Defiant Comics was a short-lived comic book company founded in 1993 by Jim Shooter, a former editor-in-chief at Marvel Comics and Valiant Comics (as well as a co-founder of the latter), after he was ousted from Valiant; a lot of Defiant's creative staff were people who had followed Shooter from the company. Shooter himself also plotted or wrote some of the books.
Whatever potential the company might have had was cut short when it was hit by a lawsuit from Marvel's British imprint, Marvel UK, over the title of one of their first series, Plasm. At the time, Marvel UK had registered the name "Plasmer" as "intended to use", but hadn't done anything concrete with it yet. Because the names were similar enough that there was a risk that they would be confused with each other, Marvel threatened to sue. Defiant tried to change the title to Warriors of Plasm, but Marvel sued anyway, claiming the title infringed on the Plasmer trademark, and rushed out a Plasmer comic to support their legal case.
Defiant ultimately won the lawsuit, but the legal costs ate up much of the company's capital and held up a merchandising deal with Mattel until it fell apart. As a result, the company was shut down in 1995 just as it had started publishing issues related to its first big crossover, Schism. The plans for how the series was going to play out are available online
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Comics published by Defiant Comics:
- Charlemagne: A teenage boy runs away to Vietnam to find his brother, a soldier who has gone MIA during the war, but ends up in a coma as the result of a military strike, then wakes up in the present day with incredible strength. Written by Jim Shooter and D.G. Chichester, drawn by Adam Pollina, created by Shooter.
- Dark Dominion: A writer in New York City is able to access an alternate dimension similar to our own known as the Quantum Substratum. Written by Len Wein and Shooter; co-created by Shooter and Steve Ditko.
- The Good Guys: A group of teenage comic book fans gain superpowers after some supernatural incident and form a superhero team. Created by Jim Shooter, written by him and various other writers.
- War Dancer: An ancient Aztec warrior prince who can channel magical powers through rain dancing appears in the present day United States. Created and drawn by Alan Weiss, co-written by him and Jim Shooter.
- Warriors of Plasm: The Supreme Acquisitor of an alien race of brutal, world-consuming conquerors launches a rebellion against his masters, abducting several humans and giving them superpowers in an attempt to form an army. However, only a few of them survive and form a dysfunctional team of superheroes, with some staying on Plasm to help and some going back to Earth. Initially written by Shooter and plotted by him and artist David Lapham, with Len Wein later taking over scripting.
- Dogs of War: A spinoff from Warriors about Shooter, an ex-military man from the original Warriors team who gained powers of invisibility when he was abducted.
- Prudence & Caution: Another spinoff featuring a pair of humans given superpowers when they were abducted: Caution, another member of the original team, and Prudence, who was found later on Plasm during the events of Warriors. Written by Chris Claremont.
- Splatterball: A one-shot issue about the titular game, which is the most popular sport on Plasm.
- The Great Grimmax: A six-page one-shot published in an issue of Hero Illustrated written by Shooter about a famous Splatterball player who delivers a package to a bad neighborhood on Earth. The character was announced to have his own book in the works, so it may have been a promotional story.
- Glory: Intended to be a solo spinoff title about the titular Team Mom of the original Warriors team. All that was published of it before Defiant shut down was a #0 issue; totaling eight pages in length, it was published two pages at a time across four issues of Overstreet Comicbook Monthly.
Tropes
- Arc Welding: The text-only one-shot "The Origin of the Defiant Universe" tied together all of the Defiant titles, revealing that the Org of Plasm, a focal point of the Warriors of Plasm series, was created when War Dancer attempted the Dance of Two during the Black Plague, accidentally affecting the deep Dreamtime, cutting off a large region of it and mutating his dream planet into a biological being.
- Big Bad: Charles Mal, a.k.a. "Chasm", a Corrupt Corporate Executive with superpowers introduced as the main villain of Dark Dominion, was beginning to fill this role for the Defiant universe, especially when he started appearing in Warriors of Plasm.
- Creator's Oddball: In addition to their regular superhero comics, Defiant also created Whacked!, a one-shot parody comic about the Tonya Harding / Nancy Kerrigan scandal which was published with the logo of The River Group, Defiant's business partners.
- Crisis Crossover: Schism, which would have a 4-issue limited series and tie-in issues in the ongoing series showing how their characters experienced it. Because Defiant was shut down, the only issues related to the crossover that were released were issue #13 of Warriors of Plasm and #5 of Dogs of War, both of which became the last issues of those books to be published.
- Cut Short: As stated above, Defiant collapsed very suddenly and the ongoing titles ended without a proper ending as a result.
- Keep Circulating the Tapes: The company went under quickly, with only one trade paperback (of Warriors of Plasm) being made, and whoever owns the comics hasn't reprinted them or made them available in digital form, so currently the only way to read them legally is old back issues.
- The Merch: The River Group made some merchandise for Defiant when it was starting out, like special collectible card tins, baseball caps, shirts and posters, but most notably sets of trading cards for Dark Dominion and Warriors of Plasm that, when completely collected and laid out in order, formed #0 issues for those series. The one for Warriors was reprinted as a regular comic in its first and only trade paperback.
- Meta Origin: In Defiant's shared universe, the powers could all be somehow traced back to "Dreamtime" — humanity's collective ID that existed on another plane of reality. All super-powered humans either learned to enter and access the surface level of the Dreamtime, unknowingly tapped into the deep Dreamtime energies unleashed by Lorca's invasion and wished superpowers for themselves, or got powers from Dreamtime's native lifeforms.
- Organic Technology: The concept of the Org of Plasm was an entire civilization built around organic technology. The entire "org" (planet) and all its inhabitants were essentially a single collective life form. A big problem with that set-up is that individual people were generally seen as expendable the same way individual cells in a body would be. The conflict was over the notion that people should have rights as themselves.
- What Could Have Been:
- According to Jim Shooter, the Schism crossover was intended to end with the villains triumphant, with Mule, a recurring antagonist, gaining control of the Plasm, and Chasm, the Big Bad of Dark Dominion, taking over Earth, though not in any way the average human would register.
- An editorial included in issues says there were plans for a computer game based on Splatterball, a Blood Sport featured in Warriors of Plasm, and that the company was about to make an announcement about an unspecified Defiant universe movie, but the company was shut down shortly afterwards and nothing came of either of these.
- Also according to an editorial, Grimmax, a supporting character in Warriors of Plasm, was going to get his own book, The Great Grimmax, as was Glory, the de facto team leader of the original Warriors team.
- According to Jim Shooter
