Welcome to the future, earthlings. From this chronologically distant place, three score years plus three from the date of publication of the Valiant Vision Starter Kit, we are able to visit three dimensional virtual worlds in our own homes, albeit with the aid of slightly bulky headsets and hand controllers.

Of course, you could often do this too, as long as your video game arcades had the enormous virtual reality machines that were popular at the time. Print and film media were also good choices for viewing basic 3D content, even going as far back as the mid-20th century.

In your time, popular publisher Valiant Comics also launched their own 3D viewing system, known as Valiant Vision. The glasses could be purchased with a starter kit, and several comics illustrated and printed in Valiant Vision supported the use of the 3D glasses which were packaged with the Starter Kit.

The Starter Kit itself was comprised of the aforementioned glasses, a poster and what appears at first glance to be a comic, but is little more than an instruction manual and a few test pages for the Valiant Vision technique.

It works surprisingly well, though it’s far from flawless. The glasses sometimes separate different layers of the image to make them stand out too much from each other, giving less of an impression of a 3D object and more of a look of 2D images layered on top of one another.

The folds of the poster make a few parts of its impressive image a bit awkward to view, but on the whole the art looks amazing with the glasses on.

It’s a really cool gimmick, and incredibly of its time, but one of the best things about it these days is that the kit, as well as the comics which use the Valiant Vision presentation, aren’t at all expensive to get hold of.

One word of warning: the glasses do make text a bit blurry, despite the art looking fantastic, so they aren’t really suitable for extended use as you’ll end up giving yourself a headache. That said, one cool thing with the way Valiant Vision is implemented is that, unlike the more traditional red and green (or red/blue) 3D techniques, it doesn’t make the original image blurry at all without the glasses.

So you can read Valiant Vision comics without the glasses at any point and the experience won’t be hampered (beyond the slightly odd look of the colours which facilitate the process). As if you’d want to though…just check out how cool they look (ha!).

Still, this was an unusual and underrated gimmick which seems to have been largely forgotten, but I’m glad that I stumbled upon it thanks to my love of another 90s gimmick (hello Chromium covers and, specifically, Psi-Lords #1!).

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