The Life and Death of Toyo Harada (2019) DMG/ VEI

The Life and Death of Toyo Harada is one of the first major “event” comics to be announced in the DMG era, after this summer’s Harbinger Wars 2, but the former won’t be a formal sequel to the latter. Indeed, both Simons and Dysart emphasize that Life and Death is intended to be accessible to folks who’ve never picked up a Valiant comic in their lives. “To the uninitiated reader, it’ll come off as sort of a maximalist epic, complete with global politics and huge doses of character-driven pulp sci-fi,” says Dysart. The story picks up after the events of the Dysart-penned Harbinger and Imperium series, both of which prominently featured Harada. He’s a near-immortal “psiot” — a human born with monumental abilities — who was once a secretive billionaire and philanthropist. He ran a program to find and train young psiots, but his undemocratic, megalomaniacal mind-set has led to repeated attacks against him from the heroes of the Valiant universe. In recent years, he went from being a behind-the-scenes kingmaker to a major global figure, attempting to correct economic injustice by empowering the developing world against the global superpowers. But don’t worry too much about all that. “You only need to know two things,” says Dysart. “One: There is a ring of alien technology that now orbits the earth in the Valiant Universe. These are the remnants of an invading alien fleet that was destroyed a few years ago in our continuity. And two: Toyo Harada’s defiance against the G8 economies has galvanized an approaching global war that is dividing the world, not by ideological or geographical lines, but along economic sustainability lines.”