Final cover will feature glass element.
Valiant Entertainment has come up with a new variant cover idea for its Valiant Beyond titles: Tempered glass.

Matthew Klein, Valiant’s new director of sales, announced the glass variants at the Diamond Retailers Lunch at Comic-Con in San Diego. The first glass cover will be for Bloodshot: Rising Spirit #1, drawn by Doug Braithwaite, in November, and the next one will be for Livewire #1, a December release. The covers will be 1 in 250.

The Valiant Beyond initiative (see “New Series for Bloodshot, Faith, Livewire, and More”) will kick off in September with Faith Dreamside #1, written by Jody Houser, with art by M.J. Kim and covers by Marguerite Sauvage. “Faith Dreamside is going to be a return to our popular character, Faith Herbert, and it is going to be a story that is going to take the character into a fantasy horror realm, explore a new part of our mythical universe, and it’s really going to test the character to her core,” said executive editor Joe Illidge. “Now Sony has tapped Maria Melnik, the American Gods writer, to write the screenplay for the Faith film. So we’re really ramping up and this character, in addition to being one of the shining lights of the Valiant Universe, is going to be one of the shining lights of the world, as her story becomes part of a much larger media landscape.”

Writer Vita Ayala was there to talk about Livewire, who debuted in the relaunched Valiant Universe in Harbinger #3 and is now getting her own series—which, it was announced at the lunch, is being promoted from a four-issue limited series to an ongoing series. Ayala said they are writing the series for longtime Livewire fans as well as readers who have no idea who the character is. After causing a major disaster, Livewire “realizes she has to be better because the people she has to protect, and whom she loves, expect better and they don’t know if they can trust her yet,” Ayala said. “It’s going to have lots of really cool, big action sequences but also lots of interesting, small, quieter moments.”

After Livewire, the next Valiant Beyond titles are Incursion, debuting in February 2019, and The Life and Death of Toyo Harada, which will launch in March (see “’The Life and Death of Toyo Harada’”)