Fun for Valiant Fans

This volume collects the full four issue Valiant High story arc. It appears that this is a one-off that's outside the Valiant Universe canon, but that's fine because it seems mostly to be a fun, and slyly funny, goof on the characters.

The premise is that all of the familiar Valiant heroes are teenage students, or teachers, at Valiant High. The drawing and a lot of the hijinks are in the "Archie" sort of style, which makes sense. Through footnotes and sidebars we are familiarized right away with who each kid will become, but the tale is not burdened with too much exposition about the kids' futures. Rather, we get to see what these characters might have been like as teens, and we get a superpowered but still high schoolish story.

The Valiant heroes aren't given equal time. The central figures are Livewire and Zephyr. The amusing teams - Archer and Armstrong, Woody and Quantum - don't figure much at all. There's a fair amount of Ninjak, but just a touch of Dr. Mirage as a teacher. Needless to say, Bloodshot makes an insane gym teacher. Almost everyone makes at least a cameo. The inside humor is along the lines of Livewire being able to interface easily with any digital tech, but failing miserably at driver ed.

I am very much a fan of the Valiant Universe, and I'm willing to give just about anything they do a try, so I guess I'm biased. But I got a kick out of this. If you don't know the Valiant players the book is probably still entertaining, but you will miss a bunch of the jokes. On the other hand, this might whet your appetite to read more of the Valiant titles.

(Please note that I received a free advance will-self-destruct-in-x-days Adobe Digital copy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)

This is fun to read. I enjoyed the story and characters are amazing. There are lots of things happening so i want to see more of it. But i really enjoyed reading it.