I read Valiant Beyond: Bloodshot #1 after the panels of thinly veiled transphobic content surfaced online Friday.
The cover promises “New Origin, New Universe, New Starting Point.” Because when comics’ biggest hits are DC’s Absolute books and Marvel’s Ultimate books, why not do the same?
The comic is nothing I would have sought out had I not seen the online furor first. It’s hyperviolent, with a mouth like a South Park 10-year-old and a sense of humor to match. There’s a scene where Bloodshot has beer blessed in flashback so he can piss on a trapped vampire to kill him in the present. It’s well-drawn by Fernando Heinz Furukawa, but it’s entirely too referential to the action media that came before it, like Die Hard, John Wick and Duke Nukem, to say nothing of The Punisher.
The plot: Vampires are running rampant in Japan, having mixed their blood with the nanites that make Bloodshot the unkillable super-soldier he is. Formerly relegated to the equivalent of reservations in the Arctic and Antarctic, vampirism appears to be seeping out of the Japanese underworld and into the culture. Hence, those two panels you’ve seen online, with dialogue as follows:
“There are kids who want to become vampires because their favorite influencer says they are one. And parents who force their children into that irreversible change … just to feel modern … and believing that they’ll be thankful for it when they grow up.”
Comics writer and former CXF staffer Zoe Tunnell rightly called it out on Bluesky:
I pride myself on my professionalism in comics. I don't talk shit about books I don't enjoy. I am happy when folks get gigs even if I wish I landed them. So when I say the transphobic bullshit in the new BLOODSHOT #1 comic is disgusting and should have never made it to print. Shameful shit.
— Zoe Tunnell (@zoewithasword.bsky.social) August 15, 2025 at 3:05 PM
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A number of past Bloodshot and Valiant creators, including Deniz Camp, Joshua Dysart and David Lafuente, also put their two cents in on the matter:
Bloodshot would hate transphobes and throw himself in front of a hail of bullets to protect a trans kid without hesitation. Just FYI.
— Deniz Camp (@denizcamp.bsky.social) August 16, 2025 at 2:35 PM
As someone who's written Bloodshot, this sucks. Alien Books has said that "Going forward, all scripts will undergo a more intense review by our proof readers", this is not a "proof reader" issue. It's a writer/editor problem. The sentiment was intentional by a writer and went unchecked by an editor
— Joshua Dysart (@joshuadysart.bsky.social) August 15, 2025 at 6:50 PM
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and fuck that Bloodshot writer
— David Lafuente 💀 (@davidlafuente.bsky.social) August 16, 2025 at 2:13 PM
Fairly quickly, Alien Books, Valiant’s publisher, issued the following statement:
Writer Mauro Mantella also issued an apology on his Instagram:
“When I wrote the script in Spanish, I wasn’t fully convinced by the line in that panel. So, when I translated it into English, I changed it a bit… but now I realize that was a huge mistake. I borrowed a common phrase used by haters and tried to adapt it to the fictional world of vampires I was building. But now I see that it was understood in a completely different way. Maybe my subconscious betrayed me when I tried to make a sharp comment, but please believe me: I was always referring to this fictional world where vampires force their children into eternal life without their consent.
“In fact — still within the fictional context of the story I wrote — there will be consequences for this in issue #2.”
While they mostly say the right things (“we’re sorry you misunderstood” is never that), Alex Zalben and the crew at Comic Book Club found past tweets from Mantella that spoke to the contrary, uncovering a rat’s nest of transphobia, antifeminism and vaccine conspiracies, the kind of stuff you see on a ComicsGate message board.
That all these creators felt comfortable speaking out against the book, and the fact that nobody appeared to have seen it until two days after the book came out, speaks to how little interest there is in a renewed Valiant Universe in 2025. Valiant sent out early review copies July 3, nearly a month and a half before release, so the material was out there well before this.
It all shows how far Valiant’s star has fallen since Dinesh Shamdasani and a team of investors revived the Valiant brand in 2012 after the fall of previous owner Acclaim Entertainment. It’s worth noting that while Valiant is the most memorable, it is still the first of three publishers started by the late Jim Shooter in the late ‘80s into the ‘90s that ultimately went under.
But 2010s Valiant was a shot in the arm, bringing back characters like Bloodshot, X-O Manowar and Ninjak while elevating characters like Faith and Livewire.
In 2018, that success resulted in the publisher’s sale to DMG, a global media company that wanted to use Valiant’s characters for crossmedia adaptation at the height of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Out of that came a single Bloodshot movie starring Vin Diesel that premiered in theaters right as governments started shutting things down for COVID-19. Meanwhile, most of the Valiant 2.0 founders took their parachute money and launched Bad Idea, a niche publisher filled with ex-Valiant talent seemingly more interested in goofs, bits and gimmicks than the comics themselves. Former Valiant Vice President of Marketing and Communications Hunter Gorinson is now the president and publisher at Oni Press, which is experiencing a renaissance of buzzworthy indie comics in addition to reviving the EC Comics horror anthology brand.
Under DMG, Valiant’s production shrank significantly, to the point where it was producing one book a month. Finally, in 2023, DMG struck a licensing agreement with Alien Books to carry the Valiant publication line forward. Alien in turn struck a distribution partnership with IDW, helping it leapfrog to Penguin Random House after Diamond Comic Distributors declared bankruptcy.
When we spoke with Alien Director Matias Timarchi last year on The ComicsXF Interview Podcast, he talked about wanting to finish out the Valiant books that were in midseries and clear the decks for a new era.
Which brings us to where we are now. The Valiant Beyond line currently launching is an attempt to retool Bloodshot and other Valiant characters for a new era, not unlike your Absolute, Ultimate and Energon universes at DC, Marvel and Image. But part of what makes the hype real on those other books is creators who send fans into comic shops, names like Scott Snyder, Jonathan Hickman, Peach Momoko, Deniz Camp and Daniel Warren Johnson. Valiant Beyond’s roster includes Mantella on Bloodshot, AJ Ampadu on Tales of the Shadowman and Fred Van Lente on All-New Harbinger. And look, I like Van Lente, but he’s already written Valiant books, so it feels like more of a security blanket for folks who miss the 2.0 era.
The funny thing is, pre-Alien Valiant actually had some banger creators attached to it. Camp — on the cusp of blowing up pre-Ultimates, Absolute Martian Manhunter and Assorted Crisis Events — and Jon Davis-Hunt were doing their take on Bloodshot; Becky Cloonan, Michael Conrad and Liam Sharp were having space barbarian adventures with X-O Manowar; and Steve Foxe was writing Archer & Armstrong. You could have had it all right there, if only you’d wanted to truly invest in it. But post-DMG Valiant was a victim of the crumbling comics climate post-COVID, and the apathy of a company that just wanted IP.
And the moral there is, you get what you pay for. If all you want is familiar character names but you don’t want to invest in creators who will tell engaging stories without alienating audiences, eventually some grifting transphobe is going to weasel his way into your bullpen and want to “go back” to making his Five Below Punisher “a real man,” cracking jokes that sound like they came from a 1989 Tim Allen standup special.
Meanwhile, there’s plenty of non-Big Two superhero universes worth checking out, like Minor Threats and Black Hammer at Dark Horse and the Massive-Verse at Image, or The Boys and Invincible, both of which actually did make it to TV.
The shame of it all is, there are plenty of good characters at Valiant who could still shine in the right hands: Archer and Armstrong, Quantum and Woody, Faith, Livewire, etc. But if Bloodshot is an indication of this new era, perhaps they should lie fallow while this Van Sciver-level nonsense shakes itself out.
Better yet, maybe Alien should tap its new partners at IDW for some of their talent, if you want folks who know what to do with licensed properties. TMNT-Harbinger, anyone?
Dan Grote is the editor and publisher of ComicsXF, having won the site by ritual combat. By day, he’s a newspaper editor, and by night, he’s … also an editor. He co-hosts The ComicsXF Interview Podcast with Matt Lazorwitz. He lives in New Jersey with his wife, two kids and two miniature dachshunds, and his third, fictional son, Peter Paul Winston Wisdom. Follow him @danielpgrote.bsky.social.
