Defiant Comics

Defiant Comics was a comic book publishing imprint of Enlightened Entertainment Partners, LP. Defiant was established in 1993 by former Marvel Comics and Valiant Comics editor-in-chief Jim Shooter.

Publication history

Defiant was founded in the wake of Jim Shooter's departure from Valiant. After attempting, unsuccessfully, to retain his partial ownership of Voyager Communications (Valiant's parent company) Shooter founded a new company that included some Valiant artists and writers on its staff. He formed a business venture with The River Group to help finance Defiant.

In early 1993, Defiant announced that its first title, Plasm, would be released as a series of trading cards that could be put together in an album to form "issue #0". Upon hearing the news, Marvel Comics threatened a lawsuit against Defiant, claiming the new title violated a Marvel UK trademark for their book/character Plasmer. Though Defiant changed the title to Warriors of Plasm, Marvel continued its lawsuit. While the court eventually ruled in favor of Defiant, the legal process depleted the company's capital, having cost over $300,000 in legal fees. Defiant ceased publication in Summer 1995.

Comic book

A comic book or comicbook, also called comic magazine or simply comic, is a publication that consists of comic art in the form of sequential juxtaposed panels that represent individual scenes. Panels are often accompanied by brief descriptive prose and written narrative, usually dialog contained in word balloons emblematic of the comics art form. Although comics has some origins in 18th century Japan and 1830s Europe, comic books were first popularized in the United States during the 1930s. The first modern comic book, Famous Funnies, was released in the United States in 1933 and was a reprinting of earlier newspaper humor comic strips, which had established many of the story-telling devices used in comics. The term comic book derives from American comic books once being a compilation of comic strips of a humorous tone; however, this practice was replaced by featuring stories of all genres, usually not humorous in tone.

Structure

Comic books are reliant on their organization and appearance. Authors largely focus on the frame of the page, size, orientation, and panel positions. These characteristic aspects of comic books are necessary in conveying the content and messages of the author. The key elements of comic books include panels, balloons (speech bubbles), text (lines), and characters. Balloons are usually convex spatial containers of information that are related to a character using a tail element. The tail has an origin, path, tip, and pointed direction.

Defiant

Defiant may refer to:

In the Star Trek universe

Transportation

Other uses

Jim Shooter

James Shooter (born September 27, 1951) is an American writer, occasional fill-in artist, editor, and publisher for various comic books. He started professionally in the medium at the age of 14, and he is most notable for his successful and controversial run as Marvel Comics' ninth editor-in-chief, and his work as editor in chief of Valiant Comics.

Early life

Jim Shooter was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to parents Ken and Eleanor "Ellie" Shooter, who are of Polish descent. Shooter read comics as a child, though he stopped when he was about eight years old. His interest in the medium was rekindled in 1963, at the age of twelve, through the comics in the children's ward of the hospital where he convalesced after undergoing minor surgery. He found the DC Comics stories to be similar to the DC stories he had previously read, but was impressed with the style of the Marvel Comics, which had only begun publication two years earlier. Thinking that if he learned to write the types of stories that Marvel published, he would be an asset to DC Comics – whose books, Shooter felt, "needed the help" – Shooter spent about a year reading and studying comics from both companies.

DC Universe

The DC Universe (DCU) is the fictional shared universe where the stories in most American comic book titles published by DC Comics take place. DC superheroes such as Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman are from this universe, and it also contains well known supervillains such as Lex Luthor, the Joker, and Darkseid. It should be noted that in context, "DC Universe" usually refers to the main DC continuity.

The term "DC Multiverse" refers to the collection of all continuities within DC Comics publications. Within the Multiverse, the main DC Universe has gone by many names, but in recent years has been referred to by "Prime Earth" or "Earth 0".

History

Golden Age

The concept of a shared universe was originally pioneered by DC Comics (originally known as National Periodical Publications) and in particular by writer Gardner Fox. The fact that DC Comics characters coexisted in the same world was first established in All Star Comics #3 (1940) where several superheroes (who starred in separate stories in the series up to that point) met each other in a group dubbed the Justice Society of America, with a request to reintroduce the Justice Society as the Justice League of America, which was founded with Major League Baseball's National League and American League as inspiration for the name. The comic book that introduced the Justice League was titled The Brave and the Bold However, the majority of National/DC's publications continued to be written with little regard of maintaining continuity with each other for the first few decades.