Two of Valiant's most popular heroes, Shadowman and Ninjak, are among the characters with the most experience navigating the supernatural realm known as the Deadside. In the 2017 story Rapture, they team up to confront an ancient evil from destroying the otherworldly plane.
Their opponent is a Babylonian sorcerer known as Babel who had been imprisoned for millennia after he built the infamous Tower of Babel. Now that he has escaped captivity, Babel is trying to reconstruct his Tower. While confronting him, Ninjak and Shadowman discover the secret existence of a realm beyond the Deadside: the Liveside.
Rapture was written by Matt Kindt with art by Cafu and Andrew Dalhous and some truly innovative lettering done by Dave Sharpe. In the story, Babel is rebuilding his magic Tower to access the Liveside, a heavenly afterlife of divine light that contrasts the Deadside's shadowy occult power. However, Babel does not merely hope to contact the Liveside, but to challenge it, threatening the fate of all the realms of the living and the dead.
One of the most important people in the Valiant Universe is the Geomancer, Tama, who is the protector of the Earth and possesses a powerful relic, the Book of the Geomancer, which allows her to predict Babel's return. To stop him, she recruits the help of Ninjak, a mercenary spy and martial arts master with an impressive high-tech arsenal and ties to MI-6. While Ninjak claims to hate magic, he has received extensive training in the mystical arts and is quite experienced operating within the Deadside. Together, they go to MI-6 and recruit two others, Punk Mambo and Shadowman, both of whom have abilities rooted in Voodoo.
The more important of these magic users is Shadowman, who gets his powers from being bonded to a loa. For generations, his family have guarded the living against the dead and other entities that reside in the Deadside. However, Shadowman was defeated by an old enemy and turned into an entity known as the Magpie, whereupon he wandered the Deadside, hunting down powerful magic items and killing their wielders. Tormented with guilt, he is loath to return to the otherworldly plane. However, Tama tells him that the Book of the Geomancer explicitly states they can only defeat Babel if Shadowman accompanies them. He agrees.
It makes sense that Shadowman would be central to this story. Prior to Rapture, the Liveside had only ever appeared twice, and one such instance was in the 2002 video game Shadow Man: 2end Coming. However, it had been absent since Valiant Entertainment rebooted the universe in 2012. Prior to this, the Deadside was depicted as a mixture of hellish and purgatorial realms from different cultures' belief systems combined with more generic fantasy elements. There was no heavenly equivalent in the Valiant cosmology, which made for a very bleak reality.
At the climax of Rapture, Babel has tricked Shadowman into helping him achieve his goals. Realizing what he has done, Shadowman follows the sorcerer to the Liveside and drags him back to the Deadside. He defeats several loa serving Babel and then manages to stop the ancient wizard with Tama and Ninjak's help. The story ends with Ninjak returning to the world of the living while Shadowman remains to contemplate his future. A flashback reveals Shadowman had time to meet his father in the Liveside, allowing him to acknowledge the wrongs he committed as Magpie and begin his journey toward atonement. Appropriately enough, both Ninjak and Shadowman are returning in their own series coming out later this year, giving fans a potential chance to see the heroes go back to these supernatural planes.