In issues #8 and #9 of Valiant series Harbinger, the story was part of the company-wide Unity event, thus I'll be skipping them over for now, and get to them when I review Unity as a whole.
After the out-of-time Unity war, the Harbinger Renegades are back home, with Kris having since given birth to her baby, and lost it to the future. The team readjusts to their life, and continue searching for fellow Harbingers, soon finding Shatiqua, a young woman with super fast reflexes. All the while, unbeknownst to the Renegades, the mysterious H.A.R.D. Corps are watching their every move...
There's very little to say about this story. It's just plain dull! The characters aren't terribly written, but are boring, and the H.A.R.D. Corps are way too unexplained and underdeveloped. The story's pace is awkward, and scenes are handled very abruptly, especially the ending!
Another character problem is that no-one has any ill-effects from their arduous six months in Unity! NO PTSD, trauma, or anything of the like! They get over it instantly and go right back to looking for Harbingers.
New addition to the team Shatiqua is bland. No-one gets any development here. The only scene that comes close to a human moment is when Flamingo contemplates to Pete whether having a new member for the Renegades is a good idea, given what happened to the friend Torque...But this moment of doubt only lasts for two panels before never being mentioned again.
The art in these issues is ok, but there are problems, such as faces being frozen stiff in either a plump-collagen expression, or a wooden one. There's one terrible moment where a photo of a cityscape is used instead of art. What's worse is that this is the exact same shot, poorly meshing drawn flying car and everything, from Harbinger Issue #2! A couple of pages later, there's another city photo, and it's completely superfluous, interrupting the middle of a conversation for literally no reason. The worst thing about these moments is that at the end of Issue #10, there's a really good drawing of a cityscape, which makes the prior laziness all the clearer. Finally, there's an odd moment where a piece of dialogue is in a completely different font than the rest of the scene's lines.
The HARD Corps is one of my favourite comic series' of all time, so its certainly an unpleasant surprise that their very first appearance was in this totally lacklustre story...
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