Press Release
At Special Edition NYC, Madefire, a digital storytelling and technology company that provides a platform to artists, writers and publishers to create a new reading experience called Motion Books and Valiant Entertainment, today announced a new partnership to release Valiant’s award-winning library of titles – including Unity, Rai, X-O Manowar, and more – through Madefire’s Motion Books Marketplace within the 5-star rated Madefire digital comics app and through the exclusive Motion Books network within the deviantART website.
Delivering a truly revolutionary reading experience powered by Madefire’s Motion Book Tool, the partnership begins today with the release of Valiant’s chart-topping series Unity by New York Times best-selling author Matt Kindt (Rai, Mind MGMT) and superstar artist Doug Braithwaite (Armor Hunters, Justice).
Featuring the debut appearance of the first-ever all–star super team in Valiant’s two-decades long history, Unity features X-O Manowar, Ninjak, Eternal Warrior, and Livewire as they unite to pull the world back from the brink of a global cataclysm engineered by billionaire philanthropist and secret superhuman Toyo Harada.
“Since the launch of X-O Manowar #1, Valiant has always put storytelling first, and the opportunity to apply Madefire’s immersive and captivating Motion Books technology to our most high-profile titles has been electrifying. Unity is the perfect book to launch this new partnership and, as you can now see, Madefire’s work is one hundred percent additive to the already brilliant story that Matt Kindt and Doug Braithwaite unleashed on the world last year. This is Valiant as it has never been seen before,” said Valiant CEO and Chief Creative Officer Dinesh Shamdasani.
“Doug Braithwaite is one of the finest, most respected artists in the business,” said Liam Sharp, CCO and Co-Founder of Madefire. “It’s great to have him returning to the Madefire experience with Unity – a studio favorite! Doug’s work has always been grounded but dynamic, and with a great script by Matt Kindt it’s perfect as a Motion Book!”
Designed for reading on a screen, Madefire has built an end-to-end publishing platform called Motion Books that immerse the reader in an interactive experience with sound, motion, and depth. Their web-reading partner is social network and creative giant deviantART, the largest creative community in the world and host to the exclusive Motion Book library on the web. Madefire Motion Books is a free comic app that delivers the most innovative reading experience for iOS devices as it pioneers the next chapter in storytelling; it has been 5-star rated since launch, and was named the Apple iTunes App Store’s “Best of 2012”.
The digital space is slowly maturing but settling in as a major medium for the industry as readers shift toward reading on screens such as tablets and mobile. Madefire continues to take a digital-first approach to storytelling, and makes its content immediately available to users on their device with in-app purchasing.
About Madefire
Founded in 2011 by Ben Wolstenholme, Liam Sharp and Eugene Walden, Madefire is a media and technology company. Madefire has built the Motion Books publishing platform that provides artists, writers and publishers tools for creating a new reading format called Motion Books. Madefire is backed by Toni Schneider at True Ventures, The recent CEO of Automattic, makers of WordPress, as well as Bill Woodward (Anthem Ventures, former Chairman of Macromedia). The Advisory Board also includes industry leaders Mike McCue, CEO and Founder of Flipboard, angel investor Sina Tamaddon, former Senior Vice President of Applications for Apple Inc, Dave Gibbons, co-creator of Watchmen, the bestselling graphic novel of all time, and Bill Sienkiewicz, widely recognized as one of the greatest innovators of sequential art. For more information go to madefire.com or the Madefire Facebookand Twitter pages.
About Valiant Entertainment
Valiant is a leading character-based entertainment company with a library of over 1,750 characters, including X-O Manowar, Bloodshot, Shadowman, Eternal Warrior, and many more. Established in 1989, Valiant has sold over 80 million comic books, and today its characters continue to be forged in publishing, licensing, film, video games, and beyond. Since its summer 2012 relaunch, Valiant has returned to the fore as one of the most highly regarded publishers in comics, winning a 2012 Diamond Gem Award for Comic Book Publisher of the Year. Outside of the United States and Canada, Valiant titles are published in a number of languages and territories internationally, including Brazil, Mexico, France, Italy, Spain, China, and others.
