Acclaim / Valiant

Valiant was founded in 1989 by Jim Shooter, recently departed as Marvel's editor-in-chief, and Steven Massarsky. It began with licensed Gold Key characters — Magnus, Robot Fighter; Solar; Turok — and built new ones around them: X-O Manowar, Harbinger, Rai, Bloodshot. The line was tightly plotted and unusually disciplined about continuity, and for a period in the early 1990s it outsold almost everything that was not Marvel or DC.

Acclaim Entertainment, the video-game publisher, bought it in 1994 for a sum that made sense only at the peak of the speculation boom. The boom ended, the line was relaunched in 1996 as Acclaim Comics with the characters substantially reworked, and publishing wound down by the turn of the century.

The characters were revived in 2012 by a separate company, Valiant Entertainment, which is not this publisher.