Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Valiant Universe" in English language version.
The Valiant universe had one conceit that was not normal. There were powers of the mind that were released. Everything about that universe was the powers of the mind. Nobody had any horns or wings while I was there. There was no Atlantis under the sea. It was all this world, this planet. You could go to the streets where these people lived. And done well, it worked.
So one day the phone rings. A voice says, 'I'm from Acclaim Entertainment, don't hang up.' I said, 'OK.' 'My name is Mike Marts, I'm from Acclaim Comics, but there's no one here you know.' I said, 'Well, that's a good thing.' He said, 'We didn't like 'em either.' I said, 'What can I do for you?' He said, 'Look, we would like to do this Unity 2000 thing. Would you consider writing it?' I said, 'I'll talk about it. I don't have anything with you or anybody at Acclaim as long as the former bad guys aren't there.' I met with him and the publisher and one of the other editorial staff people. We had a nice lunch. We talked about what we could do. They made me a pretty good offer. I suggested they take Jim Starlin who was happy to do it. And we started out. I've written the whole thing. I've turned in five issues. I've turned in six plots and Starlin has turned in all the artwork. But as of today, they've only published three of them. The thing is, they never paid me [for the last 2 issues]. I'm not going to give them the last issue. They've got the art and they've got the plot, so maybe they'll just get someone to write it. Who knows? I don't know. I've lost interest in them. When people don't pay me, I lose interest in them.
There are only three connected universes — that's it. It's not like we're competing necessarily against Hellboy or The Walking Dead. Valiant is defined enough that I think we build on previous work from a character-wise perspective. We're all standing on the shoulders of giants. The advantage we have is that they've already built a lot of the visual vocabulary that we understand superheroes to be. We don't need to talk about that anymore. If somebody's sitting there in a spandex thing with ray beams coming out, we don't need to talk. We know what this is. People want more. They want something deeper. They want that pathos that [a character like] Thanos represented. I think that is very much what Valiant leans into.
So that's when I came up with the "branching off of the tree event" and since then, I think a lot of people have done those. So when I was with VALIANT, I said "All right, let's revolutionize this crossover thing again." And I thought, let's do it just in the regular books, so you don't have to go out and buy a special issue, it's just in the books. Maybe with one special issue at the end and an intro. So I'd been thinking about that for a long time, and contrived to weave the VALIANT storylines together. I still think it was pretty damn good for somebody who was flying by the seat of his pants.
