Recently, I wrote about my time working with Jordan B. Gorfinkel and Avalanche Comics Entertainment. I ended by referencing Valiant Comics, intending to write about my multiple years of consulting with them. As I began to prepare this, it turned out that much of the email archive was gone, and mysteriously, my file on the work done for them was also absent. So, here’s what I recall…
Some background: In 2005, Jason Kothari and Dinesh Shamdasani outbid others to acquire the rights to the Valiant trademarks and comics properties during a Chapter 7 auction of the Acclaim properties. They spent the next year-plus putting together their plans.
On November 8, 2007, Dinesh’s people reached out to Gorf for a meeting. In anticipation of the December meeting, I outlined my thoughts, and by the time we met, Gorf and Scott Peterson had put together a proposal for how ACE could help Valiant relaunch their titles. Gorf and I trooped into Manhattan for the meeting which went well enough, The offices were devoid of personality, as if they were merely renting space.
Shortly afterward, Jason reached out to me and asked if I would be willing to work as a consultant sans Gorf and ACE. I received Gorf’s blessing, and from 2008 to 2011, I worked to help develop the new company. This meant researching the field, pricing out various configurations of trade editions, and hearing ideas about marketing and publishing.
Walter Black, who had been the last of the Acclaim Editors-in-Chief, was on board as their Operations, and he was coming up to speed on what that would entail. Meantime, Jason would spin out ideas and after we spoke, I’d go price things out or counter why it would or wouldn’t work. As it turned out, he was doing this not only with me but with a variety of people, from Mike Marts to Bill Jemas. There was even talk with smaller publishers about partnering to bring their expertise into bringing about a new Valiant Age. That didn’t pan out, so instead, Jason began consulting with Fred Pierce, fresh from the Wizard empire. Who knows how much money was spent on consultancies?
According to Jason’s LinkedIn profile, he credits himself as CEO & Board of Directors from 2007-2013. He was the main force at this time, with Dinesh, then in Los Angeles, an occasional figure and always cc’d on correspondence. Jason’s desk had three monitors, and his eyes often flitted from screen to screen as we talked, and I remained uncertain how much he heard me. Often, he kept information on a need-to-know basis, so it wasn’t well into 2008 that I learned he had already rehired Jim Shooter to return to Valiant as their new EIC.
On March 10, 2008, Valiant made lots of noise as Paramount Pictures announced they had acquired the film rights to Harbinger, with former X-Men director Bret Ratner attached. It was just another thing I had to learn from someone other than Jason.
Jim was working in the small offices, sharing space with, I believe, Walter. He’d be there in shirt and tie, pounding away at a computer, writing scripts for the first series. At this point, Jason’s publishing plan was to relaunch the books slowly, treating them as a series of “seasons”, taking a break between each season as other titles filled the gap, and just before the new season would begin, the TPB of the previous season would be launched.
The problem was that EIC Shooter didn’t have a firm grasp on which characters would appear in which order or how long each “season” would run. So I guessed for planning purposes, varying runs from six to eight issues.
Whenever I came into their offices for a planning meeting, which involved determining which artists to bring in and what other writers to follow the path Shooter laid out, Jim was reluctant., He was focused more on writing than being the EIC. A year later, it became clear why. He had also been talking with Mike Richardson at Dark Horse, and in the summer of 2009, he jumped from Valiant to Dark Horse to the Gold Key characters he was best known for.
That caught Jason and Dinesh flatfooted. They floundered without an editor to run things for them, casting a far net.
2009 through 2011 felt like a lot of spinning wheels as plans and people came and went. In August 2011, Cuneo & Co. invested in the company with Gavin Cuneo stepping in as a board director and his father, former Marvel exec Peter Cuneo, taking over as Board president. Peter and I had only a few conversations during my Marvel tenure, but I knew this was a good move for Valiant.
At one point, we were proceeding with the season publishing plan sans Shooter, and I laid out an editorial schedule to meet the pub dates. Here, I used my DC training to ensure there was room in the schedule for things to go sideways and still meet the pub date. One afternoon, I was brought in to have a conference call with Jason and Bill Jemas, who I hadn’t spoken to since he fired me eight years previously. We made pleasant small talk, and when it was time for business, he started by asking, “Do you want these books to ever come out?” With his usual cavalier manner towards the calendar and human fallibility, he wanted to take all the air out of the schedule. Let’s just say the call didn’t go well.
In time, Jason firmed up his staff, and the hunt was on for an EIC. One of the staffers, whose name I cannot locate, sent me a laundry list of names, and I shot the majority down. People like Grant Morrison and Garth Ennis would never agree to be EIC, in my opinion, but I was criticized for being too negative. I just didn’t want them to waste their time. Soon after, I was asked about Warren Simons. We’d never met, but I knew he had been Axel Alonso’s assistant at Marvel around the time I left, so didn’t have a clear idea.
That’s when I got involved in training to be a teacher, and my consultancy ended without rancor on either side. Soon after, Warren was hired, and in turn, he hired Matt Kindt, Robert Vendetti, Josh Dysart, Patrick Zircher, and Clayton Henry, among others, to launch the new Valiant Universe.
Harbinger never happened, and the 2015 Bloodshot film crashed and burned. Jason left, replaced by Dinesh. The company floundered, and then Dinesh left. Its properties still have appeal and affection among a certain portion of the readership. You won’t find my fingerprints on anything they released in 2012, but I did what I could to help steer two enthusiastic tyros into the world of comics publishing.
#Tags: Avalanche Comics Entertainment, Bill Jemas, Bret Ratner, Dark Horse Comics, Dinesh Shamdasani, Fred Pierce, Gavin Cuneo, Harbinger, Jason Kothari, Jim Shooter, Jordan B. Gorfinkel, Mike Marts, Mike Richardson, Peter Cuneo, Scott Peterson, Valiant Entertainment, Walter Black, Warren Simons