Valiant Entertainment's first-ever crossover is nigh -- "Harbinger Wars" #1, which showcases the intersection between Joshua Dysart's "Harbinger" and Duane Swierczynski's "Bloodshot," is set for release April 3 and promises to add a deluge of new characters with unique powers and characteristics for Harada, Peter Stanchek and Bloodshot to battle over during the impending Harbinger Wars as dozens of Psiots are liberated from Project Rising Spirit.
Valiant has provided Comic Book Resources with an exclusive forst look at artist Khari Evans' designs for the new Psiots introduced in "Harbinger Wars," and to get some insight on the characters, CBR went to event co-writer Joshua Dysart, who provided notes and background on the ten new characters to join the Valiant Universe during the event.
CRONUS
Real Name: Christian
Male
Age: 20
"We will protect ourselves."
Joshua Dysart: Christian is the oldest of the group. Smart, charismatic and idealist. He is capable of utilizing energy healing and psychic surgery to heal the wounded. But this power can be reversed allowing him to also cause immediate organic systems failure through violent energy filed manipulation.
THE TELIC
Real Name: Tara
Female
Age: 15
"I can see everything, all the connections that bind us in this moment. Careful I don't cut them."
Dysart: This one is like an Oliver Sacks kid turned super deadly. She sees visual patterns in everything. Allowing her to make very fast, and often accurate flash predictions of immediate events around her. She's capable of a deep, atomic statistical mapping of every action and reaction in the immediate local universe. These patterns are revealed to her like DMT hallucinations that she can never turn off. The universe flexes in repeated, pulsing patterns. Everything can be quantified into an immediate future probability. This also makes her deadly at hand-to-hand combat as she follows "The Flow" of patterns with alarming, virtually pre-cog, speed.
TRAVELER
Real Name: Wee Mad Mack
Male
Age: 15
Dysart: Wee Mad Mack can vibrate his own molecules at such a high frequency (and for short periods of time) that it allows him to quantum phase. Neither alive nor dead in that moment, he is able to traverse a plane of existence not yet identified by P.R.S. scientists realm for brief flashes at a time. This allows him to make short jumps in our own universe, like using secret passageways, or folding space. But the world that he must traverse is nightmarish and filled with unimaginable creatures. Mad Mack has been turned pretty twisted by his quick jaunts there. And if he grabs you and drags you in with him, the odds of you emerging out the other side as sane as when you went in are slim.
LITTLE CASTLE
Real Name: Isaiah
Male
Age: 13
Dysart: Isaiah doesn't talk. He keeps to himself. To this end he has erected around himself, since the very moment he became activated, a psiot shield similar to Peter's. Unlike Peter's shield, nothing penetrates Isaiah's. He also can't make it go away. This is his psychological response to the horrible PRS activation process. Isaiah follows the other kids around, seemingly frail, but actually virtually indestructible.
HIVE
Real Name: Pier
Male
Age: 17
"Your life falls into my mouth."
Dysart: Hive absorbs life forces. By opening his mouth he pulls the essence, the breath, from living organisms all around him. The problem with this is that he also absorbs the psychic imprints of his victims. Inside him is a storm of angry people. He can only barely keep a cap on them and he suffers, but occasionally also benefits, from the multiple personality disorder it breeds in him.
ASTRAL
Real Name: Jessica
Female
Age: 9
"My body is here. But not me."
Dysart: Lady Astral performs a kind of hyper-astral projection. Not only can she create an invisible "psiot package" which allows her consciousness to travel outside of her body, fly around and just generally observe things, but she can also fire her psyche at a person like a bullet, causing all kinds of violent destabilizing flash cognition and even brain-wide seizures.
ATOMUS
Real Name: Simon
Male
Age: 13
"Wave your flag when you approach me. I want to know whose side you're on."
Dysart: Simon is a cocky little $#%!. He's also the fastest, most agile and creative flier anybody has ever seen. What's more, he can make other things fly along with him. Imagine him coming at you with a flying car in his wake, ready to be driven home to its destination, your body.
SERENADE
Real Name: Nora
Female
Age: 10
"Someday, I'll make the whole world cry."
Dysart: Serenade is a cryptically dangerous creature. By singing, and then subsequently using her psiot powers to change the sonic tones into brain waves, she can project great blasts of emotion over large numbers of people. The real danger here is that she's a profoundly mentally disturbed 10 year-old girl with very little control over her own emotional landscape.
RAMSEY
Real Name: Ian
Male
Age: 12
"Don't you understand? I'm a shooting star."
Dysart: Ramsey is able to excite the molecular state of photons in light waves all around him. This allows for a vast range of light manipulations. For instance he can warp light to cloak himself and other objects, or pinpoint it into beams of various intensity, but primarily Ramsey can turn light into a weapon concentrating it into solid shards. Since manipulated light is incredibly agitated on a photon level his light paintings and manifestations carry with them extremely dangerous heat signatures. When he manipulates light waves it causes strange patterns of colors like the aurora borealis.
TITAN
Real Name: Baxter
Male
Age: 9
"In my imagination there's a little box. You don't want to know what I keep inside that box."
Dysart: The boy with the monster in his head. Baxter is quiet and shy, easy to smile. A lovely child actually. But somewhere inside the innocent child's imagination lurks a large destructive, imaginary beast hungry for violence. Baxter is capable of projecting his worse fears in the form of this horribly insane monster. Once out of the "box" that is Baxter's brain, it is a lethal force nearly impossible to bring down.
Check out the new Psiots in "Harbinger Wars" #1, on sale April 3.