Brand Echh: WARRIORS OF PLASM #1

As we’ve talked about here briefly in our sequence on the assorted early launches from VALIANT, Editor in Chief and primary creative voice Jim Shooter found himself ousted from that company shortly after completing work on that company’s UNITY crossover. Different people have given different accounts of exactly what happened and how it all went down, but it’s clear that there was a power struggle for control and that Shooter lost it. Bob Layton remained with VALIANT and took over the position of Editor in Chief, and Shooter moved on. Undaunted, and convinced of the value of his creative instincts, Shooter did what he had done previously: he put together a group of backers and he launched a new comic book publishing venture, boldly named DEFIANT. The initial DEFIANT roll-out announcements included a wonderfully over-the-top illustrated fable of Jim’s history up to this point, positioning him as a force for truth and rightness that was inevitably being stymied by the “bad guys” he found himself surrounded by. (By way of a timeline, WARRIORS OF PLASM #1 was released in the same month that saw the publication of Valiant’s MAGNUS, ROBOT FIGHTER #30 and HARBINGER #22. So DEFIANT was directly competing with Shooter’s old operation.)

Launching DEFIANT was not without its own difficulties. For one thing, the company launched just as the speculator bubble that had been driving the spectacular sales of the early 1990s began to burst, sending everybody’s sales numbers falling towards more reasonable levels. Secondly, the comic book landscape was then littered with additional new companies that were intent on getting their own market share of what was now a dwindling marketplace. But most crucially, DEFIANT immediately ran into a legal battle with Marvel over the title of what was intended to be its inaugural series, then-called PLASM. Marvel’s UK operation was in the process of launching a series called PLASMER, and the company complained that the two names would cause confusion. It all seems very petty, and one of the end results was that Shooter decided to retitle his book WARRIORS OF PLASM in an effort to placate Marvel. The company also wound up burning through a bunch of their available start-up capital in litigating the matter, which put them immediately behind the eightball as well.

It kind of has to be said: WARRIORS OF PLASM is a weird choice to serve as the roll-out of a new interconnected super hero universe. It’s a very strange strip all around, a science fiction fantasy that is built around the “Org” of Plasm, a far-distant planet that is an integrated living world. All of the inhabitants of Plasm as well as all of the matter that is used in the construction of its society is all a part of the greater organism. In order to continue to grow and evolve and expand, Plasm needs to constantly be fed. This is accomplished by conquering and stripping down other worlds, whose essence is added into the greater whole of Plasm. Because Shooter’s financial partners were a trading card concern, the initial set-up story was released initially as a trading card set, in which nine-up arrangements of cards could be arrayed in a trading card binder into pages, allowing one to read the story. This was an era in which super hero trading cards were a momentarily massive thing, and so this approach may have been seen as a smart play. But the reality is that few were going to go to the effort to complete and assemble an entire card set to read the inaugural story of a universe in which they weren’t yet invested.

The artwork on WARRIORS OF PLASM #1 was produced by David Lapham and Mike Witherby. Lapham had been a discover of Shooter’s over at VALIANT, where he was touted as being akin to the second coming of Frank Miller. Together with Shooter, Lapham created HARBINGER as Valiant, and took over as that series’s writer for a short time after Jim’s ouster. But after just over a dozen issues, he left Valiant to join his mentor’s new publishing venture. It has to be said that WARRIORS OF PLASM is a pretty good looking book, with Witherby’s tight inking giving Lapham’s pages an appealing and marketable look to them. It certainly wasn’t the flavor of the way–at the time, the field was dominated by Image-style large shock images without a whole lot of storytelling structure. But DEFIANT, like VALIANT before it, stressed fundamental, almost diagrammatical pages centered around a basic grid and emphasizing mid-range establishing shots. They were always very easy to follow. Lapham would remain with the series as artist and occasional scripter right up to its final issue, making it one of the more consistent titles that DEFIANT put out.

It’s honestly kind of difficult to truly get across the essence of WARRIORS OF PLASM, as so much of the dialogue and interactions are build around the strange culture of the Org, with a surfeit of crazy terminology that’s simple enough to puzzle out but which requires a conscious effort to do so. Accordingly, it isn’t an especially easy read, for all that the story itself isn’t that complicated. (It also becomes difficult not to chuckle at some of the more absurd lines, such as “We’ve been genetically engineered to excel at all your favorite lust-games. High Gore Lord Sueraceen had us made to order for you, sir…”) The main driver of this opening issue is Supreme Acquisitor Lorca, who has located the Earth and sees it as a source of new material for the Org. But Lorca is looking to overthrow the rulers of his world, who were responsible for the death of his true love, Laygen. Accordingly, he sets up to abduct 10,000 random people from Earth and transform them through genetic reengineering into a super-powered army he can lead in a revolt against the current ruling order.

Unfortunately for Lorca’s dreams of revolution, something goes wrong in the process and most of the people who are subjected to this process die horrifically. In the end, there are only five survivors: Louise Johnson, a grandmother who will be known as Glory; Reverend Martin Gilbert, AKA Preach; Lieutenant Elvis Mazerov, called Shooter; shy one-armed auto mechanic Rick Tietz, hereafter Mouse; and cosmetics counter girl Cookie Wazenegger, Nudge. Lorca attempts to have all of the evidence of his betrayal “slaughtered, mulched and recycled” before his duplicity can be discovered by the authorities, leaving the five survivors to use their new powers to escape and go on the run. By the end of the issue, they’re able to fight their way to the gateway through which they were first transported to Plasm and make their way back through it to Earth. But their continued existence represents a threat to Lorca’s well-being, and so he’s got no choice but to go after them and extinguish them, all the while prepping the Earth to eventually be consumed by Plasm.

WARRIORS OF PLASM ran for only 13 issues, plus an additional squarebound one-shot, before reaching the end of the road. It expired just as Shooter was attempting to roll out DEFIANT’s first company-wide crossover, SCHISM, his answer to his previous UNITY. But it was too little, too late, and only two of the projected SCHISM chapters would ever see print, the operation running out of money and unable to continue. WARRIRS OF PLASM is a very strange title, but not without its charms, and the level of execution is better and more consistent than much of what DEFIANT would end up fielding.