Brand Echh: RAI #0

Jim Shooter, who had been the Editor in Chief and main creative driver of the Valiant super hero universe didn’t last for very long with the company following the UNITY crossover. Not to get into any of the specifics of his departure, about which assorted parties have very different recollections, the key factor germane to this write-up is the fact that certain of the things he had a hand in planning reached fulfillment after he wasn’t around to see them through. One of those was this issue, RAI #0, which turned out to be something of a Rosetta Stone in charting the history of the Valiant Universe from the modern era all the way to the future time of Magnus and his circle of associates. It also introduced one new character and series, while simultaneously setting the stage for another. For a while, this was a very hot book as new readers came to Valiant and wanted to work out how it all fit together.

The book was group plotted by Shooter, Bob Layton, David Lapham (who also penciled it) and Jon Hartz. I’d guess that Shooter had intended to script it himself, and that Layton stepped in to take over the scripting upon Shooter’s removal. I’d also guess that certain story details changed along the way, aligning more with where Layton saw the line going now that Jim wasn’t part of the equation any longer. But it’s easy to draw a line between this story and the Adult Legion tales that Shooter wrote for editor Mort Weisinger when he was working on the Legion of Super-Heroes feature in his youth. The difference here being that both the present and the future described in this story were active loci of storytelling for the line.

The connection point between the two timeframes is the Blood of Heroes, the nanite-enriched solution used by Project: Rising Spirit to transform dead hitman Angelo Mortalli into the unkillable amnesiac warrior Bloodshot. The issue opens with Geoff the Geomancer locating Mortalli after having learned of the Blood of Heroes during UNITY. He inadvertently awakens Mortalli, who escapes–but not before slaughtering all of the technicians at the project. Geoff is concerned about events to come and continues to seek out allies among the assorted Valiant heroes–including X-O Manowar and Turok in 1993–to face and overcome these threats to the planet’s survival.

The narrative continues to jump ahead, and we learn that in the year 1999, Shadowman will be killed defeating big villain Master Darque and the supernatural Darque Power that he had unleashed. This was an actual plotline that Shooter intended to build to across years–he said in interviews that he didn’t have any hesitation about confirming the final end of a popular character because he and his team could always come up with other new characters to replace him. Later, in 2020, Archer, having become a spiritual leader and having married Flamingo of the Harbingers, set off on one last adventure to rescue his old friend Armstrong from harbinger enemy Toyo Harada, who was attempting to divine the secret of Armstrong’s longevity.

In 2028, Bloodshot met his own end, killed by recurring Harbinger villain Ax, who wanted the blood that sustained Bloodshot’s life. When his corpse was found by Geoff and Gilad, it had been completely drained dry. But the missing blood didn’t resurface for years. In 2056, nearing the end of her own lifetime, Kris of the Harbingers writes a meaningful letter to her child, who was taken into the future to become Magnus. She entrusts this communication to the Geomancers to deliver. Within a few years 2/3 of the world was under the control of Toyo Harada’s Harbinger Foundation, with an organized resistance of heroes opposing him. To keep his X-O armor out of the hands of Harada, who was looking for ways to extend his lifespan, Aric sends it away into space before fighting a final, fatal battle with his old foe. But Harada has figured out how to sustain his existence by transferring his mind into other younger bodies.

This battle with Harada goes on for generations, and in 2099, it’s John Stanchek, the descendant of Harbinger lead Pete Stancheck, who finally confronts Harada and ends his threat. Harada has by this time located the Blood of Heroes, and so Stancheck must stop him before he can use the Blood to make himself functionally immortal and indestructible. He does this by overwriting Harada’s mind with his own, erasing Harada’s consciousness. The Blood of Heroes remained unused, but by 3050, as the central computer that ran all of Japan, Grandmother, became sentient and self-aware, she modeled her series of protectors, the Rais, after the historic Bloodshot. But she hid the Blood of Heroes away, fearful that if it was ever used on a person, that person would gain telepathic power over her as Bloodshot had over all machines.

But Grandmother had left the Earth following an alien invasion chronicled in MAGNUS, ROBOT FIGHTER, leaving Japan to rule itself once more. The final Rai had perished during the UNITY crossover. But in the final pages of this issue, Rokland Tate, the geomancer of the far future, guides Takao Konishi to where the Blood of Heroes has been hidden since grandmother’s fall and used it to transform Takao into the Last Rai. This was all set-up for the new series RAI AND THE FUTURE FORCE which would be launched shortly thereafter, and it set the stage for BLOODSHOT to become a regular series as well. But really what this book represents, unintended or not, is Jim Shooter’s vision for the future and the conclusion of many of the plot threads that he’d been weaving since starting down the road towards the Valiant Universe. While the company would continue to publish comics for another half-decade, and the characters were thereafter rebooted and re-imagined on a number of occasions, for certain fans, this issue represents the capstone to what Shooter and his fellow creators had invented. It does a good job of providing reasonably fulfilling final fates for many of the characters while still leaving the door open for most of them–a delicate balancing act.