Remember Valiant Comics? Back in the 90s everybody with a printing press was starting up a comic book universe, and Valiant was the one that Jim Shooter, the guy who oversaw one of the great eras in Marvel Comics (and whose attention to continuity I loved at the time but may have forever poisoned the well), headed up. Valiant used obscure Golden Key characters from the 50s like Solar, Man of the Atom and Magnus, Robot Fighter (no supeheroes have punctuation in their names anymore), as well a smattering of originals – like Harbinger. Heavily influenced by X-Men, Harbinger was a book about super powered people who were the next step in human evolution, but the twist here was that they had to be activated by an ‘Omega Harbinger.’ It was pretty cool at the time.
Paramount Pictures has acquired the rights to this long dead comic book and Brett Ratner, who has wanted to launch another franchise instead of hopping on at the end again, is looking at the property for his next gig. The script will be written while Ratner develops his other movies, like Playboy, the Hugh Hefner biopic, and his Trump Tower heist film.
A couple of years ago Harbinger would have made a cool movie, but in a post-Heroes world it isn’t all that special, especially since the book’s original mandate was to keep the characters away from the usual sort of spandex adventures featured in comics at the time. And I wonder if there are enough people who still hold Harbinger in high enough regard to get up in arms about Ratner getting onboard; this could be the perfect project for him to duck fanboy hate.
I guess the good news is that this means we’re one step closer to a film adaptation of Jim Shooter’s masterwork, Warriors of Plasm, still the only comic to debut as… trading cards. Jesus, the 90s.