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This summer, Valiant is flashing forward nearly two-thousand years into the future and checking in on what’s going on with their most popular characters in the year 4001 AD with a series of special one shots. Valiant has released a preview of 4001 AD: Bloodshot #1 by Jeff Lemire, Doug Braithwaite and Brian Reber!

If you're like me, then you've probably looked at the eponymous suit of armor in the pages of Valiant's X-O Manowar and thought, "Yeah, okay, it's an indestructible suit of space armor that has wrist-rockets and a lightning sword, but wouldn't it be better if it was a hundred feet tall?" If that's the case, well, I have good news, bad news, and worse news. The good news is that we're finally going to see what that looks like when Valiant's 4001 AD Summer crossover explodes into an X-O Manowar one-shot next week! The bad news is that, as the title indicates, it's not actually going to happen until the 41st century. The worse news is that it happens in a version of the future that's generally described with words like "ruination" and "despair," where people probably aren't doing well enough to appreciate how rad it is to have a giant robot. But we can, if we would only check out a preview below!

Valiant Comics has been on a roll with itsevent comics since returning to publishing several years ago, with hits like Harbinger Wars, Armor Hunters, and Book of Death, which manage to stay controlled and contained while bringing all of your favorite Valiant characters together for the summer. This year, Valiant goes back to the future, all the way to the year 4001 A.D., to see what the future holds for the heroes of the Valiant Universe. One character with very specific ties to 4001 A.D. is Rai, who serves as the spirit guardian of New Japan, a mechanical metropolis that orbits the Earth. In a brand new story arc beginning in Rai #13, Matt Kindt and Cafu promise to reveal the never-before-told story of how New Japan rose to power, and the creation of the first Rai, and we’ve got preview pages from the issue to show off.

Futuristic Japanese hero Rai is at the center of Valiant Comics' big 2016 crossover, 4001 A.D. The story launches with a Free Comic Book Day special, and continues into a four-issue event series by Ninjak writer Matt Kindt and Rai artist Clayton Crain. The story is set to involve other Valiant heroes as well, but whether time travel is involved or it's just that a bunch of them are immortal is unclear at this time.