By Todd Allen

Archer & Armstrong will be the latest Valiant book getting the revival treatment.  The original A&A was a Barry Windsor-Smith book.  It was also a book with a sense of humor about itself.  An immortal of slovenly bent and an uptight martial artist.  Yes, this was the comics version of a buddy movie.

The new version is by Marvel veterans Fred Van Lente and Clayton Henry.  If you’re saying to yourself, “that team sounds vaguely familiar,” there’s a reason.   Van Lente and Henry (along with co-writer Greg Pak) had a run on The Incredible Hercules.  And, truth be told, there are some tonal similarities between that Hercules run and Archer & Armstrong‘s original run.

Press release and the preview material follows, including a Neal Adams cover.

VALIANT Presents ARCHER & ARMSTRONG #1: LETTERED PREVIEW
Valiant is proud to present an advance preview of Archer & Armstrong #1, from the New York Times best-selling creative team of Fred Van Lente (Amazing Spider-Man) and Clayton Henry (Incredible Hercules)! It’s history in the breaking on August 8th when the Valiant Universe’s two most formidable fighters set out on a conspiracy-smashing quest for the truth!
After years of meditation and training, 18-year-old Obadiah Archer has been dispatched to New York City to carry out the sacred mission of his family’s sect – kill the booze-addled immortal known only as Armstrong and convene a new world order! But as this underage assassin stalks his prey, he’ll soon find that both hunter and hunted are just pawns in a global conspiracy stretching back five millennia – and that Archer & Armstrong will have to work together if the future is to stand any chance of surviving the past’s greatest threat!
Who are the puppet masters pulling the strings of history? How is a centuries-old civilization tied to the very fate of the Valiant Universe? Can we get fries with that? Find out the answers to these questions and more when Archer & Armstrong #1storms into stores everywhere on August 8th with four frenetic covers by superstar artists Mico Suayan, Clayton Henry, David Aja and Neal Adams!

1 COMMENT

  2. If Valiant can successfully begin world building again and do it successfully, I think this would a huge breath of fresh air for the industry aside from the over-rated New 52 hype and Avengers hoopla currently in effect.

  4. Was the Barry Windso Smith run of this title good? I’ve never read the old Valiant books, saw a bunch of his at Heroes Con this weekend, but ended up not picking them up…