SECRET ORIGINS OF SOLAR, MAN OF THE ATOM - PART 4 of 4
SOLAR'S BIG BURNOUT

Jim Shooter's line of VALIANT titles took comic book nation by storm -- but was Valiant a FRIEND or a FOE of the industry? Time would tell. Valiant was about to publish their first big company-wide crossover, UNITY.

Jim Shooter recalls, "We started publishing the superhero stuff and it wasn't an instant hit. We were selling OK numbers. I think Magnus started out selling 80,000-90,000 and then trickled down into 50,000 or so. Solar, with the Barry Windsor-Smith thing. Big name, right? Nothing. Sold like 40,000, I think. They weren't doing that well."

But that was before UNITY, which would rocket Valiant into the stratosphere. Solar was to play a key role in UNITY, which was essentially a retelling of Shooter's Marvel “Secret Wars” mini-series, but this time with VALIANT characters... such as Magnus, X-O Man-O-War, Rai, and our hero, SOLAR -- all pictured below, courtesy of "the Barry Windsor-Smith thing."

The UNITY crossover went on for two months, throughout Valiant's entire line. Huge inter-locking cover montages were drawn by WALTER SIMONSON. Here's Simonson's SOLAR #13 cover, minus logo and type:

CRASH AND BURN

At the height of the Valiant boom, an issue of "Turok" sold an astounding 1,750,000 copies -- numbers not seen since the Golden Age. Valiant, as a publisher, was as hot as Solar himself, but after the booming early 1990s, the entire comic book business suffered a near-fatal, industry-wide crash which many believe Valiant either contributed to, or actually caused outright.

By the mid/late 1990s, several new and once-promising comic publishers, including Valiant, had ceased operations entirely. Despite the company's successes, it was sold, for purely business reasons. Triumph, the group of investors who had funded Valiant, ordered Valiant's president/ publisher Steve Massarsky to sell the company to cash in on their investment.

“I'm going to tell you exactly what happened and why we had no control over the sale of the company,” former Valiant editor in chief Bob Layton (pictured right) explains. “Triumph, by the end of '93, had made a small fortune off of Valiant. We were netting around $30 million a year and they had more than satisfied their investors. If you understand how venture capital works, they are always short-term investors. Once Triumph had made sufficient profits, they ordered Massarsky to sell the company. They wanted out. They were in the venture capital business, not the publishing biz. They didn't give us a choice.”

In the company's last gasp, Solar returned from his "star-bonding" episode briefly, and to little effect, in the VERY limited series, "UNITY 2000." The series was scheduled to run six issues, but only lasted two. Here's the second (and final) issue's little-seen cover, by Jim Starlin and Joe Rubenstein: