Valiant to Bring Back Deathmate This Summer

Later this month at the Chicago Comics and Entertainment Expo, Valiant Entertainment will announce details about Deathmate, a revival of the ’90s crossover series that teamed Valiant superheroes with characters from the Image Comics titles.

In its early days, Image focused more on superhero and superhero-adjacent comics, and made more of an attempt to have a cohesive shared universe, than they have for most of their publishing history.

It’s unlikely the new Deathmate will share much commonality with its ’90s counterpart. When Valiant announced that they would resurrect Unity — a line-wide crossover event from the ’90s that heavily featured characters from Gold Key Comics, to which Valiant no longer holds the rights — there was speculation that the title could bring those characters back into the fold. That didn’t happen, but Unity became a critically-acclaimed book that featured many of Valiant’s heavy hitters in what amounts to their equivalent of the Justice League of Avengers. Since Unity recently ended, it’s possible Deathmate will take on a similar role.

Deathmate, a six-issue miniseries where the issues were designated by color rather than numbered, featured work by Bob Layton, Barry Windsor-Smith, Rob Liefeld, Jim Lee, Greg Capullo, Joe Quesada, Jimmy Palmiotti, and more.

The original miniseries has never been collected or made available digitally, and it’s unlikely that it will be due to what are likely complicated rights issues — especially now that Jim Lee has sold Wildstorm to DC Comics.

Deathmate is most notable for the first appearance of Gen 13 being in Deathmate: Black.