Having recently read the first issue of the Valiant Beyond reboot (All-New Harbinger #1), this lone 1994 issue of Harbinger caught my eye on a brief trip to Vanguard Comics in Gosport. That strikingly colourful, old school cover sold itself, and I couldn’t resist immediately buying it.

In this issue, the Harbinger Foundation has a visitor, and it transpires that they’ve been up to no good with their experimentation. Meanwhile, tension, jealousy and deception causes dangerous rifts amongst the Harbingers, leading to a violent, super powered confrontation.

This being my first read of the classic Harbinger comic, I was struck by the close similarity to the X-Men comics of the 80s and 90s. Powerful men in charge of super-powered teens, and often cloudy morality at play. Not only that, but the more soap opera style, dramatic elements with interpersonal relationships seemed to also be quite a close facsimile of the types of scenes you’d find in an X-Men comic from the period too.

I was admittedly throwing myself in at the deep end with this issue, and as such I did struggle to figure out who was who, and who’d done what to piss off certain characters. As confusing as it was, it was a very nostalgic read, with great, 90s art and colouring which feels just a step removed from the splashy, shallow posing of the era.

It’s entertaining enough, and with enough intriguing plot threads, that I would actually like to delve into more of the series; as much as it feels like a bit of an X-Men mockbuster, it does feel more substantial and less reliant on overly showy artwork than Marvel’s merry mutants were in 1994.

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