Valiant Entertainment has been using their Harvey-nominated title, Bloodshot Reborn, as a staging ground for some exciting throwback covers.
Bloodshot Reborn normally has pretty dynamic covers to go along with Jeff Lemire's great writing and Mico Suayan and Lewis LaRosa's lush artwork. Here's the main cover from issue number 1:
It was with issue 14 that the throwback covers started, when Jeff Lemire painted his own send-up of comic's first "chromium" cover, Valiant's own Bloodshot #1, though Lemire is using the figment of imagination character Bloodsquirt:
For issue #15, they parodied the look of the late '80's Marvel comics, and specifically the title "The 'Nam." This was surely inspired by the Vietnam-era version of the nanite-infested killing machine. Also, this cover is done by Darick Robertson, co-creator of Spider Jerusalem and Transmetropolitan, one of my favorite comic creations ever.
For issue #16 they dove further back into the past, back to the '60s era Marvel:
Another variant for issue #16 had Valiant again parodying their own property---or joint property, as it is---with the Deathmate cover. The original on the left is the awesome Joe Quesada "Deathmate: Prologue" comic that introduced the crossover between Valiant and Image. I remember one reviewer describing the crossover's ultimate failure in the following terms: If you mix five pounds of ice cream with five pounds of dog shit, you won't get anything edible. In the modern version, Deathmate is the name of the black and silver lady character on the right-side cover. She's a killing machine: part T-1000, part Universal Soldier:
Issue #17 is a pretty direct parody of early '90s DC Comics' Suicide Squad:
The idea of using an older property as a design influence is nothing new for Valiant Entertainment, as we see here from their Summer 2015 event, the Book of Death, where each of the four issues from the miniseries had a classic Rai #0 variant, and the one I chose here is the Livewire copy, #2.
