While it isn’t as popular a comic book line as Marvel and DC, there are some Valiant Comics storylines that match up to anything from the Big Two. Valiant Comics is from two different eras, with the first line founded by former Marvel Comics editor-in-chief Jim Shooter in 1989 and running into the 1990s, before being relaunched in 2012. This is a smaller, interconnected universe that allows the crossovers to mean a lot more because it doesn’t require a lot of tie-ins to complicate things. These storylines have brilliant creative teams, including Shooter, Robert Venditti, Joshua Dysart, and Duane Swierczynski. In 2025, Valiant Comics began distributing under the IDW Publishing banner with Alien Books as the publisher.
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With stories including X-O Manowar, Bloodshot, and Harbinger, here are the Valiant Comics storylines that stand up to anything that Marvel and DC have ever done.
5) Armor Hunters
Released in 2014, Armor Hunters is a four-issue event miniseries by Robert Venditti and Doug Braithwaite. It was Valiant Comics’ summer 2014 company-wide crossover, kicked off by a Free Comic Book Day 2014 Armor Hunters Special. The story follows an interstellar strike team that hunts the Armors, a virus-like species of sentient war-armors that have exterminated whole worlds. The team traces the last one to Earth, where it is bonded to Aric of Dacia as X-O Manowar’s suit, Shanhara.
The Hunters are led by Primary Reebo, who commands from Gin-GR, a sentient starship that is also counted as a member of the squad. To force Earth to hand over the armor, the Hunters have Gin-GR destroy Mexico City as a demonstration of what refusal costs. This event had real costs and a massive battle as the strike team orders Earth to surrender the armor or else. This is also a story that offers up sympathy for the attackers as well, since the Hunters all lost family or friends to the Armors, so they see themselves as the heroes in this story.
4) X-O Manowar: By the Sword
X-O Manowar is one of Valiant Comics’ most popular and successful superhero titles, and the best storyline from his series arrived in 2012. X-O Manowar #1–4 (2012) by Robert Venditti and Cary Nord was the flagship first title of the rebooted Valiant Universe. Aric of Dacia, a 5th-century Visigoth warrior at war with Rome, is abducted and enslaved by an alien race called the Vine. He then steals their sacred sentient armor and becomes X-O Manowar.
The character dates back to Valiant’s original 1992 line, but the 2012 series rebuilt him from the ground up as the anchor for the entire new publishing line, making this one of the most important new storylines of the rebooted comic book line. The high-concept storyline of a barbarian warrior fused with far-future alien tech gave the reboot a hook that stood apart from the generic superhero stories being told at the time at Marvel and DC.
3) Book of Death
Book of Death was a four-issue core event series in 2015 by Robert Venditti, Robert Gill, and Doug Braithwaite. In the storyline, Tama, the last in a line of Earth-protecting mystics called Geomancers, and her sworn protector, the Eternal Warrior (Gilad Anni-Padda), defy their own allies to stop a coming Dark Age. Tama’s Book of the Geomancer has already recorded the future, so each issue reveals events reaching toward the dawn of the 41st century.
There were also four “The Fall of…” one-shot tie-ins by Jeff Lemire, Matt Kindt, Joshua Dysart, and Robert Venditti that showed the future deaths of some of Valiant Comics’ most famous heroes. It showed the deaths of Bloodshot, the Harbinger Renegades, Ninjak, and X-O Manowar. This storyline also included a miniseries, Legends of the Geomancer, by Fred Van Lente and Juan Jose Ryp, expanding the mythology behind the Geomancer line. This had an uphill battle since the outcome was already written, and this just played the events to tease where Valiant’s continuity was heading.
2) Harbinger Wars
Harbinger Wars is a four-issue miniseries that arrived in 2013 by Joshua Dysart (Harbinger) and Duane Swierczynski (Bloodshot), with art by Clayton Henry, Clayton Crain, Mico Suayan, and Pere Pérez. This was the first company-wide crossover of the rebooted Valiant Universe. The storyline sees two forces that have spent decades hunting “psiots” (children with latent superpowers). The two forces include Toyo Harada’s multinational Harbinger Foundation and the United States government’s Project Rising Spirit.
The conflict explodes when the escaped super-powered kids of Generation Zero break loose and seize Las Vegas, dragging every faction into the open. This crossover series also threads through two other comics, with tie-ins taking place in Harbinger #11–14 and Bloodshot #10–13. Harbinger Wars stands out thanks to its moral ambiguity and flawed characters. There are no genuine heroes here, with one side ruthless visionaries and the other side existing as tragic pawns. Between the world-building and the tense pacing, this series stands up to anything Marvel or DC was publishing in the 2010s.
1) Unity (1992)
The best Valiant Comics storyline of all time goes back to the original run of the comics. “Unity” is an 18-issue company-wide crossover published in the summer of 1992, conceived by Valiant Comics editor-in-chief Jim Shooter. It was bookended by a free Unity #0 prologue (August) and a Unity #1 epilogue (October). Readers followed the story through all nine Valiant titles, and the crossover even launched new books for Archer & Armstrong and Eternal Warrior.
The villain is Mothergod (Erica Pierce), who gained Solar-like reality-warping powers and tried to erase and remake the universe. In the end, Solar ultimately stops her. Unity #0 was penciled by Barry Windsor-Smith and inked by Bob Layton, Valiant’s two most popular artists. Giving the prologue away for free was a deliberate hook to pull in new readers. Shooter’s entire idea was to reinvent the comic book crossover, and it remains the best story of the original comic book line. The Unity name was even brought back for a team in the 2012 reboot.
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