Rafer Roberts

With all apologies to our readers in the Sunshine State --- and let's be real here, you know this better than the rest of us --- every headline that comes out of Florida paints a picture of a sunny, tourist-friendly peninsula that also seems to exist in a combination of Mad Max times and The Purge. So really, it was only a matter of time before those terrifying yet intriguing headlines made their way into comics. Now, fresh off their adventures in "Welcome To Clowntown," Valiant's mismatched Archer and Armstrong are coming face to face with... well, pretty much everything, from bath salts on down, as they take a trip to Florida. Check out a preview below!

In an age of the direct market and solicitation copy available three months ahead of time, it's hard to truly pull a swerve on comic readers like publishers used to, but Valiant Entertainment may have pulled it off. While fans have been waiting for Rafer Roberts and Darick Robertson's new team title Harbinger Renegades, due next month, today Valiant announced the series' true title as Harbinger Renegade, and revealed that it introduces a dangerous new villain to the Valiant Universe ahead of 2018's major crossover event.

Some people say that politics and politicians have no place in comics, but that's just not true. Captain America Comics #1 saw the hero punching out Adolf Hitler on the front cover; FDR was in an issue of Detective Comics two full issues before Batman debuted; and this November, Valiant's premiere female superhero teams up with presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in Faith #5.

I've written before --- pretty recently, in fact --- about how one of Valiant's greatest strengths as a company is how well it can build its titles around high concept stories that make it easy for new readers to jump on. So with that in mind, when writer Rafer Roberts describes his upcoming Harbinger: Renegades book with artist Darick Robertson as, "Jack Kirby's Trainspotting," you know they're onto something. When Harbinger: Renegades returns in November, Roberts and Robertson are reuniting the team that was shattered after their last adventure to take on the future of the Valiant Universe --- and you can check out a preview right here!

Life in the Valiant universe is tough. I mean, not only do you have alien invaders and the unkillable soldiers of Project Rising Spirit to worry about, and not only are your chances pretty slim of actually getting to hang out with Ninjak, but they're also going through a sudden surge of super-powered "psiots" that are putting pretty much everyone on edge --- especially after a group of renegades blew the lid off the Harbinger project a while back. Clearly, the only option for super-powered youngsters is safety in numbers, and that's exactly what's happening in Harbinger Renegades. In November, Rafer Roberts of A&A: The Adventures of Archer & Armstrong, and Darick Robertson of The Boys are teaming up to bring you a new team that's set to take on the streets of the Valiant universe --- and you can catch a first look at the new series below!

If you're a fan of Valiant's Faith --- and you should be, she's great --- then you're in for a pretty good time next Wednesday. Not only does July 20 see the release of the all-new Faith ongoing series from Jody Houser, Pere Perez, Marguerite Sauvage and Colleen Doran, which picks up where the fantastic "Hollywood and Vine" miniseries left off and introduces an all-new supervillain, but we're also going to see her in a pretty significant guest appearance. In A&A: The Adventures of Archer & Armstrong #5, by Rafer Roberts, Mike Norton, and Allen Passalaqua, Faith and Archer are finally going on their first date, and if you thought seeing Archer trying to use emojis was cute, wait'll you see the conversation they have over dinner. Of course, given their night jobs --- and the fact that there's a shady dude watching them over mozzarella sticks --- I'm going to guess that the night might not go as smoothly as they'd like. Check out a preview!

The Valiant Universe of 1,985 years in the future is an ever-more fascinating place. That's clearer than ever in 4001 A.D.: Shadowman #1, written by Jody Houser and Rafer Roberts, with art by Robert Gill and colors by Michael Spicer. It seems that there's a city on this future Earth occupied by the dead, a last outpost left behind from a war between the dead and the living. The city of the dead has been at peace with its human neighbors for centuries, but that piece is falling apart.

Here's the thing about unlettered preview pages: They are, by their nature, incomplete, so you're only really getting half of the story. Still, since comics are first and foremost a visual medium, you can still sort of follow along with sequential art. Unless, of course, you're reading a book like A&A: The Adventures of Archer & Armstrong. If that's the case, well, your guess is as good as mine. Don't get me wrong, it's not that the storytelling is bad. Far from it, in fact --- the art by Mike Norton is great. It's just that this book gets so weird, so fast that one second you're reading about jogging in the park, and the next you're seeing a monkey in a top hat, a frog with a crown made of fire, and a bunch of circus strongmen who may or may not be failed clones of Armstrong. That's just how it goes in Clowntown.

Ever since their return in 2012, Archer and Armstrong have had a series of adventures that I think it's fair to describe as "increasingly weird." They've fought a cult made up of the super-rich, they've fought a different cult that worships the number zero, they've followed a treasure map that was tattooed on a hobo's rear end, and --- most recently --- they've been journeying to the bottom of Armstrong's magic bottomless bag, which was otherwise full of a thousand years' worth of pocket litter. With all that, I have to imagine that it's pretty weird to come up with new situations that are somehow even weirder. But that is a challenge that Rafer Roberts and Mike Norton have decided to tackle head on in the next arc of A&A. In "Welcome To Clowntown," Valiant's second-favorite mismatched pair find themselves trapped in a carnival staffed entirely with clones of Armstrong.

If you carry around a bag in your day-to-day life --- or heck, even a wallet --- then you already know how cluttered those things can get. You just dump things in there, and when it's time to clear it all out, you wind up buried under a torrent of movie tickets, dead pens and receipts. If, however, your bag was a magically expansive satchel that you'd been carrying around for about five thousand years, you'd probably have a whole lot more to deal with. For Archer & Armstrong, that is definitely the case --- and instead of half-punched loyalty cards for the local coffee shop, they're dealing with garbage monsters, giant robots, and fish men as they're dropped into the depths of Armstrong's bottomless bag. It's all happening in Rafer Roberts and David Lafuente's A&A #2, and you can read a preview below!