With the X-O Manowar armour destroyed, Aric is lost and adrift, a millennium and a half from his home. Yet when Solar finally, belatedly responds to Aric’s distress call, he knows exactly what to do to help. With the replacement armour from Solar, Aric needs someone to sacrifice themself in order to activate it. But can he find someone before the seed dies? And is it right for someone to perish so that X-O Manowar can protect the Earth once more?

Since reading the Chromium-covered #0 issue of X-O Manowar, I’ve gone back and read all of the first 30 issues of the character’s first run from the 90s. Though it has a few ups and downs, and lead character Aric can be a bit of a dick at times (plus the casual homophobia and occasional misogyny doesn’t help), it’s actually a great run overall, and certainly feels like a particularly underrated and underappreciated series.

This issue in particular is a great case in point; after the last few issues saw Aric’s home attacked by the spider aliens who created the bio-armour, not to mention a direct attempt made on his life by a disgruntled ex-employee, we settle in for what seems like a calmer and more reflective epilogue before the next arc begins.

Yet we get quite a serious and downbeat story, with an incredibly shocking and graphic dose of body horror thrown into the mix. Though Valiant’s comics tend towards the bloody and violent, given that the medium was very much embracing R-rated action movie stylings back in the early 90s, the extended and very explicit sequence of a heroic character being very viscerally taken over truly stunned me, more than three decades after it was initially published.

After a shaky start, X-O Manowar has become a firm favourite of mine, and it’s so obviously much more than the Iron Man clone I have always expected it to be. Almost halfway through the run of the original series, I can’t wait to catch up and read it all, before moving on to more of the modern runs featuring the character.

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