Discovering The Valiant: Bloodshot vol. 1 Review

Bloodshot vol. 1

And here I thought Harbinger was dark. This is probably the darkest Valiant comic I’ve read. What a concept. Bloodshot is a military weapon of a man filled with nanobots that repair him and give him superpowers. He gets beat to a pulp more than Wolverine. The military or secret ops or whoever is pulling the strings erases his memory when convenient, and fills him with stories for the mission. They’ve wiped his memory hundreds of time and sent him back out on suicide missions, where he’s taken out a crazy amount of people. The action, violence and gore level of this book reminds me of Garth Ennis’s MAX Punisher run, yikes. He’s on the run, meets up with the grounding character woman who doesn’t have powers, and the military chases after him with a living EMP called Pulse. I Had fun with it and found it hard to put down. The last page of this volume was pretty fuzzed and difficult to read from what looks like a printing error, but I was able to make it out. Overall, really dark, but I enjoyed it.

There are two artists on art duty in this, and unfortunately their styles don’t mesh at all. It seems like one’s used just for his flashbacks in an attempt to mitigate that but it’s a weird look, and doesn’t mesh well with the traditional comic look. It’s mostly fine at points, but there are some strange proportions and faces drawn in areas that look a little rushed. Art is okay, but not my favorite.

Overall, not sure I’m attached to the character, it’s hard to be, and I would have liked just a little more in terms of char development attachment to the nurse woman whose name I couldn’t quite read on that blurred last page, and with Pulse for that matter, but it’s a solid first book and I’m interested enough to keep reading. 7/10