IMO, Acclaim was a mixed bag but so was the original Valiant. Some of it was definitely better than others. One of the original Valiant concepts that never really grabbed me like some others was Rai. It seemed like I was missing something there.

And that's why. The "Valiant" fans are possessed of Geoff Johns silver age lust, but to an extreeme, as Valiant only had 1 or 2 years before the creators all left and the books slid into mediocrity.

The Acclaim years...until the company folded, was filled with creators like Busiek, Priest, Nicieza, Waid, Peyer, Ellis, Delano, Kruger, Maquire, McDuffie. doing great books.

If I want to read about multiverses, I'll read DC.

VALIANT has to offer an alternative to what DC and Marvel do, not the same thing but different.

Be Yoohoo to DC's Coke and Marvel's Pepsi, Babylon 5 to Star Trek and Star Wars.

Priest had a new character in a series Concrete Jungle introduced. I'd like to see more of that as well as an updating of Trinity Angels and maybe even Giffen's Punx.

Consider that if Unity 2000 had been finsihed, the Acclaim version would have taken over the original version, who would have vanished after it drank the magic ink.

VEI has already expressed their intention to return the character to their pre-Acclaim state.

I've read Shooter's script for the final issues and seen the completed artwork for the remaining issues.

Spoilers (of a 9-year-old incomplete series, heh)

In the end, it turns out that the original VALIANT heroes were fakes that a writer in the real world (the VH 2 reality) created using magic ink that Lucifer gave him.

All the VALIANT characters vanish when the ink falls on them and Solar drinks it to sacrifice himself.

In the end, the "real" people, the VH 2 characters, are the ones that survive.

It was a crappy ending to a crappier Crisis on Infinite Earths-rip off.

Although I don't know if I've ever met anyone else that read it (thank you Hondo!) Len Kaminski's Bloodshot was one of the best comics of its time, too. The rapport between writer and artist (Sal Velluto) was top-notch, it was sci-fi and superhero and spy at once, and the narration and dialogue were pure high octane poetry at times.

And Acclaim's Shadowman was groovy too; I actually only started reading it once Serge Clermont and Clayton Crain took over, but it was a well-told story, a cool concept, and the storyworld seemed authentic.

Yeah, it'd be great if they could do a Unity storyline with the present properties. Does the new Valiant hold the rights to the Acclaim books? It does, doesn't it? I'd hate to see the original Bloodshot send the Acclaim version back into the drawer.

I guess I hadn't thought of it until now, but that is one major point with the Valiant U : it doesn't have enough good villains.

I'll never understand why there's so much hate for the Acclaim series. Sure it wasn't the original Valiant, and I agree that the early Valiant was as good as any superhero stuff I've ever read, but Acclaim had some great stuff. The Acclaim versions of Shadowman, Bloodshot and Turok were preferable to the Valiant versions IMO and they had some great new properties including Quantum & Woody, Troublemakers, and Dr. Tomorrow. I always thought of Acclaim as the Valiant Earth-2 universe and am pretty sure that's what Unity 2000 was going to show when they ultimately would have mooshed the two universes into a "best of" universe. Too bad that never finished.

The Acclaim version of Darque's next apperance before the universe was thankfully puut out of its misery was to be in the Final Solution, a crossover about Harbingers being put into concentration camps.

http://sonicdan.com/valiant/acclaimjuly98.html

There was some preview art for it either in the last few issues of Shadowman or the last issue of Acclaim's Darque Passages mini series (I don't recall). Any future plans for the character would have appeared there.