Eternal Warrior #4

Valiant Comics - Nov. 1992

Key Issue Notes
First cameo appearance of Bloodshot
First appearance of Immortal Enemy / Juan Caldone
First appearance of Alex Caldone

Jared Leto has been in the news again lately, and not because he will be playing the Clown Prince of Crime in the Suicide Squad sequel. It appears that Sony has approached him to play the title role in the upcoming Bloodshot movie that they have planned. It would seem that Valiant is copying Marvel and DC, and creating their own cinematic universe.

I didn't really care for the way Leto played the Joker, but I don't know if I can really completely blame him for it though. He does have to take direction from the director after all. I really didn't care for the Suicide Squad movie at all, but that won't keep me from having high hopes in Leto playing Bloodshot.

I have to be honest with you, I don't really know a whole lot about the Valiant universe, so this write up is going to mostly be about this issue only. I do have some Valiant comics in my collection, but most of them were filler books in lots I got on eBay and never read them.

Bloodshot

There really isn't much to say about the appearance of Bloodshot in this issue. He is only fully shown in the last panel, so we don't really learn anything about him, only that he has it out for our hero. It wouldn't be until his next appearance in Rai #0 that we learn more about Bloodshot's past.

Up next is the first appearance of the Immortal Enemy. He is the arch nemesis of the Eternal Warrior. EW's main objective is to hunt down and kill the body that the Immortal Enemy is occupying. When he is finally destroyed, he moves his soul to another person. At least that's how I understand it after reading this issue. In this issue, Juan Caldone is the current manifestation of the Immortal Enemy.

Juan Caldone /
Immortal Enemy

The last character on the key issue list is Alex Caldone. As you can probably assume, he is related to Juan Caldone. In fact, Alex is his son. There isn't a lot to say about him except that he isn't quite the hard ass, evil POS that his father is.

I'm not sure how likely it is that we will see these last two characters in a future Valiant film. At the end of this story, we see the plane that was carrying all three of the characters listed here, crash into the ocean. I know that the Eternal Warrior survives, but I have no idea about the other two. Like I said, I know very little about the Valiant universe.

Variants
To the best of my knowledge, there are no variants for this issue. I know that other companies were publishing both direct and newsstand copies of their comics, but I believe that Valiant was only distributing through the direct market at this time. If anyone knows of any variants for this issue, please click the "contact" tab above and send me a message or share in the comments below.

Census
There were more copies listed in the CGC census than I thought there would be for this issue. I was expecting only a few hundred, but there are 1,205 copies listed. Most of the copies listed are of course very high grade. In fact most of them a are 9.8 NM/M (781 copies). Add that to the 292 copies graded a 9.6 NM+, and you have almost all of the copies listed in the census.

Now these are just CGC's numbers. Since CBCS and PGX don't have a census of their own, there's no way of telling how many have been graded by them. However, if you do a quick eBay search for this comic, you will see a ton of high grade copies that haven't been graded yet. I have no clue what the print run of this issue was, but since it was printed in the 90's, I think it's fair to say that it was probably pretty high.

Values

Values for Eternal Warrior #4
On GoCollect

This comic used to be one that you could get in high grade for practically nothing. You could snag a 9.8 NM/M copy for around the $45-$60 range only two years ago.

Then a trailer for Ninjak vs. the Valiant Universe came out. If you haven't seen it, I'll post it for you to watch. It looks like it could've be an ok movie, but since this trailer came out, I've heard squat about it actually being released, but I'm getting ahead of myself here.

Anyway, Bloodshot makes an appearance in this trailer, and that made values for this comic jump up to well over $200 overnight. When I say overnight, I actually mean it. There was one sale for a CGC 9.8 that sold on March 10th, 2015 for only $90, then another one, on that same exact day, for $225. In fact, there was one copy that sold for $279.99 shortly after that.

Once the hype from the trailer wore down, so did the values for this book. They ended up dropping down to the $100 mark with a few going for less that that. However, now that Bloodshot is back in the news, values have started to creep back up to the $125 to $150 range. How much higher this comic goes will depend on many things, but the more we are hearing about Bloodshot making it to the big screen, the more in demand this comic may become, and Jared Leto playing the lead role would definitely put this movie in the spotlight.



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