Day: October 9, 2014

So I picked up the Humble Valiant Bundle a few weeks back. (The bundle is no longer being sold, but that link will show you some of what was in it.)

I'm enjoying it, and I was enjoying the shared universe, right up until I got to the part where the Eternal Warrior shows up in Archer & Armstrong and behaves completely differently from how he does in Eternal Warrior. (In A&A, he's a Terminator-like unstoppable killing machine who follows Archer to the ends of the earth to avenge the death of a Geomancer and will not listen to reason when his brother tells him Archer is innocent. Whereas in his own book, he's been in seclusion for the past 150 years after telling all the Geomancers they can go fuck themselves, and rejoins the battle only with the greatest reluctance. Both of these stories are supposed to be set in the present.) Now, maybe this gets explained later -- maybe he's being mind-controlled or something -- but it's pretty jarring if you read Eternal Warrior first and then switch to Archer and Armstrong.

So I got to wondering, what order are you supposed to read these books in?

It's actually surprisingly difficult to find a simple answer to this question on Valiant's site or Wikipedia. But after some research, I've found that the short answer is: X-O Manowar, Harbinger, Bloodshot, Archer & Armstrong, Shadowman, Quantum and Woody, Eternal Warrior, Unity, Rai, with Harbinger Wars concurrent with the third volumes of Harbinger and Bloodshot (as their title implies).

The long answer is this giant table I made.

(Update 2014-12-31: And the even longer answer is a newer post I wrote, titled A More Detailed Valiant Comics Chronology.)

Note that this is not exhaustive; I've only included the books that were in the Humble Valiant Bundle (and not the Valiant Masters, which are the original 1990's continuity). Also note that these dates are from solicitations I've found online; some of these might not be the actual ship dates, but most of them probably are.

Table sorting courtesy of jQuery and tablesorter; icons courtesy of Font Awesome.

Updated 2015-09-25: Replaced Christian Bach's tablesorter with Mottie's fork.