The comic book industry was in a weird place in the mid 90s. The speculator bubble had burst by 1995, with gimmick-led covers, vast levels of overprinting and style-over-substance content having sealed the fate of the industry. It took years to recover, and though it reached its lowest point  around 1996, video game publisher Acclaim’s purchase of Valiant happened right in the midst of the comic book crash.

Their relaunch of the Valiant line (with a weird Birthquake branding, with stories that didn’t cross over between series, even though the branding seems to suggest otherwise) with more contemporary-looking comics is even more baffling with hindsight. Though Valiant’s comics had started to look dated against the competition back then, content-wise they were leagues ahead. Acclaim’s shift towards the splashier, excessively ‘extreme’ art without much in the way of substance really damaged comics such as Bloodshot, which seemed to vastly drop off in quality very suddenly.

After issues #30 and #31 told an awful, muddled and appallingly illustrated two-part story, issue #32 ever so slightly corrects course.

It’s still not up there with the previous run on the series, but this tale of the sudden appearance of vampires in Bloodshot’s world is actually pretty intriguing, and it has an excellent cliffhanger too. In terms of its artwork, it’s in another league compared to the previous story, though it still feels a little too 90s for my taste.

It does set a precedent for the vampires in the most recent, alternative universe reboot of Bloodshot too, though the Valiant Beyond series has been notably (and deservedly) criticised and shunned for its blatant transphobia.

It’s good to see Bloodshot recovering after such a daft, self-inflicted stumble; the question is, did Acclaim maintain a bit more quality after this issue too?

Seeing as the series continued until issue #51, perhaps they did. I shall certainly be checking out the rest of the run to find out for myself.

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