Tags
Indie Comics, dinosaur, Juan Jose Ryp, science fiction, Samurai, indie box, Rai, Dan Abnett, Valiant
Rai—a shortening of the word “samurai”—is a cybernetic killing machine with some kind of human element in the far distant future, and his adventures started back in 1991 at Valiant Comics. Valiant’s never really been on my radar. It originally served as a vehicle for Marvel’s Jim Shooter to tell modern stories with older properties such as Solar: Man of the Atom and to build a “Valiant Universe” of hopefully marketable properties. Thirty years later, the character Bloodshot got a movie deal featuring Vin Diesel, but the Valiant characters never grabbed me. I know I have the minority opinion these days where everyone wants to create a “cinematic universe” and make a billion dollars, but publishing books just to get me on board with the marketing department’s so-called universe is a surefire way to lose me.
The tragedy of that mentality is that sometimes I miss out on a brilliant run by a top-notch creative team and only discover it years after the fact—which brings me to the ten-issue Rai series from 2019 by writer Dan Abnett, who Marvel fans will know from his 2000s work on titles related to the Annihilation events, and penciler Juan José Ryp, who drew both of my all-time favorite comic-book covers and all of my favorite 2000s series from Avatar, and whose work makes everything look totally awesome.
When I recently realized Ryp had drawn a Rai series for Valiant, I immediately checked it out and was not disappointed. The 2019 volume has a lot of backstory behind it, but you can pick up the essential details from the dialogue without any trouble. The story begins after Rai has destroyed an evil artificial intelligence in an orbiting city that subsequently crashed to Earth, but pieces of the A.I. still exist as incomplete backups that Rai is hell-bent on finding and destroying before they can re-assemble into a totally evil program.
Rai is joined by an older prototype of himself named Raijin whose entirely robotic body looks like a child’s, giving a bit of a twist to the manga trope about a samurai traveling with a kid, such as in the classic Lone Wolf and Cub. In this series, Rai also plays on the action-movie trope of a warrior who, despite his blood-soaked past, is trying to seek a path of peace while being forced into violence everywhere he goes.
Abnett’s stories breathe fresh life into these clichés by taking Rai on a journey where every situation puts his character to the test, addressing his motivation and guilt about failing his mission to destroy the evil A.I., his internal conflict over stopping to help people along the way when his greater quest might threaten their very existence, the duality of his coldly ruthless dedication contrasted with the fact that he is trying to help people with a problem much larger than their immediate concerns, and how he deals with being judged, reviled, or praised by everyone he meets.
Abnett does a great job of revealing character through conflict, and the sci-fi conflicts he chooses always give Ryp something awesome to draw. I mean, this series just looks amazing, and the inks from Beni Lobel and colors from Andrew Dolhouse bring out the best from Ryp’s pencils. I would probably love this series even if I couldn’t read any of the words, because the visual storytelling is that good.
It’s like Abnett plotted all ten issues by asking himself, “What would be the awesomest stuff I could ask Ryp to draw?” How about a cybernetic murder samurai, synthetic rampaging dinosaurs, an Earth goddess who can call down massive lightning strikes from the sky, an army of evil soldiers who are helpless humans encased in self-healing nanotech armor that controls them, some mechanical dragonflies, a sexy cyberspy with cute hair and a piratical eyepatch, a dude with a frickin’ skull for a face, armies of anthropomorphic mutant animals, and hordes of Mad-Max creeps who are always trying to ruin your journey into desolate landscapes? JUAN, YOU MUST DRAW THEM ALL!
The result is an absolutely gorgeous visual feast that somehow remains coherent thanks to the hard questions posed to the characters that drive their decisions and reveal nuance and depth about who they really are—and who they long to be.
This is the best thing I’ve read from Valiant, and my complaints are few. I sometimes felt the Raijin character was too chatty and expositional, saying in a hundred words what could have been said in ten. But that’s handled as part of his idiosyncratic nature and contrasted with characters who say a lot more with much less. I also felt the first five issues were more compelling than the next five, but by then I was hooked and could have read a hundred more.
My main gripe is that Abnett and Ryp didn’t keep going! The series ends after ten issues which are basically two story arcs, but I would have been all aboard for a much longer collaboration. Rai was an unexpectedly brilliant find from the Valiant vaults, and it fires on all cylinders due to the union of writing and art that defines a great comic-book run. Abnett and Ryp might have moved on to other projects—as so often happens in the world of comics—but they created something really entertaining here, and I’d love it if they “got the band back together” to tell more of these stories.
Collector’s Guide: You can currently get all ten single issues for about $2.50 each, a hardcover edition of Abnett’s complete Rai issues for about $35—including issues outside this volume—or a digital collection that includes all these issues.