Posted in: Comics, Valiant | Tagged: mk kim, Paul Levitz, the visitor, valiant

Paul Levitz and MJ Kim Reboot The Visitor at Valiant in December

Published Tue, 17 Sep 2019 12:59:24 -0500

In an EX-X-XCLUSIVE report confirming something Bleeding Cool reported first four months ago, sexy Dora the Explorer advocacy website The Hollywood Reporter has revealed that Paul Levitz and MJ Kim will reboot The Visitor at Valiant this December. Though The Visitor takes its title and some inspiration from the original Valiant comic, this is a brand new character with nothing else to do with that, as Levitz explains:

I don't mind adding on to other people's work. You know, certainly the Huntress character is clearly took on all the Batman mythology, and I did so much stuff on the Legion that was firmly based on many, many other writers work, but the Valiant Universe is new to me. I've read a little bit of it over the years, back to when Jim [Shooter] was creating it, but I've never been deeply immersed in it or played in it before, and this seemed like an interesting opportunity. There were a couple of things in the original Visitor series that I thought were… structurally interesting. Particularly, it seems very much of a place; the original stories were very very specifically Los Angeles, and I said, "that could be fun. Let me do that with New York."

For whatever set of reasons, I focused in on UN Week as a starting point, and said, "OK, what kind of havoc we have during UN Week? How would that logically tie to the life of a character with a complicated background? What can be going on?'" And I started to build out from there.

Levitz elaborated on the concept:

In and of itself, it's a very specific mystery story, hopefully with some emotional resonance for the characters as they're going on, hopefully, some interesting setups as we explore New York. MJ — whose work I did not know when I started on the project — is just doing such a fabulous job of immersing herself in all that. She's going to each of the locations, taking photographs, digging into it. We're meeting up Monday actually at a location, so if we can prowl round it together and build it. That sense of place is something not a lot of comics do today. And it's a good tool.

Check out some of MJ Kim's artwork below and look for The Visitor #1 in stores in December.