Since I’m part of the “comic book circle of life”, Professor Alan sent me these two Valiant books.  And since it’s Professor Alan, he sent them with the challenge of “Uncollect These!”

Challenge accepted, sir.

The publication date on these is 1994 (with an early 1995 cover date), so we are definitely in the “bust” part of the Nineties, and the book (as well as Valiant itself) doesn’t have much time as at this point I believe it’s already been purchased by Acclaim and will be completely gone within a year or two.  That shouldn’t have much of an impact on the quality of the book, but I guess I could go in wondering whether or not its cancellation was a shame or a mercy killing.

Our hero is Ivar, a time-traveling hero who has his “team” working with him as he slips through the timestream in a premise that feels like a syndicated television show from that era (although I seem to be thinking this a lot when I read some independent comics of this era.  I don’t think it’s that off-base because a number of books I’ve read could have easily been ported to low-budget/Canadian-shot syndication or cable networks like TNT and USA).  When issue #3 opens, he’s in Edison, New Jersey in the future and has to get some item hidden in a Thomas Edison museum exhibit that belongs to his friend Mac.  He gets it, and seems to spend the rest of the episode time-hopping until he comes across some super android that has been sent to kill him and his team and eventually they wind up in prehistoric times where the super android seems to be destroyed and he has to wait for the next available time jump.  However, the android isn’t destroyed and there’s all sorts of crazy time confusion with people plotting against him and his team and I honestly had a hard time figuring out exactly what was going on.

I know that part of the reason for that was because I was coming in three issues into a series and therefore had to use context clues to figure things out because beyond the fact that Ivar hops on these time arcs the same way that Adam Strange hops on the Zeta beam, I couldn’t really figure out what his mission was, what his origin was, or what the villain was up to.  The fight with the android was probably the best part, especially when we got into prehistoric times and there was a period where it seemed like the baddie was eaten by a T-Rex, but he comes back much later because he’s indigestible (to which Ivar says, “figures”).

Otherwise, I had a tough time engaging the story, and there were even times when I had a tough time figuring out when things were set because it seemed like the future looked similar to the present.  So whereas Eternal Warrior was interesting to me and might be worth perusing if I see it in a cheap bin, this is going to be a hard pass.

Keep, Sell, Donate, or Trash?

Trash.