Reviewer: Jesse Baker
Story Title: Into the Fire (XOM #1), Kingdom Come! (XOM #2), The Most Powerful Man in the World (XOM #3), King’s Crossing (XOM #4)
Written by: Bob Layton, Jim Shooter, Steve Englehart
Penciled by: Barry Windsor-Smith, Sal Velluto, Mike Manley
Inked by: NA
Colored by: NA
Lettered by: NA
Editor: Jim Shooter and Don Perlin
Publisher: Valiant Comics
X-O Manowar was one of the first break-out hits for Valiant Comics that did not directly go back to the various Gold Key comic properties that the company used as the backbone of their comic line. The book’s premise was pretty far-fetched; what if Conan, The Barbarian was alive in present day America and had Iron Man’s armor as his main weapon. It was a surprise hit and X-O quickly became one of Valiant Comics’ most popular characters. So popular, that Valiant Comics quickly churned out a trade paperback reprinting the hard-to-find first four issues of the series.
In the first two issues, we quickly get put to speed about the character Aric and his origin. 2000 years ago, Spider Aliens came to earth and kidnapped a barbaric entity by the name of Aric. Aric was imprisoned in suspended animation for centuries before being let out in 1992. Grabbing a nearby suit of armor left out in an open lab as a tool to use against his captures, the armor engulfed him and gave him the power to escape to Earth. But as he discovers, much time has past and Aric finds his world gone and a new world in its place. Aric is soon befriended by a VERY effeminate man by the name of Ken Clarkson, who upon seeing Aric begins swooning over him and takes him home in order to shower him and shave him and probably bugger him. We learn that Ken works for Orb Industries, which is a front for the Spider Aliens in their plot to conquer Earth and that Ken has been given the assignment of bringing Aric to his alien masters. But when they double-cross him and proceed to blast one of his hands off, Ken allies himself with Aric and help him destroy the Spider Aliens main Earth representatives and claim Orb Industries for their own.
Issues #3 and #4 are stand-alone stories with one major theme: Toyo Harada (who is a Japanese businessman who has telepathic powers and a superiority complex about having super-powers that would make both Ultimate X-Men’s Magneto and Professor Xavier look modest) wants to destroy Orb Industries in order to keep the Spider Aliens from using the corporation against the planet Earth. In #3 Harada sends a cybernetic sniper out to kill the heads of Orb Industries before finding out that someone else was now in control. In #4, Harada has a business dinner in New Orleans with Aric and Ken that ends with the Harbingers (the Valiant Comics version of the X-Men) attacking the three in a desperate attempt to assassinate the evil Harada that fails and only makes Harada and Aric become closer allies instead when Aric defends Toyo from the Harbingers.
X-O Manowar #4 also features one of the most cheap and utterly pathetic debuts of a new character. During this issue, we see Harada, Ken, and Aric enter a nightclub and in one single panel we see a man playing saxophone. The guy says absolutely nothing and is not named at all by anyone else in the issue. That same month, Valiant launched another book called “Shadowman†and made an announcement via their friends at Wizard (who Valiant was in bed with in terms of promoting Valiant as the book all comic speculators should buy if they want to make a boatload of money, something I will address in more detail when I do a review for Valiant’s “Rai†trade paperback soon) that the sax player in X-O Manowar was indeed Shadowman in his civilian identity and that comic hoarders and speculators needed to buy up as many copies of this book if they wanted to make a quick $30-50 bucks.
Overall this trade is not very good in terms of content and of giving the newbie reader a good look at original version of X-O Manowar (as Acclaim Comics, who bought Valiant out in 1994, has released brand new versions of the character over the years with their versions being mainly outright Iron Man rip-offs). The title got better as it went on as Aric picked up a girlfriend (who temporarily becomes X-O Manowar for a time), becomes best friends with Turok (another Gold Key character Valiant brought back), and his relationship with Ken goes sour after Aric gives him a robotic replacement arm that is set to explode and kill him if he so much as back-talks Aric.
