Abadazad to Zorro

Just the original run.

My relation with Valiant is an unusual one, in that I never bought the comics as they came out. One day in the late '90s or early 2000 I made my weekly visit to the LCS, and lo and behold the owners had landed a big lot of comics at a local auction the preceding weekend. They had set all the really valuable stuff aside, but were now stuck with a ton of what would have been quarter-bin fodder in those days, mostly Valiant titles. So many, in fact, that there was no room to stock them in the store; that's why they held a huge sale... at ten cents a comic.

I might not have been overly attracted to the Valiant universe before, but at such a price I just splurged and went away with a longbox full of Valiant comics. (I had to walk home with them all, a 4 km endurance course ).

I didn't land any of the really pricy Valiant books, but got several years worth of most titles starting around the Unity crossover. In later years I filled a few holes here and there, especially when Newkadia would have sales and the Canadian dollar was still worth something. Needless to say, I was in comic-book heaven with the tight continuity between the titles and the time periods covered, as well as with the Barry Windsor-Smith art featured in Archer & Armstrong, Eternal Warrior, X-O manowar and others. The early Valiant, under the aegis of Jim Shooter, was just the way I think a shared universe should be managed!

I love discussions about Jim Shooter!

Did you see the massive Shooter interview  that the Comics Historians held? It's over seven hours long, and I never got bored. 

I agree that he was often adamant on certain things that might have felt stultifying to certain creators (emphasis on the clarity of storytelling, remembering that every issue is someone's first exposure to the characters, continuity between titles, having consistent powers and the like); I sort of doubt that Shooter would have allowed people like Neal Adams or Philippe Druillet to go crazy with page structure the way they did. At the same time, when he left Valiant, it didn't take long for the line to start slipping into retcon and internal contradiction territory. Most of all, I think he often had a certain "my way or the highway" attitude that would grate the nerves of certain creators. I had a boss like that, once, and while I knew how to handle him (present your ideas as if he had been behind them, mostly) some of my colleagues were just always at loggerheads with him.  

Your example of the redone X-O story sounds just like something he would do... pay the work commissioned, but not use it and redo it himself because the original didn't fit the editorial frame. It's a fair decision, economically speaking, and it's a sound decision, editorially speaking, but it's also sort of rude to whoever saw their work shelved! I can see why egos would be bruised in such circumstances.

Yeah, and timing was a huge factor here, too. Marvel had been very laissez faire before his arrival. Roy Thomas had that belief that a good writer could edit themselves, and everyone who came after him 1) had such a quick turn-around, and 2) were members of the bullpen themselves who likely didn't want to ruffle feathers. So throwing Shooter into an environment like that one, especially if he had little appreciation for tact and subtlety, was a recipe for disaster. Probably would have worked fine at DC (where Shooter learned his craft).