early on, invested in our company and then fully acquired it two years ago. Dan is the one who’s going to supply the vision for [movies]. And we have 2000 characters; we have 30 families of characters. They’re just numbers, but when we had the premiere two weeks ago on Tuesday, Dan had an after party. What he did was he decorated it with 16-foot panels of a smattering of our characters. And if you just looked at the smattering of those characters, it was overwhelming. And you could see a lot of the Hollywood people who were there and the business people were there – you can’t understand it until you can feel it and touch it. And so many of them were asking, “What’s this character? What’s that character?”
We create great characters, and we depend on our editors and our talent to come across. The talent has been very generous with us, and our editors have been great. Very often, talent has ideas, and they’re reticent to give it to another company. They’ve been giving us some great ideas, so we’ve had certain things. Also, the mantra that we have at Valiant and that we launched in 2011, is that we’re about 20 years from now and not 20 years ago.
A lot of our characters were so of today, even though they were created in the 90s, that we’ve been accused of pandering. I’ll give you, for instance, Faith. Faith is part of the Harbinger Universe. She’s a superhero female character you never see. She’s a plus size female character. We never mentioned in the book that she’s plus size. What we do promote is that she is a comic book geek, probably like most of the people who are listening to you. She’s a comic book geek who takes joy in being a comic book geek, and then when she found out she had superpowers, she said, “Oh my God, can you believe I can do this?”
So, I’m on a panel probably about two years ago, at the height of Faith’s renewed popularity- and we have a Faith YA novel coming out late in July. We’re not just expanding into movies, we’re also expanding into other media. I get a question coming up to me… And the guy asks me, “Why are you pandering with the Faith character, with the whole #MeToo movement and everything today?” And I said to him, “Me pandering? You just caught up to her. She’s a 25 year old character. We were writing about Faith 20 years ago.” And everybody applauded. That’s typical of who we are.
It’s hard to communicate why a certain comic book character has potential to be explored in another medium. It has to start at a character level. In the Valiant way of expanding into other media, is there something that stands out for you? If there is a Valiant movie universe, what would you hope that looks like?
Basically, I as publisher will talk through – when we can be in a room together with the editors and marketing and Greg and Matthew and Emily and the sales department. When we’re all [in a room,] editorial will show us a concept for a new piece of IP or the relaunching of an old piece of IP. First of all, my thought is, “Do I believe this character can strike a sympathetic chord?” And that’s really what I think of first. And it’s not necessarily a sympathetic chord for me. But can strike a sympathetic chord for what we imagine the people who are Valiant fans, and the people who don’t yet know that they’re Valiant fans, will join? Faith was one example. It was rewritten and represented, and it struck a tremendous sympathetic chord. Faith is part of our Harbinger universe, so that worked.
Bloodshot is part of the core pantheon, so we have Bloodshot, and you said you know XO. We have Ninjak, and Shadow Man was huge. Shadow Man back in the day was a video game, and XO was a video game with Iron Man. We have all these characters, but since we have so many different families, they can be anything. You know better than anybody, how many movies are out there that people don’t know are originally comic books? How many stars have done movies – like Road to Perdition was a comic book. I think people might know that Men In Black with a comic book, but I don’t know that they do, or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. We create the product, and then it’s up to Dan and his team to create the vision for what to do with the product.
We create great comics, we try to launch, let’s say, 8 to 12 new pieces of IPs and new number ones a year. We try to have a mix of our skeleton characters that we can build the company around. We can build the company around XO and Shadow Man, and some books that we’re going to be launching at the end of the year that are already done. We have those characters, then we launched Divinity five or six years ago, and that struck a sympathetic chord. A friend of mine, who was the president of Simon and Schuster, said to me, “Fred, if I knew which would be the bestsellers, I would only print the bestsellers.” He said, “Nobody knows.”
Is there something that you’re most excited about when it comes to taking Valiant characters beyond the comics? Is there a particular part for both the publisher and fan in you that you’re most excited to see develop?
I will tell you what makes me the most excited. Let’s say that we have Bloodshot launching, and Bloodshot is our Blade. Not our Iron Man; Bloodshot is our Blade. If I tell a civilian that I work for Valiant, and I’m going to have a Bloodshot movie, they don’t know. Today, they do know. That’s really what gets me excited. These characters that I’ve loved for 30 years – and I loved these characters even in the hiatus that I had from the company – what I love is that people will now know about it.
And remember, not too far back, some of the characters that the Marvel Universe has worked on and some of the characters that the DC Universe has worked on weren’t household names until recently. I’m not quite sure if the regular American walking around – they knew Spider-Man, they knew the Avengers, they knew Batman, they knew Superman – did they know Iron Man? I don’t think so. I think Iron Man was so well done as a movie that they knew it.
To me, I want our characters to become as ubiquitous worldwide as everyone’s characters. And the beauty is, the way has been paved. If you ask a Valiant fan, and if you ask our staff and if you ask our editors, you will have the feel [for] characters that would be part of the Valiant universe and characters that wouldn’t be part of the Valiant universe. I can’t write the formula for you, but we all know. And you know who really knows? Our fans. And the fans that we have been fans for 25 or 30 years. So they know, and if we’re not true to those characters, we will hear about it.
My brother’s a huge Fast & Furious fan. He saw the first trailer for Bloodshot and texting me saying, “This looks awesome. What is the deal with this?” And I was the one to tell him, “Well, it’s based on a comic book.”
I’m going to use that. Thanks. I will use that, because I’m often asked these questions. People who are involved in our company even on a peripheral level, they have no concept of how big we are. Now, you walk into our office and you see rows and rows and rows of trade paperbacks and hard covers, and they’re all different. It’s amazing, the amount of work that our sales crew promotes and that our marketing crew promotes, and our design department works on. It’s amazing. And that’s not even talking about what we have to do within the comic book industry to make us stand out.
But if you walk into any comic bookstore, when you can again, you will not walk into a comic book store today without feeling the presence of Valiant. We use that presence to help promote the movie, and because of that presence, the retailers and the fans were huge in helping us promote the movie. Unfortunately, we promoted the movie at probably the most challenging time to promote movies in anybody’s memory. But you know what? It was successful. It was the number one movie worldwide, and it was the number one launch for the week. I can’t do more than that. I would have taken the whole family out to see it, but I couldn’t.
Bloodshot is available to stream now.
NEXT: Bloodshot Fans Can Watch The First 9 Minutes For Free Online
