Is this book worth those big preorders? Well, I can't really comment on that but what I can say is that this is an excellent comic that is well worth the cover price of admission.
Let me start with a couple of negatives. While I am a huge fan of Cary Nord (who is under an exclusive with Valiant these days) I think that his art is a little rough in some places. The historical bit of the story do not sing quite like the science fiction parts. The cover image of Aric in the XO armor is head and shoulders above that of Aric in period costuming fighting against the Romans. His period costuming is one of the weaker points of the issue in general. The other negative is only a personal one....I would have liked to have geeked out to Aric pulling on the XO armor in this issue. Is that a true negative? I don't know. I don't really plan on holding that one against the issue.
On to the positives. Except for some issues with costuming, Cary Nord's art work in this issue is pretty great. The wide shots of the battle scenes, the introduction of the space craft and the Spider aliens...these are all good things. Nord imparts a great energy and sense of action and movement to his art in this issue, bringing the script to life. To the negative, maybe I am holding the great work that Nord did on Conan against him here, but he has set some high standards with his previous works.
Robert Venditti put together an action packed script that races in an almost breathless manner from one plot point to another, barely allowing the readers to rest from one moment to another. By the time that Aric encounters the Spider aliens there had already been so much to happen that has happened that I couldn't believe that I had read only one issue of a comic.
Yes, there are going to be comparisons to the earlier versions of the character. While there are parallels between this story and the original origin of XO-Manowar, I think that calling this book a retelling would do it a great injustice. There is enough to make this more than just a retelling of what has already been done previously. I think that the first issue of XO-Manowar is an incredibly strong one and definitely and indication that the Summer of Valiant has started out on the right foot. Further Valiant number ones have a high bar of storytelling quality set by this issue. If I gave thumbs up in reviews, XO-Manowar would get two of them from me and then I would drag some guy off the street in to give a couple more of them. This is quality comic storytelling.
If Valiant manages to keep putting out books as strong as this one, I think that people are going to start forgetting about earlier versions of the characters and move on to these as being the definitive versions of the Valiant characters.
Below are some preview pages provided by Valiant.
