Brand Echh: UNITY #0

Having been publishing super hero comic books for about a year, Valiant editor in chief Jim Shooter was about to unveil his master stroke. Jim had scored massive numbers writing MARVEL SUPER HEROES SECRET WARS years before, the very first company-wide crossover series, and its success must have been top of mind as he and his team laid down the foundation for their Valiant Universe. For the next two months, every super hero title Valiant put out would represent a chapter in UNITY, a line-wide crossover series that would bring all of the company’s main characters together and quantify the relationships between them all. As a way of luring in prospective readers who may not yet have sampled his books, Shooter decided to release the first chapter as a stand-alone #0 issue provided free to retailers and fans. This strategy seemed to pay dividends as this was the point where interest in Valiant truly exploded, and the prices of key back issues skyrocketed as newcomers tried to get caught up on what they had missed.

Valiant distributed 250,000 copies of UNITY #0, a huge number (though not quite as huge for the era). They also did their usual trick of creating rarer variant editions of the book with different logo colorations and much smaller print runs–5000 copies for the red log variant and an unknown amount of a gold logo variant. As I say, this was money well spent as the company saw an immediate return on the sales of their entire line as readers became interested in what was going on. In his inside front cover editorial, Shooter promised that each tie-in issue would contain an integral part of the story, the lack of which had become a common complaint about many crossover tie-ins of this time. As Shooter wrote pretty much all of them, and mapped out his story timeline in granular detail, this turned out to be largely true.

The UNITY #0 issue was penciled by Barry Windsor-Smith and inked by Bob Layton, who were probably Valiant’s two most popular and well-known artists at the time. It’s consequently a good-looking story. Janet Jackson provided the full process coloring that at points was a little bit overdone, but which was a lot more sophisticated in terms of the number of possible colors than most of what Marvel and DC were releasing at the time. This kickoff story was only 16 pages long, but it was dense enough that it felt like a substantial read, even with the shorter run time.

The story of UNITY #0 grows directly out of recent events in SOLAR, MAN OF THE ATOM. The main villain of the piece is Mothergod, who is actually Erica Pierce, a co-worker of Phil Seleski’s who went through the same transformation that he did, emerging on the other side with the ability to manipulate energy in a godlike fashion. Pierce was thought destroyed in the accidentally-generated black hole that had looped Solar back to the moment of his own creation, but a new character, Geoff McHenry, the Geomancer who can speak to the spirit of the Earth, warns Solar that Erica is still out there and still a threat. The pair work together to try to locate the troubled woman before she can become the world-ending threat that past geomancers have prophesied.

Solar and Geoff follow Erica’s trail into the timestream, to an area that Solar refers to as being “backstage of the universe”. There, they discover a pocket continuum that Erica has made her own, grafting together pieces from throughout time in a manner reminiscent of SECRET WARS’ Battleworld. In this Lost Land, dinosaurs cohabitate with futuristic cityscapes and robotic sentries–it’s a fabulous mishmash of elements. Also, because it exists outside of the normal flow of time, this realm can be accessed from any point in the timestream–whether the present as Solar and Geoff recognize it or from the 4001 AD time period of Magnus and Rai and company. This allows for different Valiant characters who are set in different time periods to all participate in this story together. (one fun element of the story is that we wind up with two iterations of Gilead, the Eternal Warrior, in it, one from the present and a later one from Magnus’ future.)

As Solar and Geoff begin to be pursued by Erica’s forces, Solar sends Geoff back to Earth with a piece of himself, his hand, to summon help–primarily Gilead, the Eternal Warrior, who battles on behalf of the Earth. Geoff is additionally conveyed by Solar’s energy to the location of the Harbinger kids and X-O Manowar, who had just concluded a team-up story of their own, and are willing to come along and help for really no good reason beyond the fact that this is a big crossover story and everybody is going to get involved, like it or not. Wanting allies he can trust at his back, Gilead takes a moment to pull in his brother Armstrong, getting Armstrong’s new friend Archer in the process. So all of the present day players are now assembled–with the exception of Shadowman, who will enter the storyline on his own later.

Returning to the Lost Land, Geoff and his group are surprised to discover that only a few minutes have passed since he’d left–time moves at a different rate here that in the outer world. But in those couple of minutes, a trio of other heroes have also arrived to lend a hand, this group from 4001 AD: Magnus, Rai and that second Gilead I mentioned earlier. From there, the focus shifts over to Erica herself, as she lays out some of the basics of this world and her plan to Albert, who was the son of the parallel Erica Pierce whom Mothergod killed and replaced. She tells Albert that her ultimate goal is to fix the damage that Solar caused to the timestream by essentially wiping creation clean and then beginning again, with a universe crafted to her own specifications. Thematically, this makes Mothergod of a piece with some of Shooter’s other past villains, including Korvac/Michael and even the Beyonder. You can tell that Shooter had an ongoing fascination with characters with ultimate power who tried to right the wrongs of the universe but whose humanity made them too fallible to truly succeed.

And so the issue closes with the forces of Pierce and the assembled Valiant heroes about to throw down in what promises to be a spectacular conflict. That conflict would play out across all eight Valiant releases over the next two months, eventually concluding in UNITY #1 two months later. As a way of visually uniting each months’ releases, as well as bringing some additional excitement to the event, Shooter and company recruited Frank Miller to produce all of the Valiant covers for May and then Walt Simonson to do all of the covers for June.

UNITY fit together pretty well, and it contained some big touchpoints for the nascent Valiant Universe. Magnus, it turned out, was the child of Harbingers Flamingo and Torque (who had died prior to this story) carried to the future and raised there Cable-style. And Rai was killed off, but not before setting up that his powers and mantle would be passed on to a successor in his future and that his line stemmed back to the present day, presaging the introduction of another key Valiant hero. Everything had come together perfectly and valiant was now poised to capitalize on the success of what it had been building. But one person who wouldn’t get to enjoy the fruits of that labor was Jim Shooter, who was ousted from the company at around this time. Accounts differ on all of the circumstances–Shooter told his version on multiple occasions and in multiple places. But regardless of how everything went down, after UNITY, Shooter’s name disappeared from Valiant for the most part. (A couple of stories and concepts that he had helped to come up with prior to his departure continued to carry his byline.) In his place, Bob Layton stepped up to become the new EIC of Valiant, bringing a slightly more commercial sensibility to what the company produced, but losing some of the tight line integration that had made the early Valiant titles so fascinating.

Valiant continued to be a market force for the next couple of years, but UNITY was really the company’s biggest moment. Thereafter, as the marketplace shuddered after the speculator bubble of the early 1990s burst, the group began to struggle more and more as sales decreased throughout the industry. The Valiant line was relaunched at a certain point in the event known as BIRTHQUAKE, then relaunched again by Acclaim, who wound up buying the company just before the bottom dropped out. What had seemed for a hot second like it would become a viable long-term third publisher in the field didn’t much make it out of the 1990s. But the characters are still well-remembered by fans of this era and a couple of attempts have been made to bring them back to prominence, some of them very well done. But alas, it seems as though Valiant’s time has largely passed, apart from a loyal niche audience.