A guide to reading Defiant Comics

I wanted to bump this post because I just completed my Defiant collection of the core books so I want to start a Defiant reading project. Any suggestions whether I should try to read these in the order mentioned in this thread or some other way? I've read some of the books as I've received them, but I think I'm going to just re-start from the beginning and go all the way to the end.

I'm also looking forward to reading some of the unpublished scripts out there once I get to the end of the stuff that was actually published. I'm looking forward to reading the entire Defiant Universe, so I can get a better idea of what it's all about.

guess I ran into my first roadblock, I don't have Dark Dominion #0, which I'm assuming was only available as the card set. Any opinions on whether the #0 issue is a must read? I'm sure I can get a set of the cards cheaply but I was hoping to get a bunch of Defiants read soon and didn't want to wait for a set to come in via mail order.

I finished my reading of all the Defiant books this weekend. I generally found the books to be pretty darn good, there were a lot of great ideas floating about with Defiant and the biggest shame is they never really got to develop the concepts any further than they did.

I also went back and read some old posts here on the Defiants and just about everything I thought about these books were already expressed by others here. The first thing I'll say is that I did feel at times that there were too many new concepts and characters added at too rapid of a pace for one to really get attached to any of them. Part of the problem I think was the headlong rush to get to the first company wide crossover in Schism. That's a big difference to me between Valiant and Defiant. With Valiant, you had the opportunity to get to know the characters in their own stories before the huge crossover took over their books with Unity. Also, even when the huge crossover was going on, each group of characters still maintained their own separate stories even while crossing over into the main Unity storyline.

I didn't feel that every Defiant book really got the chance to find it's own voice. Dark Dominion did a pretty good job. I would have liked to seen more battles between Michael and Chasm, but the later stories were very good even when not involved with Chasm or Mule.

Dogs of War was a very enjoyable series to me, though I'm pretty happy that the reported DOW/Good Guys crossover from the other thread didn't happen. Even though Shooter was a heartless SOB, I think he tried to do the right thing, even when doing what he thought was right might have crossed the line into doing something wrong. Maybe it says something about what kind of person I am to feel that Shooter was a hero, but that's the way I felt about him.

I liked Warriors of Plasm, even though the concept of the five as a team seemed to fall by the wayside pretty quickly. Sueraceen was a favorite character of mine, I guess it's just her twisted ways "tweaked" me just a bit!
WOP #13 was quite a jolt and didn't make any sense to me until I came back here and read the Schism notes. After reading those, it seems like WOP #13 had basically the same content as what would have been Schism #4. Makes you wonder why they released this book as it seemed pretty awkward to read the end of a crossover that hadn't happened as of yet.

Good Guys was inconsistent to me, it always had the feel of "let's reintroduce the characters to the new readers" every few issues. Like I read on this board, that must have been the result of rapidly changing creative teams.

Neither Charlemagne and War Dancer did a lot for me as individual titles, even though both have really good art. They both seemed to be just leading to the ultimate battle between the two of them with some roadblocks thrown in the way to stretch out the stories until it was time for the big battle. Charlemagne got off to a very promising start, but once it seemed like the character's only reason to exist was to battle the Dancer it kind of trivialized what happened in the early issues for me. Where would have these two titles gone if Defiant had survived?

I didn't understand the reason for having the Prudence & Caution title AT ALL other than just to have something to bring Chris Claremont in to write. I feel like I got NOTHING out of reading P&C 1 and 2 and they are easily my two least favorite Defiant books.

I'd of course like to thank Defiant1 for creating the site and inspiring me to go back and read these books. I can only imagine how frustrating it must have been to have read these books when they were new and felt the energy within them just to have it go away all of the sudden like that.