I Am NOT the Beastmaster

All 7 And We'll Watch Them Fall

Seven Soldiers #1, by Grant Morrison and J.H. Williams III

Could Seven Soldiers #1 possibly live up to expectations?  Not just the expectations created by the long wait for the grand finale, but the burdens its own author has placed upon it--the task of wrapping up a thirty-part story with seven different protagonists and supporting casts?

Paul O'Brien doesn't seem to think so.  His comments on the final issue's pacing and narrative unity are sadly unarguable, but I don't think he gives the book or the project as a whole enough credit when he switches to its content:

But it's all form and very little substance.  Or rather, the substance is all in the individual characters, conceived as pitches for solo titles.  Sure, it's an incredible piece of planning, but what was it actually about?  What are the themes of this story?  What was the point?  And how was this issue supposed to make it?  You can't justify this story as a work of genius simply on the formal elements alone, but that doesn't seem to be stopping people from trying.

Paul is overlooking a number of themes that have cropped up throughout the project.  Obviously there's the industry critique of comics that conflate cynicism with artistic maturity, and Morrison's call for a renewed belief in heroism--which becomes so overt by the final issue that it hardly deserves the name of "theme" anymore.  "Lecture" might be more like it.  (Whatever happened to "It's so like, down-to-earth and non-preachy"?)

Even that manifesto relates to other themes whose scope mercifully extends beyond the confines of the comics industry.  The anxiety about genre maturity reflects a general preoccupation with physical and emotional maturity.  Most of the project's antagonists and failures, from Gloriana Tenebrae to Don Vicenzo all the way down to Lance Harrower, are deathly afraid of growing old or dying.  A few of the friendly supporting cast can't or won't grow up, like Ed (Baby Brain) Stargard or the gestalt child Leviathan.  But other villains like Solomano or Zor try to make the heroes more "mature" by casting them in grim and gritty character revamps, turning them into racists or child murderers.  Morrison confronts his heroes with two equally unpleasant options, the stasis of permanent childhood and the degradation of false, forced maturity.  The Seven Soldiers have to find ways to grow without giving in to nihilism, despair, and the death of a thousand cuts that all too often passes for our experience of adulthood.

And what is the recurring anxiety over the influence of Alan Moore on the superhero genre if not another facet of the project's fascination with absent or evil fathers?  Morrison's always liked to write avatars of youth who rebel against evil patriarchs and faceless authorities (Zenith and the Many-Angled Ones, Jack Frost and the Archons, Noh-Varr and Midas, Seaguy and Mickey Eye); Seven Soldiers provides plenty more examples of both.  Klarion, the most classic of these Morrison rebel youth, is such a wild card he refuses even to pick a side in the grand struggle.  Instead he dispatches multiple progenitors--the crossword puzzle is quite clear on this--and supplants Gloriana.

But Morrison adds a number of benevolent if absent fathers and father figures, no strangers to his earlier work, but usually less common than they are here.  Zatara is only the most obvious; Larry Marcus, Metron, Arthur, and Aaron Norman all fill the same role. Even that eternal brat Klarion wants to follow in his missing father's footsteps.  (Oh, the irony!)  Aurakles is the prototype for all these vanished dads, his appearance recalling God, Urizen, and of course Alan Moore.  If Moore is one of the writers getting stitched up inside the DC universe/Cyrus Gold (where he's doomed to die in a swamp and be reborn as a swamp-creature... oh, the irony!), he's also one of the benevolent progenitors being freed by good son Shilo Norman.  That creative tension has been one of the mainstays of this project, as Morrison alternates between criticizing or parodying Moore's recent work (Promethea) and citing or imitating his older material (Swamp Thing, especially the end of "American Gothic").  Both constitute a kind of literary one-upsmanship, the fealty no less than the open critique.  Morrison rebukes the recent Moore by going back to the classics--in some cases all the way back to the Len Wein Swamp Thing that started it all--and choosing them as his templates.  Nor is the "wretched, mindless" Aurakles the most flattering portrait of one's literary ancestors.

Okay, so Seven Soldiers can't really escape the metacommentary, but the project applies it to some larger purpose.  Both Morrison and his characters have to retrieve or preserve the legacies of the good fathers while resisting the dead hand of the evil ones.  Morrison won't let them settle for mere nostalgia or repetition of the past, which has run its course and entered its twilight; they have to find a third path of change, which sometimes involves violently overturning the very legacies that have produced them.  None of the Seven Soldiers illustrate this better than Ystina, who kills the corrupted Galahad and an undead Arthur himself in the halls of Castle Revolving so she can preserve their ideals--and, we're told, establish a new golden age in their place.

Substance has never been lacking in Seven Soldiers.  The question is whether the final issue brings all these themes and character arcs to a successful resolution, or whether the stylistic experiments--and the extreme formal constraints of wrapping up seven plots in just forty pages--overwhelm them.  The results, unfortunately, are a mixed bag.

p. 1: A DC logo pin?  In case the previous appearances of the Seven Unknown Men were too subtle?

p. 2-7:  Already commented on these pages.  I have to say, I wasn't expecting those preview pages to be the first seven pages in the actual order--what's that Shining Knight page doing up here, away from the rest of the story?

p. 8-11: I also have to question why, in an issue that's so pressed for time it can barely squeeze in all seven of the Seven Soldiers, Morrison treats us to a nine-page flashback.  I can see the need for the five-page Kirby tribute, which unifies the project's mythology, but did the Arthur stuff need four pages when it totals seven panels?

p. 12: For a scene that's calling for the end of brutal, cynical superhero revamps, this scene is pretty brutal itself.  The Unknown Man has drowned Cyrus Gold and is preparing Zachary Zor to take his place, to be killed by an angry mob that thinks he's a child-killer.  Poetic justice, given what Zor did to the Newsboy Army, but I'm not sure the Unknown Man is in much of a position to criticize Zor's "nasty game."

And that's the saving grace of this whole sequence... (please see p. 37)

p. 13: The Guardian photographs, especially one remarkably callous caption, remind me of the infamous Mars Attacks! cards.

Is Guardian riding Harry the police horse?  And what are the chances that this valiant steed is a distant descendant of Pegazeus and the winged horses of Gorias?

p. 14: GUARDIAN CRYPTIC X-WORD! Maybe this is a coincidence, but if we look to p. 28 for answers to today's crossword we get the first page of the Mister Miracle scene--the cosmic substratum that underlies the entire project.  And some of the crossword answers (full answers here) link up with the Mister Miracle/Dark Side confrontation. 

The last answer, 8 DOWN. ONE, completes Dark Side's new slogan.  1 DOWN. LOA suggests the New Gods have been moving through the story in human bodies, much as we see the real Darkseid inhabiting Mr. Dark Side through Shilo's god-sight.  Is the crossword telling us that the real action, the real war has been happening on this remote plane all along?

Other clues point to the various patriarchs or evil authorities of the project, especially those that Klarion overthrows.  I'm not sure why the third Submissionary, 2 DOWN. ABEDNIGO, warranted inclusion, but they're the first group Klarion challenges.  4 ACROSS. BADDE tells us  the atrociously-named Ebeneezer Badde was Klarion's real father.  That explains his little chuckle when Klarion tells him he's the son of Mordecai and Charity of Limbo Town, and it makes me read the end of Klarion #2 in a new light--perhaps Badde really is trying to save his son from Melmoth's agents, and Klarion kills him without realizing who he is.  Then he fights off Melmoth, who doesn't rate a space in the crossword, before supplanting 7 ACROSS. GLORIANA as the ruler of the Sheeda.  These characters share a thematic connection to Darkseid, DC's ultimate bad dad.  The real question is whether Klarion will become the tyrant he replaces, or look for a new path as he did after assuming the power of the Submissionaries...

6 DOWN. LANCE implies that the symbolism of the spear really does pass down to Alix through Lance Harrower.  Rather strange since she's the descendant of Aurakles, but then she gets her powers and her Aurakles-like appearance from Lance as well.

And finally, the left-field revelation of the series, 1 ACROSS. LENA implies that Lars and Lena, Ed Stargard's assistants, are the twin children of Chop-Suzi of the Newsboy Army.  It makes sense that the dutiful Ed would raise his dead friend's children.  But here's the question...

Consensus after reading Guardian #4 was that Captain 7 molested/impregnated Suzi and either killed her or led her to die in childbirth (after Zor writes his grisly suit/life).  The Captain is black and Suzi is Asian.  Lars and Lena are as Nordic as anybody on this earth.

Who was Lars and Lena's father?

Did the Newsboy Army kill the wrong person?

(RAB identifies the next most likely suspect, although I'm not sure if that character was physically capable.  He also has some great material on parenting and misdirection in the Seven Soldiers project.)

p. 16: The second greatest disappointment of this issue.  The last issue of Bulleteer presented a wonderful dilemma: the person destined to save the world is so soured on superheroics that she doesn't want any part of her destiny.  This set up a perfect resolution for Alix's arc (rekindling her compassion) and an opportunity to tell a classic Marvel-style story of redemptive heroism.  The final issue truncates all of that, giving us an Alix who's already regained her compassion and who never takes an active role in saving the world.

p. 17: Zatanna sports her costume from Zatanna #1. This is the first time we've seen her wear the same costume twice.  Does this indicate that she's stabilized her external identity after settling her internal doubts in the final issue of her miniseries?  Or did Morrison just not specify in the script that she get another new look, and Williams went with an old model?

p. 18:  Misty/Rhiannon's real name is Errrhiahchnnon, per Frankenstein #4.  We might just as easily call her Arachne (note her spiderweb loom in Zatanna #3), which would make her the source of the eponymous 13th month of the sorcerors' calendar mentioned in Zatanna #1.  Every ordering scheme in this project has been either incomplete or overcomplete--sixes and eights, but never sevens--so why not an extra month that's not mentioned on any calendars?

Unfortunately, Ali ka-Zoom's reappearance undercuts the finality of his exit in Zatanna #3.  Maybe Morrison should have tapped someone else to deliver the expository dialogue--Ed Stargard, the Vigilante (where'd he disappear to?), somebody who would let him tie in another strand of the narrative.  Ali didn't really need another appearance, although his detailed knowledge of the plot and his general appearance (top hat!) have always suggested that he might be one of the Seven Unknown Men.  Perhaps the one who replaced Zor (unless that's Morrison himself)?

p. 22: Is that Jorge and Hannah Control?  Does the talking head mean that Hannah was another robot?  Belittled and rejected by one of his own androids... no wonder Jorge flipped out in Guardian #3.  Note that they're standing in front of the United Nations building, which Morrison has juxtaposed with their Century Hollow project once before.  This single panel creates a nice metonymy for the whole world falling apart.

p. 22-23: The similarities to the final arc of Promethea are overwhelming--the apocalypse comes to Manhattan and the President wants to nuke the place.  Both stories also culminate in fourth-wall-breaking addresses to the reader.  And, of course, Morrison has snagged the Promethea artist to illustrate it.

The human resistance hardens around the Manhattan Superhero Museum, which has already helped Shilo Norman shake off the Anti-Life Equation.  The museum reminds people of humanity's best traits, traits Morrison finds embodied in the meaning-making forms of the superhero.

p. 25: "I have been a story in a thousand books."  The Merlin has been DC continuity; perhaps he becomes it again on this page as Zatanna wakes up the universe.  Zatanna's spell doesn't seem to contribute to the death of Gloriana, but it may affect the metaphysical levels of the plot: the rescue of Aurakles and the imprisonment of Zor, both of which Morrison means to signal a new direction in the writing of superheroes.  (Somehow I doubt it will amount to that anywhere outside Morrison's own work, but All-Star Superman is good enough for me.)

p. 28: Here begins the issue's greatest disappointment.  I loved the final issue of Mister Miracle, but Shilo's appearance here doesn't do anything that issue didn't already do better.  Do you get the feeling this issue only had space for about five soldiers? (please see p. 39)

p. 29: "When the harrowing is done we will hunt the living gods themselves through the ruins of paradise."  Like Adam Strange, Starfire, and Morrison's old friend Buddy Baker in 52?

The thought that this whole project has been building up to a 52 tie-in depresses the hell out of me.

p. 33: "You're free."  Having fulfilled her destiny--in just about the most passive, accidental, narratively unfulfilling way possible, might I add--Alix is now free from destiny.  It's a lovely little panel to end her arc (I like the way Dave Stewart uses grays and spot color to play up her similarity to Aurakles).  I just wish this issue had given that arc more than eight panels to build to its climax.

p. 34-35: More painfully overt metacommentary, although I do like Morrison's description (and we are literally reading Morrison's description here, in-story as well as out) of the DC universe as "Threadbare and ragged... the work of too many hands to ever fit properly..."  He clearly loves it, though, in all its patchwork glory.  Zor is stitched into a heteroglossic universe that can never be standardized into a single genre, tone, or narrative.

Also interesting to note that Morrison is only doing to Zor and the cynics what he's already done to himself:  he's sewn himself into the story as the Seven Unknown Men and Mind-Grabber Kid.  Though I'd much rather be Lucian Crawley than Cyrus Gold.

Finally, the first-person viewpoint of these scenes means that we're sewn into the coat along with Zachary Zor, just as we're part of the spell Zatanna casts on p. 25.  We helped tarnish the heroes through cynicism and we help refurbish the universe through self-awareness; we're implicated, too. (please see p. 37)

p. 36: I find I like Ystina more now that she has a Linda Lee-style secret identity.  Her miniseries also reads better now that the whole project is finished and its overarching themes are more apparent; perhaps it simply suffered from being first in a project that depends on interconnection for its charge.  Shining Knight still had that unforgiveable lapse in showing the destruction of Caliburn, though.

p. 37:  The third road was first mentioned by one of the Seven Unknown Men back in SS #0:  "There's a third road... Slaughter Swamp is one of those in-between places, where solid things turn soft and change."  Real change is the third path that avoids the false binaries of cynical maturity and arrested development.

But Morrison may be breaking down other binaries here, including the relatively straightforward good and evil morality that has structured the Seven Soldiers macro-plot until now.  The Sheeda are our own descendants, consuming us as we consume the planet; Misty says that defeating and becoming them is as bad or worse than being defeated by them.  And lest we feel too cocky about sewing those bad "deconstructionist" writers up in the miser's coat of DC continuity, Morrison commemorates the event with a black flower--one more guilty secret floating up to the surface of Slaughter Swamp.  If the awakening of the DC universe weren't founded upon a couple of murders, if the "good" Unknown Man weren't implicated in a little violence himself, this metacommentary might lapse into a saccharine call for nostalgia that would completely contradict Morrison's point about growth and change.  Instead he accepts the evil along with the good, the grim with the playful:  both have a place in Morrison's post-Seven Soldiers universe.

Not unlike the ending of "American Gothic"...

p. 38:  Are we meant to read this lovely image of a cackling Klarion as a response to the previous page?  Is Klarion following a third, independent road between righteousness and wickedness?  His people back in Limbo Town are a fusion of both.  This may be the best possible resolution for the human race, one that breaks outside the binaries and avoids simply replacing Gloriana with a copy.

The page also serves as a nice counterpoint to the image of the terrified Whip that closes Seven Soldiers #0. 

J.H. Williams III's remarkably adept pastiche of the other Seven Soldiers artists is the saving grace of this issue; love that Frazer Irving Klarion being... er... waited on by those two Simone Bianchi Sheeda, with a Dave Stewart color scheme that unifies the looks of those two miniseries.  Everything about this page reconciles opposites, doesn't it?

p. 39:  One of the fans in Bulleteer #3 mentioned a rumor that Millions the Mystery Mutt is immortal and secretly running the U.S. banking system.  Now we discover Millions is alive, even though a caption in Guardian #4 (the suit Zor sewed for him) said he was dead at 14.  Bear in mind that Millions' pal Kid Scarface discovered the Cauldron of everlasting life in Slaughter Swamp.  And now Millions the Mystery Mutt is immortal and running a nationwide organized crime syndicate.  Possibly in addition to the U.S. banking system.

p. 39: "All is one in Dark Side."  An odd note for Morrison to sound at the end of this project, especially in conjuntion with the crossword clue 8 DOWN, "And all is this, seven into seven."  Seven Soldiers has previously made heroes out of characters like "Sky-High" Helligan who can assemble its disparate pieces into a single story, but the slogan and the clue imply that Dark Side lies at the end of the project's drive for narrative unification.  Dark Side certainly thinks he's won on the penultimate page, when the narrative is as complete and unified as it ever will be.

The Dark Side scenes hint that the whole Sheeda plot has been a misdirection, just as RAB says (please see p. 14).  Dark Side has pulled off a cosmological coup d'etat while everybody else was distracted by the pyrotechnics, much as the Sheeda threat itself is presented as the more serious threat brewing while all the big-name heroes are distracted by Infinite Crisis (a template lifted from "American Gothic" and its arm's-length relation to Crisis on Infinite Earths).  The real struggle is for the possession and execution of the first superhero and the avatar of freedom, a struggle Dark Side wins until the final page and its unfortunate retread of Mister Miracle #4.  Still, it's surprising that Morrison would cast his own narrative completion as a sign of victory for one of his antagonists.

Surprising, but not inconsistent.  This isn't the first Morrison work to associate the push for narrative order or clarity with tyranny (I'm thinking of Sir Miles in "Entropy in the UK"), and Seven Soldiers has always been a glorious mess, much like the miser's coat.  This is a project that defiantly refuses to complete any of its organizing groups of seven, and it preserves that anarchic confusion right up to the end.  (Is I, Spyder the eighth of Seven Soldiers?)  That makes for a chaotic, frequently frustrating final issue, but Seven Soldiers #1 is true to its story and its author.

Imperishable

I was afraid it would be hard to dive back into the Seven Soldiers storyline after a six-month hiatus, but DC has wisely rekindled my interest with this preview (thanks, Jog) of the long-delayed final issue.  It's the perfect appetizer for readers of this series, loaded with backstory delivered in a style that meshes Kirby's Eternals with J.R.R. Tolkien.

Among the other revelations, the preview lists all of the seven imperishable treasures that have been bouncing around this series.  To get ready for the final chapter of Seven Soldiers I thought I'd take an inventory and see which ones have yet to put in an appearance...

The Cauldron of rebirth is easy; Kid Scarface had it before Neh-buh-loh recovered it for Gloriana.

The Merlin made of living language is easy, too; Gwydion, currently in Zatanna's possession, is one of the treasures.

The steed Pegazeus is the progenitor of the race of winged horses that includes Vanguard, Ystin's horse. The horses have gathered at the city of Gorias in the Himalayas in Frankenstein #4; in Zatanna #4 Misty and Vanguard are leading a, ah, flock? of them to San Francisco to get Zatanna's help (which brings two of the treasures together).

The Sword is troublesome; this should be Caliburn, Arthur's sword, which Ystin takes from Gloriana. Gloriana identifies Caliburn as one of the seven imperishable treasures, specifically "the treasure of Findias," one of the cities built by the New Gods.  (The cauldron comes from Murias, and the winged horses congregate in Gorias.  No word on the treasure of Filias yet.)  But in Shining Knight #4 Galahad destroys Ystin's sword.  That looks pretty perishable to me.

Is Caliburn a bit of misdirection, and if so, to what purpose?  Is Frankenstein's blade the true imperishable sword?  Did artist Simone Bianchi screw up in drawing the destruction of Caliburn?  (Nothing in the script calls attention to the loss of this treasure, and the second preview page shows Ystin holding a sword that looks a lot like Caliburn.)  Or did this just fall through the cracks of Morrison's 30-part story?

The Hammer has shown up only briefly, carried by the knight Bors in the flashback that opens Shining Knight #3.  Bors uses it to forge the Arthurian A-bomb that ends Mordredd's reign but also begins the corruption of the last knights of Avalon.  (That flashback says the knights carry three of the imperishable treasures, but it doesn't indicate what the other two are.  They can't be the cauldron or Caliburn, which have been lost in time by this point, and I don't see a winged horse anywhere.  Galahad is carrying a spear on his back in one panel, but I'm not sure that treasure should be understood as a literal spear.)  No more recent signs of this treasure.

The all-knowing Fatherbox is a mystery.  The name implies a New Gods connection, but Mister Miracle had a Mother Box (or Motherboxxx if you prefer).

Could the Fatherbox instead be one or both of the mystical dice that have appeared in Klarion, Guardian, and Zatanna?  (An even more intriguing possibility if Croatoan is just another name for Aurakles, who has already slipped out of one pair of chains elsewhere in this series, or if it' s a name for the Fatherbox itself as Melmoth implies in the last issue of Klarion.)  The last two preview pages show all of the treasures except the Merlin, which has no fixed form, and the spear, which may not be a physical entity at all, but they do show Aurakles peering at a small, die-shaped object in his hand.

Finally, and most important of all, there's the enchanted Spear that can slay Gloriana.  The spear has some connection to the bloodline of Aurakles, the first superhero; in fact, it may be the bloodline.  The preview tells us that Aurakles is entrusted with "the hushed and profane secret" of the spear, not the spear per se, and its ability to strike across time may refer to the bloodline being passed down from generation to generation.  That venereal, reproductive transmission might also explain why the spear is called "love" as well as "vengeance."

We already know that Alix Harrower is descended from Aurakles, whose pale skin and bright red hair evoke the transformed Bulleteer.  (Strangely, her name connotes the harrowing that the Sheeda are going to perform, but she would have gotten that from her husband, who had the rather suggestive first name of Lance.  Can you inherit symbolism by marriage?)  The resemblance between Alix and Aurakles is telling enough that Morrison didn't need to jump the gun with the Vigilante's sudden exposition in Bulleteer #4; this could have been one of Morrison's classic only-obvious-in-retrospect reveals if he hadn't spoiled the surprise before he planted his best clue.

The New Gods charge Aurakles "To bring order and meaning where incoherence reigns."  For Morrison, that's the fundamental mission of any superhero--restoring meaning to a debased world where values are in freefall and words cannot be trusted.  That places them in opposition to Gloriana Tenebrae, who exults in the degeneration of meaning, proudly telling Ystin that "Words can mean anything and everything, that is why they have no proper shape here."  (Shades of the shapeless living language Gwydion, whom she turns loose on Zatanna.)  This is quite a change from the younger Morrison who once presented languages with fixed meanings as implements of torture and control in The Invisibles, who wrote "Love means nothing at all.  Life means nothing at all" as the most tender and romantic line in the entire run of Doom Patrol.

But Morrison is also indicating the ideal reading strategy for Seven Soldiers.  He's telling us we have to find the patterns in the seemingly incoherent jumble of characters and plotlines, become like "Sky-High" Helligan or the Bride and fit thirty discrete pieces into a single narrative.  The seven imperishable treasures make a convenient starting point for assembly, but we could just as easily look at the less explicit recurrences that have unified the series:  the vanished, usually terrifying patriarchs, the dutiful or rebellious children who encounter them, all the absences yearning for completion, and the Romantic, tragic model of history and modernity as falls from grace.  Morrison has thrown a lot of elements out there over the last twenty-nine installments; here's hoping the final chapter can pull them all together into some kind of order and meaning.

Evil Serum?

Bulleteer #4, by Grant Morrison and Yanick Paquette.

The final issue of Bulleteer is more about Sally Sonic than Alix Harrower, although as Sally's unfortunate life represents a possible fate for Alix the flashbacks never seem out of place.

This late in the game any regular Seven Soldiers reader can spot the recurrent themes in Sally's story:  the stunted aging, the importance of change and mortality, the forces that conspire to pervert innocent heroes, and the very blunt critique/participation in superhero comics' fetishization of women that has been this book's bread and butter.  I am a little surprised that Morrison would resort to such a hokey excuse for Sally's corruption ("Doctor Hyde's Evil Serum") when he'd already done such a great job of taking Sally to the precipice of that corruption quite naturally, through her own naïveté.  But he's done this before, with the Vigilante's lycanthropy or, to switch projects, with the paranoia-inducing alien chemicals in All-Star Superman.  All of these stories present plausible psychological motivations for some pretty unsavory behavior and then veer off into the transparently ridiculous shelter of genre devices.

It smacks of the same refusal to grow up that characterizes so many of the failed heroes in Seven Soldiers--if you assume that psychological realism is the only way to tell mature stories, which Morrison plainly does not.  That's the way favored by Zor and the Sheeda, who both force the heroes they encounter to "grow up" into the venality of what passes for realism in most comics.  It's the wrong kind of change, as bad or worse than stasis, and the two feed off one another.  Morrison's alternative seems to be heroes who can grow into real emotional maturity, and who can say something valid about our lives without giving up even the zaniest genre trappings, but attributing their behavior to Mort Weisinger plot devices like the Evil Serum feels like an unpleasant atavism.

(I'm also surprised that Morrison didn't explain Sally's behavior through the Sheeda, who have become more naturalized through steady exposure.  Although perhaps he does--there's one panel near the end where Sally seems to scratch the back of her neck, right where they ride, as she talks about madness and change...)

Alix goes through a few changes herself in this issue; happily, no Evil Serum is in sight (although Sally does make the offer).  Last issue Alix inadvertently saved herself through her own empathy, but this time she can only triumph by shutting out her archnemesis, crying "I DON'T CARE WHAT YOUR +%@&'N SOB STORY IS!" just before she delivers the coup de grace.  This hardening and Sally's negative example of the fate awaiting attractive female superheroes--the culmination of four issues that bombard Alix with dead, failed, or twisted heroes--prompt Alix to turn a deaf ear to the Vigilante's pleas for help.  Morrison dumps the information about her role in the Seven Soldiers storyline a little too easily, but Alix's renunciation of her mission does great things for future stories, cementing her even further as a classic Marvel-style reluctant hero and establishing a challenge for the finale that ties right into one of Morrison's recurring themes.  Somebody has to pull Alix out of her jaded, negative attitude towards superheroes and rekindle her compassion or we're all finished.  Come to think of it, if the Evil Serum is, like the Guilt monster or the Omega Sanction, just a stand-in for the forces that strip us of our idealism and grind us down, then maybe Alix caught a whiff after all.

This comic isn't the tour de force of issue #3, and the pieces of the grand puzzle aren't delivered as elegantly (and hence aren't as thrilling, even though by all rights they should be moreso) as those in #2.  Still, it's a nice little finish for a series that surprised me by finding more emotional depth in its arch premise and its unabashedly cheesecake art than I would have thought possible.  This was right up there with Zatanna and Klarion as the best Seven Soldiers has had to offer.

"I believe it may even be a type of hologram"

"Be born again and again in me!  Life after life!  Suffocated in mortal clay!  Broken and blinded by the explosion of being!"  --The Omega Sanction, Mister Miracle #4, 2006

"The whole of creation was nothing but a cage, devised by Ormazd to trap the forces of evil where he could destroy them.  That's when the battle started.  Ormazd, creating the first trap, created the concept of restriction.  The forces of Ahriman struggle for liberation.  Which side are you on?  Do you know?"  --Quimper (by way of Denise), Invisibles vol. 1 #25, 1996

"Have your eyes grown strong enough to behold the fundamental force that is restriction?"  --The Omega Sanction

"Only set me free and break this chain."  --Aurakles, Mister Miracle #4

"Look there!  Urizen, deadly black, in chains bound."  --Tom O'Bedlam, Invisibles vol. 1 #2, 1994

"I've had a long time to think about this.  So let me get things straight.  You're right here with me.  You're suffering too, Omega.  Am I right?  That's okay, everybody's got chains they wanna get out from under, right?  Even you."  --Shilo Norman, Mister Miracle #4

"I WILL SET YOU FREE!  I AM THE LORD THY DESTROYER!"  --Aurakles

"I am not the god of your fathers.  I am the hidden stone and break all hearts.  Break open your heart."  --Barbelith (by way of Jesus), Invisibles vol. 1 #24, 1996

"And there's a fundamental force in me too.  I gave my life over to representing something that's in all of us.  So whatever's holding you down, wherever you are, however hard it seems... how about you and me escape together?"  --Shilo Norman

"Which side are you on?"  --Barbelith, Invisibles vol. 1 #16, 1995

"The dalang is more than a puppeteer.  His skill makes us believe that we see a war between two great armies, but there is no war.  There is only the dalang."  --Agus, Invisibles vol. 1 #5, 1994

"Forgive yourself and remove those chains you wear."  --Metron, Mister Miracle #4

"I've been here before... feels like..."
"7 days.  You have survived the first initiation into the mysteries of the New Gods."  --Shilo and Metron

"All times are the same time.  The initiation of a sorceror reveals this.  That is why they say a true initiation never ends."  --Tlazolteotl, Invisibles vol. 1 #14, 1995

"Think of timespace as a multidimensional self-perfecting system in which everything that has ever, or will ever occur, occurs simultaneously.  I believe timespace is a kind of object,  a geometrical supersolid.  I believe it may even be a type of hologram [...]"  --Takashi, Invisibles vol. 2 #5, 1997

"Teenage kicks right through the night."  --King Mob (by way of the Undertones), Invisibles vol. 2 #5, 1997

"Funny, don't you think?  How your life coulda turned out."  --Shilo

"Welcome home, Mister Miracle."  --Professor

"Lost one.  Welcome home."  --Barbelith

Morrisonarama 2

Why don't I just change the name of the blog to Morrisonarama?  And I can include letters and pin-ups and reader polls and fanfic and we can have arguments about who's better, Grant or Shaun Cassidy.

Here's where I make some very belated contributions to conversations that began while I was otherwise occupied...

...Happily, even though it features a tour and a mystery inside the Fortress of Solitude All-Star Superman #2 doesn't retell "The Super-Key to Fort Superman," one of the most grossly over-homaged stories of the Silver Age.  No, Morrison does an end run around comics entirely and retells the legend of Bluebeard instead.  An inquisitive woman (who contemplates her future as Superman's wife), a forbidden room, intimations of a horrifying fate... is this what Morrison meant when he talked about "science fiction folk tales" and a mythology for the modern age?

...Mister Miracle seems to be the least popular of the Seven Soldiers miniseries, but Shilo Norman's torments in the third issue have struck a chord with some readers, redeeming the earlier issues at least partially.  Unfortunately, I had just the opposite reaction.

It all gets off to a swell start as Shilo loses his career to an imitator, his friends to an emotionally numbing fad, and, temporarily, his sense of self-worth to the Anti-Life Equation, cutely rendered as a meme so horrific that Dark Side's word balloon can't even represent it lest we go mad.  This triggers a wonderfully-executed three-page sequence that carries Shilo through the dark nights of the soul experienced by his fellow male New Yorker Soldiers in their third issues.  As Jog ably comments (at the above link), the scene works as an overt psychologization of Kirby's concerns in the original Fourth World comics and as a kind of magnification or explication of the story formula that all the other Seven Soldiers series follow.  So far so good.

The problems begin when Metron shows up to inspire Shilo with some words of confidence and a simple display of human kindness.  This is very much in the tradition of Kirby's Fourth World, where the most fondly regarded issues built up to charged, apocalyptic epiphanies:  Scott Free's  insistence on his own independence in "Himon," the pacifist son's final battle and transformation in "The Glory Boat," or--perhaps my favorite scene in the Kirby canon--Izaya's  renunciation of Darkseid's methods and his search for a better way in "The Pact." 

But Kirby allowed those transformative scenes to sprawl for pages, serving as the climaxes for their entire chapters, whereas Morrison tosses Shilo's torment and resistance out in a single page; Shilo is saved by two word balloons and a single panel reminding him that Dark Side's equations don't account for everything in the human condition.  There may be single panels capable of conveying such a stirring renunciation of despotism and depression, but the cloying picture of two nice gentlemen helping ladies don their coats in the rain isn't one of them.  (I do like the background detail of the Manhattan Superhero Museum, a reminder of all the qualities Morrison loves about superheroes--their selflessness, for example--that refute Dark Side's equations.  But the weight of Metron's counterargument and Shilo's resistance have to rest on something more substantial, and the two courteous gentlemen just don't cut it.)  Morrison follows it up with yet another round of torment, this time more physical, and a visit from Dark Side and another visit from the fallen gods of New Genesis, which promises a last chance I'd rather not see advertised at this cliffhanger point in the miniseries.

I don't necessarily mind the placement of Shilo's redemptive epiphany so far in advance of the series' climax--Peter Hensel observes that Mister Miracle is following the basic plotline of the Jesus myth and so this third issue, the dark night of transformation in Jog's formula, is a Kirbyesque take on the temptation in the desert/garden.  The big finish and the real moment of redemption will no doubt reserved for next issue, when Shilo Norman puts his modern spin on the most famous escape trick of all time--The Empty Tomb!  But the pacing of this third issue is too rushed to do justice to the Kirby epiphanies it so clearly wants to echo.  I never thought Grant Morrison would have me longing for the days of narrative decompression, but there you go.

...Almost forgot to mention this great post by Jog, contemplating the reasons behind the breadth of Morrison's appeal (and his constant blog coverage) following his landslide win in the first Comic Bloggers' Poll.  Jog, when I finally start up Morrisonarama! you're going on the masthead.

Morrisonarama 1

Bulleteer #3, by Grant Morrison and Yanick Paquette.

Three panels.

That's how long it takes Grant Morrison to turn one of the loopier tropes of Silver Age DC Comics--their propensity for undersea kingdoms and gorgeous mermaids people of marine origin--into a full-fledged if still fundamentally loopy culture.  Or, more properly, a subculture:  the first page of Bulleteer #3 introduces us to Stellamaris, the "undersea diva" who talks like an activist but acts like every other wannabe, has-been, and never-was at the Zenith City superhero convention.

Morrison has typically avoided the "What would superheroes would really be like?" question that has dogged so many comics post-Watchmen.  He takes superhero comics on their own terms, so that set-pieces like this issue's convention, which simply transplants the culture of comics fandom right onto the (lesser) objects of our adoration, can critique the genre (and the culture that has accumulated around it)  without rejecting its underlying premises.  What would superheroes really be like?  They wouldn't exist and so we couldn't have any of these stories--the ultimate if rarely acknowledged end of most such attempts at superhero realism.  Morrison asks, instead, "What would it be like to live in a world of superheroes?" and it furnishes stories like this one, at once hilarious and moving.

After a slight digression into the Seven Soldiers megaplot last issue, Bulleteer has returned to its critique of the warped gender politics and not-even-sublimated sexuality of comic book superheroes and comic book culture, and Yanick Paquette is once again let loose to turn out the cheesecake.  This can only be described as playing to his and the series' strengths.  And if the issue's main plot, such as it is, of murder, mystery, and assassination still gets short shrift it's because Paquette and Morrison are having so much fun with the scenery.  (That plot isn't completely neglected, though, with a good appearance by "I, Spyder" and even a cute resolution to the mystery of who's poisoning Stellamaris.)

This issue is a treasure chest for comics fans, with references to bottom-of-the-barrel DC characters like Dumb Bunny of the Inferior Five (every bit as awful as she seems here--Morrison invented nothing) or the original Bulletgirl (who levels her own, much less sarcastic critique of the Bulleteer's cheesecake appearance).  Morrison's references are perfectly chosen:  Who better than perennial B-lister Booster Gold to present awards?  He's as much a wannabe as the losers at Mind-Grabber Kid's table, albeit one who briefly made it big.  And where better to hold the convention than Zenith City, which (Google informs me) only appeared in a couple of stories featuring the ultimate hero wannabe, the meta-hero wannabe, Robby Reed of "Dial H for Hero"?  (Either that or it's a name-check to my old friend Radioactive Man.)

The issue is also, like most of the recent chapters, chock full of connections to other Seven Soldiers series.   A reference to Kid Scarface locates Bulleteer #3 the day after Zatanna and Shining Knight #3, much as Shilo Norman wanders through the third issues of Klarion and Guardian in Mr. Miracle #3.  If the first issues of each series began at variable and isolated moments--some of them, like Alix's, must have started weeks or even months before Seven Soldiers #0--then the third ones are roughly contemporaneous, lining up every series to end just in time for the grand finale.  (Some odd spatial alignments are also coming into focus:  Morrison seems to have divided his soldiers up into East Coast and West Coast groups, separated by gender, while Frankenstein gallivants around the solar system.)  The timelines are condensing and converging, creating a sense of narrative acceleration.

The same is true for the interseries connections, the element that has recently generated the most narrative charge.  The early chapters had so little to do with one another that some readers complained Seven Soldiers amounted to little more than a shared setting; now every chapter either adds a new piece to the puzzle or shows characters assembling the ones we've already got.  In this issue Li'l Hollywood learns that her old buddy Kid Scarface is dead (and possibly shows some advance knowledge of the troubles to come?  "Your time is coming, Lucian, love, sooner than you might think"??  Watch out, Mind-Grabber Kid!).  Even better, as a table of reject heroes toasts the loss of their own Jackie Pemberton one character (a Blue Boy--any connection to Solomano's nephew?) exclaims, "What was she thinking?  Nobody goes into battle with six in their team." Another voice--his fellow Blue Boy, if Paquette and letterer Jared Fletcher have mapped the table seating and the word balloons with any particular design--adds "Everybody knows it's unlucky.  Five is good.  Seven is better."  It seems the loser heroes of the DC universe have always known what we Seven Soldiers readers took a couple of months to figure out.

I love this interpretive pile-up.  I don't see it as redundancy or poor planning; quite the opposite.  As the story nears its finale the characters combine more pieces to complete the narrative, and vice versa, so that every moment of in-story connection feels like one step closer to the inevitable, apocalyptic end.  The characters' experience of the plot and their reading of the plot--and by extension our reading of the plot--are one and the same.  To read Seven Soldiers is to watch a story put itself together chapter by chapter, like watching a scattered pile of cards fly back into a neatly assembled deck.

That assembly would mean nothing, of course, if Seven Soldiers existed only to tell a conventional story of invasion and heroism and sacrifice.  Such tales might be well-told, and a great deal of fun, but why bother with the baroque narrative structure if it only leads up to another version of the coming of Galactus or the Skrulls?  Fortunately, Morrison has also used that structure to distribute a number of more evocative and meaningful themes across the storyline, themes Bulleteer has accomodated better than many of the miniseries.  The sexual ones simmer throughout this issue, of course, but Morrison also works the convention and its third-rate superheroes for some genuine pathos--nowhere moreso than Mind-Grabber Kid's two-page monologue, which viciously exposes the desperation that drives all the wannabes and never-weres, the fear that they've wasted their best years on idol-worship and nostalgia.  It enmeshes this chapter in the project's recurrent fear of aging, with an amazing admission (or joke) carried by the art.  Tell me I'm the only one who sees a connection between this:

and this!

For all the genres Morrison said he was going to tackle in Seven Soldiers, I never would have thought confessional autobiography would be among them.

And Then There Were Seven

I should just drop all other pretenses and dedicate this blog solely to comics by British writers whose surnames begin with the 13th letter of the alphabet.  It's good to have a niche.

Bulleteer #2, by Grant Morrison and Yanick Paquette.  Spoilers follow.

This is one of Morrison's loopiest chapters yet, not because the content is particularly outré--no heralds of the apocalypse with grandfather clocks for heads here--but because he continually forces us to revise our judgments about the story and the many stories contained within it.

The comic starts out innocuously enough, with FBI agent "Sky-High" Helligan coming over direct from her appearance in Shining Knight to explain the plot for us and revealing something of the aftermath of Seven Soldiers #0.  It's not quite as eye-opening as the revelatory Guardian #4, largely because it's telling us what we already know or have guessed, but it's enough to make this issue another key part of the overall crossover and it provides plenty of cud for the devoted like myself to ruminate on.  (The folks over at Barbelith have developed some pretty interesting theories about the traitors within each team of seven; this issue confirms that theory in a big way, with a twist I didn't see coming but which makes perfect sense.  Those are a Morrison specialty, of course.)

The fun really begins with a visit to a dying Golden Age supervillain.  First Morrison elegantly connects his take on the Seven Soldiers of Victory and Nebula Man to existing DC continuity.  Then he conducts a standard, fairly obvious revisionist take on the Vigilante, turning him from a singing cowboy hero into a racist thug.  Old SSoV enemy Solomano (heh) insists that villainy is just a matter of cultural perspective and says "My own people will call me a hero," and for about two pages it seems like Morrison might actually agree with him.  But then Solomano says "there are no such things as heroes, only weak fools who want to believe in them!" and we know Morrison is setting him and us up for a fall since the Seven Soldiers project is about rekindling a belief in heroism (often among the heroes themselves).  Solomano, briefly sympathetic, is now just a slightly more realistic version of Zor the Terrible Time Tailor, another villain who attempts to write his own revisionist narratives that equate maturity with pessimism and degradation and say heroism is impossible.

I can't say I'm satisfied with Helligan's alternative explanation for Greg Sanders's malice and his death-wish.  (Tangent:  how many characters in this narrative are old men and women trapped in young bodies, or old men trapped in dying bodies, or men and women who seek eternally youthful and unchanging bodies, or adolescents who seek the alien chrysalis of the Sheeda?  In other words, characters who can't change, who resist change, or who pervert change?)  Partly that's because Solomano's story seems so eminently plausible.  If we were following the "what if superheroes really existed" logic of those infamous '80s revisions--and Morrison clearly is not--who would be a better candidate for a bigoted superhero than the guy who puts a bandanna over his face and rides around the southwest shooting at people? 

Morrison brings up an ugly possibility, and then he shies away from it with a deliberately ludicrous story about lycanthropy.  Sanders's secret accounts for the rage Solomano saw--it might even be said to act as a metaphor for the rage within him, possibly for the rage of bigotry*--but it lets him and us off the hook.  I can see how Morrison needs to reject the Solomano/Zor/Grim 80s mode of revision for the larger purposes of his project, but he can't quite write off the racism that, to modern eyes, lurks in the figure of the Vigilante by exclaiming "He was a werewolf!"  It's like saying Rorschach was only moody because he was a gnome:  the figure raises very real anxieties that deserve much more honest representations.

(*Yeah, metaphor.  When the narrative vehicle has absolutely no mimetic connection to the thematic tenor--when it's in fact providing cover to insulate the character against the uglier implications of those tenors--we have left literality and hypostasis far behind.)

Those qualms aside, the issue succeeds both as a narrative lynchpin for the Seven Soldiers macro-story and as a light-comedy exercise that wrings gentle humor out of the yoking together of disparate elements that turn out to be more connected than we first think (hence the werewolf gag, which has a good payoff).  Helligan is the perfect character to anchor this issue, which is all about bringing disparate pieces together to assemble the larger story; when she describes her methodology ("I know it's a lot of information, but that's the way I work.  Everything at once") she might as well be describing Morrison's own.

She's a smart enough investigator and an engaging enough protagonist that the Bulleteer becomes a guest star in her own comic.  Paquette doesn't have nearly as many cheesecake opportunities this time (even with a cameo by the Whip!) as Morrison dials down the sexuality, but Alix still fits the story, and the story fits her comic.  As a reluctant heroine who comes into the world of superheroes by way of their own fetish community she would have fit right in with the misfits and wannabes like Dyno-Mite Dan, making her the perfect candidate for the missing seventh soldier in the first issue.  That revelation brings a belated sense of completion to their ill-fated group, and creates a real charge for readers who have been following this story from the beginning.  With the arrival and confirmation of the missing seventh we seem to have reached some kind of critical inflection point; from here on it's a headlong rush to the climax.

Addenda:  You may have already seen this midpoint evaluation of Seven Soldiers by Ian Brill, but it's worth reading; Ian offers a sharp overview of individual and cultural rebirth across the project as a whole.  Jim Roeg collates all the Seven Soldiers criticism to date; I hope he continues to update the list.  And Ragnell has a superb reading of Helligan and Bulleteer.

Seventh Soldier

Reviews of the two latest chapters of Seven Soldiers.

Zatanna #4.  Well worth the wait.  Weak third issues and long delays are all forgiven with the arrival of this final chapter, in which Grant Morrison and Ryan Sook restage a classic forties comic battle and Morrison achieves a deeply satisfying emotional resolution for Zatanna, all while engaging in the kind of fourth wall breaking that he practically owns.  When one of the Seven Unknown Men (these demiurges now drawn to resemble their bald, sunglassed Weegie creator) asks "Wow.  You ever seen one of them do that before?" I wanted, desperately wanted another one to say "Yeah, once, actually."

He's entitled to his fun, though.  He places many other amusements in this comic, starting with the tour of Zatanna's costume closet.  In a series that has, as my esteemed colleague Jog notes, focused on transformation and reinvention, Zatanna has perpetually been in flux.  She hasn't worn the same costume twice, and the past couple of issues she hasn't even worn the costumes featured on the covers.  Sook continues to design ridiculously alluring outfits for her; if anything this is even more overstimulating than the overt fetishization in Bulleteer because the script never calls attention to it.  No attempts are made at ironic commentary or self-aware critique--the comic just presents a series of unapologetically sexualized looks for its heroine, each one carrying us farther and farther away from the top hat-and-tails original.

This issue Morrison incorporates that fluid appearance into the story by showing us a closetful of outfits.  It's surprising that Zatanna, who would seem to have the most well-established and therefore stable identity in comparison to all these new or minor characters, should be the one most in transition, at least in her outward appearance, but the costume closet makes that fluidity a major part of her stage/superhero persona.  Does it reflect a deeper uncertainty?  In issue two Zatanna tells us that magic is all about performance, misdirection, posture, surface, but in this issue she says "Magical battles happen where the inside meets the outside."

Zatara provides his daughter with some inward certainty--and a closure that's been denied her since 1986--when she finally meets him in a brief but emotional climax.  His revelation may play as the kind of sentimentalism that only Morrison and a few other writers (eminence grise Alan Moore among them) are truly unafraid of, but the simple fact of this postmortem father-daughter reunion overwhelms any stylistic objections.

Not that I'd make any, since Zatara's explanation of the disposition of his books also provides a neat explanation and encapsulation of the books of this very series.  Issue one is obviously fire and spirit (Gwydion's flaming appearance, the incineration of Zatanna's friends, and the subsequent sapping of her will).  Issue two is air and mind (Gwydion's disembodied linguistic form--often seen as vapor--and Zatanna's sharp intellectual solution to his capture).  Issue four is water and heart (the pervasive rain, the waters of Slaughter Swamp, and Zatanna's emotional resolution).  That leaves issue three as earth and the body:  it's the least obvious connection at first, but that issue centers around Ali Ka-zoom and Kid Scarface letting go of this world (and the Tempter, who tempts people into eating themselves to death) and it does feature the cauldron of eternal life.  Maybe not the best fit, in that it's concerned more with abandoning the body and those concerns aren't centered around Zatanna--who already seems, shall we say, quite comfortable in her body--but it's close enough for metaphorical work.

Amusingly enough, that means Zatanna has revisited the same themes that drove an early arc of Promethea; in issues 5 through 8 she visited more abstract, more overtly metaphorized realms of compassion, intellect, and materiality before also reaching a fire/wand/spirit climax.  So the slightly snide critique of Morrison's first issue has been sustained throughout the series, but demonstrated through action and plot rather than dialogue (which was always Promethea's biggest shortcoming).  He puts his protagonist through the same journey, works in a few metafictional bits that are just as distinctively Morrison as Moore's lectures were Moore, but still manages to tell some ripping yarns along the way.  (Three, in my opinion; the third issue seemed like a chapter of Shining Knight or Guardian in which Zatanna was just an observer.  Still, a pretty good batting average.)

This issue should also provide plenty of grist for Seven Soldiers fans to pore over past issues and reformulate theories about the complete work.  For example, we learn that Gwydion the Merlin is a living language (thus further insuring a big, meaty chapter on Morrison, language, and signification in comics) and one of the seven ancient treasures.  I've been assuming that each title will feature one of these treasures:  so far we've got the sword Caliburn, the cauldron of eternal life (I assume), and now Gwydion.  Did anything seen in Guardian qualify?  I don't recall anything vaguely Celtic or Arthurian in that series (save perhaps his own helmet or shield); oh well, it's back to the comics this weekend.  You see how I suffer for my blogging?

We also get the revelation that the Terrible Time Tailor (aka old Spectre villain Zor) was once one of the Seven Unknown Men; but if there are seven now, does that mean there were once eight?  Or were they reduced to six, and did they have to recruit/create a new member?  Once again, no group can reach the stable, mythical number of seven except, perhaps, our titular heroes.

But it's the emotional journey of Zatanna that satisfies most in this series.  As much as the final page seems to open back out into the larger storyline, it also provides a knowing, ironic, entirely appropriate capstone to her character arc.  Zatanna, who got into trouble as a "spellaholic" by summoning her ideal man, asks for trouble again:  "I deen a wen erutnevda..."  Right on cue, Misty arrives to tell her that the Sheeda are invading the earth and to escort her into the final issue.  Be careful what you wish for...

Frankenstein #1.  We'll keep this one quick.

Loved the ludicrous, over-the-top opening action sequence, especially Melmoth's dispatch.  (By the way, tell me that scene doesn't remind you of Swamp Thing confronting Arcane and his Un-men.  Still more evidence for the Moore theory.)

Liked Doug Mahnke's scratchy skin-diseased art, moreso for the monsters than for the opening scenes of pristine teenagers.

Liked the refusal to make the geek figure a quietly heroic reader surrogate or an object of our sympathies, even though the geek culture/fantasy element (Excalibur Fantasy Butterfly World?) was strangely underplayed.

Thought the  issue's climax and resolution unfolded far too quickly.  How did Frankenstein end up under the school--was he buried there, along with the Sheeda larvae, in the train crash?  What happened to wake him up?  The issue gives us enough information to make inferences--that's not the problem--but these answers have potential as scenes in themselves. I'm not sure it was worth skipping the potential drama of a more gradual awakening so we could get three pages of abbreviated, listless battle scene in this issue.  Then again, Morrison being Morrison, maybe he didn't have room to devote a second issue to this suicidal Northwestern town; the next one packs Frankenstein off to Mars and then he's on to some toxic spill for issue three and for all I know issue four features a devastating showdown with an army of wind-up dolls in the Sunken Bordello of Lost Lemuria.  Morrison is one of those rare writers who makes me pine for a little more decompression; his material's good enough to warrant it.

Liked the actual awakening itself, though, in which a noble monster with a slow, ellipsized speech pattern arrives to save a frightened girl from a lascivious madman and his legion of maggots.  Frank looks to be a little more vengeful than Swampy, but otherwise this series has firmly staked itself out in DC 70s horror comic territory.  So far this looks to be the Seven Soldiers miniseries determined not to make us think too hard, just entertain us with the old ultraviolence.  And that's just fine, even if the violence itself could use more build-up.

And on that thought--happy Thanksgiving!

Three Point Five Soldiers

Guardian #4 takes us to the midpoint of the Seven Soldiers storyline with a brilliant episode that offers equal parts of revelations of the past and tantalizing hints of the future.  The comic sports some of the best art I've seen yet from Cameron Stewart, and it's one of Grant Morrison's finest single installments of this series.  But others have already praised the masters or sifted through the entrails to divine plot details (Jog and the people over at Barbelith do their usual excellent jobs) so there's no need to repeat that.  Here instead are the thoughts that linger, the discoveries made, the reasons I so love this issue.

The comic opens with a magnificently loopy Golden Age adventure sequence, dialogued as only Morrison can ("And look what's up ahead!  Wouldja believe a land of golden top hats!").  He hasn't mined that vein as richly since the glory days of Flex Mentallo ("Think as hard as you like, Earthman, you'll never be my intellectual equal!  I, the Counting Tree!").  Bonus points to Stewart and colorist Moose Baumann for the scratched, faded art reminiscent of an old and forgotten film.

The revelation that Ed Stargard is stuck in a state of permanent infancy is a little more biting than these Kirby tributes usually turn out (although not moreso than Mark Millar's Dr. Krigstein in The Authority, a twisted dwarf creating concepts for his masters' misuse, to whom Ed bears a strong physical if not moral resemblance). As one commentator on Barbelith notes, it makes Ed "the spirit of superhero comics made flesh," a perfect hypostasis for superhero comics: aged and matured but still eternally youthful (or, depending on how you want to look at it, developmentally arrested).  The hypostasis and the Kirby angle really work, though, because Morrison's essential affection for the character, and the artist and genre he embodies, outshine the insulting implications.  Morrison recognizes the genre's flaws but he loves it anyway, warts and all.  That doesn't mean he won't subject it to some dramatic changes.

(Pedantic obsession alert:  Speaking of literalized metaphors and the symbolic order, Cameron Stewart confirms that in his vision of his ideal state, Baby Brain is reading a book labeled "LACAN.")

((Incidentally, did the extranarrative panels divulging the fates of the Newsboy Army remind anybody else of the extranarrative "interview" panels in Eightball #23, especially the ones where Andy's victims speak?  I don't know if Morrison or Stewart planned any conscious homage--we do know Morrison liked "The Death-Ray"--but the connection appeals to me because it would mean that, as with We3, Morrison and Stewart are willing to pinch any trick from any comic to spice up their superheroic storytelling.  This is Morrison's preferred path for changing the superhero genre, the heteroglossia of technical homage and not the imposition of cruel or tawdry realism.  Speaking of which...))

Morrison also works an interesting twist into the Kirby kid-gang homage of the Newsboy Army.  Obviously they're based on the Newsboy Legion template, with Baby Brain as Big Words, Kid Scarface as Scrapper, and Captain 7 and Ali-ka-Zoom can fight it out over who gets to be Flippa Dippa (I'm thinking the loser).  They're also every other Kirby kid gang, even the worst of them, the "Newsboys of Nowhere Street" coming straight from the Dingbats of Danger Street.  Contary to my earlier comments about the Stan Lee-ness of the Jake Jordan headliner and his adventure in the subways, the Newsboy Army is Simon/Kirby all the way.

But Morrison takes them beyond mere homage when he shows us their origin in the shadow of the United Nations.  The multicultural assembly of kids vaguely recalls last issue's Century Hollow, a tourist attraction in which one hundred animatrons form a demographically accurate representation of the world's population.  The Newsboy Army is that project of miniaturization rendered even smaller, a "United Nation of Kids."

Both groups break down into murder; both times the violence is sparked by sex, or anxieties over sex (Jorge Control tells the police his wife has sex with the animatrons); both conflicts are played out as struggles of sober adult responsibility vs. childlike pleasure.  (Jorge says "The world is not a playground, my dear, it's a battlefield.  Century Hollow was to be my 3-dimensional map of political and social reality, not your tawdry theme park!")  That's also a conflict between realistic art and fantasy, a point Jog makes well in his review.  In both issues would-be realists try to punish those who create or dwell in worlds of fantasy or pleasure.  (And yet, and yet... Jorge's revenge takes the form of a world in miniature of terrordroids and the Newsboy Army's destroyer is named the Terrible Time Tailor.  Is Morrison covertly tilting the scales towards fantasy after all--with the understanding that "fantastic" doesn't have to mean "nice"?)

These binaries of child and adult, pleasure and control, fantasy and realism resonate throughout Seven Soldiers.  But more than just demonstrating some higher meaning, the correlation between the Newsboy Army and Century Hollow appeals to me because it illustrates how Morrison imparts meaning--by distributing it throughout each individual part of the narrative.

Early reactions to Seven Soldiers were characterized by disappointment that the crossover wasn't living up to Morrison's much-hyped claim that each miniseries, nay, each issue would be a standalone story.  That claim was pretty much shot to pieces by the first installment of Shining Knight.  Plotwise, most of the issues aren't self-contained and it's starting to look like most of the miniseries won't be, either--not that this necessarily lessens the quality.  But the issues might possess an even more important kind of self-sufficiency if even a throwaway story like "Siege at Century Hollow" can dramatize some of the larger questions that dominate the narrative.  It's a classic Morrison technique of holographic distribution in which each individual part reflects the themes of the whole.  He's done this many times before, transparently or subtly (I really should write sometime about how every issue of Animal Man ties into the plot or themes explicated in the final, transcendent arc), but he's never done it quite like this before, breaking the hologram across so many different narrative arcs.

More links, more contradictions:  "Sex Secrets of the Newsboy Army" is another story of summer's end (the name, of course, of the Sheeda homeland), of kids who force one last childhood adventure when they should all be moving on to college and sex and adulthood (or at least late adolescence).  When the group threatens to split ("two teams"?) the case for youth is made by Baby Brain, naturally, and Kid Scarface (who will find eternal life of a different sort, and horrible stasis, in the cauldron of Unwhen).  But to judge by their costumed identities, these kids already wanted to be adults, or at least a child's vision of adults.  They're all junior versions of glamorous adult careers: quarterback! movie star! magician! gangster!  Not a remotely realistic vision of adulthood of course, but their own guises betray Baby Brain's desire/biological imperative to remain young.  The conflict is interesting because it exists within the heroes, not just between them and their elderly enemy; if it didn't, the horrible crime that sunders the Newsboy Army could never have happened in the first place.

And after their story ends (too quickly--my only complaint) we have the beautifully ominous final pages. I love the moment when the lights go out as the rain beats down and the Sheeda assault begins; it's the first time the crossover has felt truly momentous and truly scary since Gwydion destroyed Zatanna's group or maybe since J. H. Williams helped Morrison finish off the first, flawed group of Seven Soldiers.  (And, to follow my personal Swamp Thing obsession, I look at that panel of Jake against the window and I think:  "It's raining in New York tonight."  But that, I concede, is only my reaction and not anything the story appears to be signalling.  At most a mood it tries to recapture--but it nails it.)

Really, a perfect issue and one of the finest chapters of Seven Soldiers thus far; certainly the one that's got me most eager to see what happens next.

Postscript.  TypePad informs me that this is my 100th post.  Which goes to show just how much time I've put into a blog I started back in March of 2004.

Actually, that's deceptive.  I've put a hell of a lot of time into it, mostly because I keep crafting long exegeses like this post instead of those short, sharp bursts I somehow never acquired the knack for.  I love writing for this blog:  it's led to a great sense of community with many people I've never met and it's even generated a few pieces that have led to more professionally beneficial works.  Since I clearly can't let go of the ruminations on figuration and symbolism in comics I think I may need to work it up into a proper book:  Morrison alone rates at least a chapter.

But there's the rub:  the time I spend blogging is time I can't spend writing academic articles or books or fiction or novels or anything else.  As I've put my writing priorities on those, where they belong, I've let I Am NOT the Beastmaster dwindle into near-silence.  In the interest of freeing up still more time, I need to do a lot less blogging.

This isn't the end of this blog.  In order to consolidate my time, though, I've decided to step down from The Howling Curmudgeons.  I wish them well and I appreciate having had the forum.  But the separation may be for the best; exporting all my posts on crap comics over there always was, in part, a doomed attempt at making this site something other than "just" a comics blog, a craven bid at exactly the kind of respectability I think comics don't need.  Besides, some of my favorite posts here contain insane rants about Thanos and "Disco Madness with Mysterio."  Perhaps this will be a homecoming of sorts.

So face front, True Believers!  I am, and ever remain,

NOT the Beastmaster.

Four Soldiers

Seven Soldiers is Grant Morrison’s latest project, a massive thirty-part storyline comprised of seven linked miniseries and two bookends.  Now just over one-quarter completed, with four of the miniseries at their halfway points, the project has built up enough of a critical mass that some of its intersections and larger preoccupations are starting to become apparent.

But who am I kidding?  It’s been running for four months now; anybody who’s still interested in reading this post probably doesn’t need the introduction.  This is both the blessing and the curse of jumping in late in the game, so I’m going to dispense with the summaries and jump straight into my comments.  But just in case you haven’t read them already, spoilers follow for all of the series.

Seven Soldiers Special #0:  This bookend special sports typically accomplished art by J. H. Williams III, who adapts himself perfectly to Morrison’s metatextual style by drawing in a pastiche that ranges from Frank Miller gritty urban vigilante to John Severin western.  I also wonder if the jagged cascades of the opening pages aren’t a visual quotation of vintage Bissette/Totleben Swamp Thing; the script references a later Swamp Thing issue, a deliciously nasty little Solomon Grundy story from Mark Millar’s run on the title.

Actually, Swamp Thing seems to pop up all over this project, and not just as the one notable source for continuity in a crossover that otherwise is perfectly happy to play fast and loose with history.  It’s also relevant as a guide for revamping characters.  "The Anatomy Lesson" is comics’ most successful reinvention, one that indirectly spawned an entire publishing line and a new direction in comics scripting:  in other words, it unintentionally accomplished what Morrison is perhaps trying to do with Seven Soldiers.  And so echoes of those old Moore Swamp Things will resurface throughout the narrative, possibly as reminders of how to remake company-owned superheroes without forsaking any of their outré elements. 

The more violent, earthbound revamps of the eighties are exhausted and rejected by the Whip in her opening scene - "I’ve taken this whole morally ambiguous urban vigilante thing about as far as I can.  And now, God help me, I want to visit other planets and dimensions and fight rogue gods" - and both she and Morrison are looking for other options.  Morrison finds them in the Seven Unknown Men, who appear to be agents of retcon, in-story explanations for the changes he is about to unleash.  One of them tells the Spider, "You shouldn’t be seeing any of this, but sometimes, in an emergency like this one, we have to let you locals into one or two of our secrets."  And so the Spider is ushered behind the scenery to witness his own renovation, just like the beginning of another Moore series, Supreme.

As for the Whip, well, she gets her wish, too, to her regret.  The end to this first special is shocking not because so many of the protagonists die - we’ve all seen plenty of that before - but because of the Whip’s expression of sheer madness and terror at the end.  Superheroes die all the time, but they aren’t supposed to lose their shit!  I’m hoping (possibly against all odds) that at least some of these characters survive their apparent end; their hooks, especially the Whip’s, are too good to lose. In any case, the issue culminates with a bunch of superheroes (or superhero imitators) utterly failing in their mission – Morrison makes it clear that a different kind of hero will be needed.

Shining Knight:  Unlike most of the other Seven Soldiers series this one doesn’t reach a stopping point with the second issue, taking a comparatively lackadaisical four issues to tell a complete story.  It’s been great so far, with lush art by Simone Bianchi, but the half-finished plot means there’s less to discuss.  I can say that Morrison’s scripting is excellent, whether he’s writing Sir Justin’s dialogue in almost-understandable mock Celtic (another Moore hallmark, reminiscent of the Rannian language he invented for Swamp Thing) or transliterating it into English for us.  Morrison’s Celtic/English fusions are strangely pregnant with sinister meaning; my favorite so far is the name for Gloriana Tenebrae’s home, "Unwhen," which connotes both Annwn, the Celtic land of the dead, and Justin’s time-traveling ordeals.  All in all I’m more interested in Morrison’s dark-fantasy take on the Camelot mythology than the fish-out-of-water time travel story, but we’ll see where this leads.

Guardian:  The most accessible series for fans of standard superhero comics, although it works an odd twist on its inspiration.  Morrison has updated the superficial trappings of the Guardian and the Newsboy Legion for an age of private security forces, tabloid journalism, and online news, but at its heart this is fundamentally a Kirby comic.

Not the Simon/Kirby feel of the original Guardian, though, nor the 70s Kirby of Cadmus and Jimmy Olsen, but the 1960s Marvel Lee/Kirby at their prime.  It’s offered a rollicking story about angry golems and subway pirates, albeit with a tragic undercurrent that’s never far from the surface.  More tragic than the typical redemptive deaths of Stan Lee - this is a world where innocent people sometimes die for no reason. But the second issue closes with a lovely little moral-cum-exegesis that captures the feel and summarizes the ethos of the old Marvel at its most grandiose:  "We’re telling stories about human dignity, Jake.  Stories of how human beings make culture and meaning for ourselves, even down there in the garbage."  Or in the Bullpen?

Zatanna:  A lot has been written about this series’ apparent response to Moore’s Promethea, and the similarities aren’t exactly subtle.  Both comics feature female protagonists who venture into dimensions of "crystallized thought" and imagination given form; both of those protagonists lecture the readers on magic.

But most of the criticisms of this series stem from one line near the end of the first issue, where a would-be sorceror’s apprentice tells Zatanna, "I love the way you write about magic.  It’s so, like, down-to-earth and non-preachy."  Presumably this is meant to contrast Morrison’s writing on magic with Moore’s, a contrast that didn’t endear Morrison to anyone despite Promethea’s lackluster ending.

What interests me is that while Zatanna chastises Promethea it’s also restaging, you guessed it, Swamp Thing - dragging Moore back to his roots, as it were.  Morrison revisits the climactic chapter of "American Gothic", quoting a line of dialogue, duplicating its setting in Baron Winter’s home, and repeating its fatalities.  If there is a criticism of Moore here it’s done by paying homage to his older material while snubbing the new.  I’ve always thought Morrison had the most interesting anxiety of influence vis-a-vis Moore of anyone in comics (certainly moreso than that faithful but pale imitator, Neil Gaiman); Zatanna offers plenty more fodder for it.

The second issue has been much better received, partially because it contains no self-aggrandizing comparisons, though it quietly delivers on the promise of Misty’s comments in the first one.  Zatanna gives Misty a lecture/demonstration of magical technique and legerdemain, demonstration being exactly what was missing from so many of those Promethea issues.  Morrison’s lessons are simpler - though also more appropriate for the character, given her background in stage magic - but he encodes them in plot and action, drastically curtailing the didacticism.  It’s less theologically ambitious but more narratively satisfying (and depending on who you ask, both of those may be good things).

All magical business aside, Zatanna is the Seven Soldiers series most tied to its character’s pre-Morrison history.  The revisions are limited to Zatanna’s costume, which gets a minor, faintly gothy redesign through the simple addition of garters and fingerless fishnet gloves.  The garters are almost too much, utterly exploding the plausible deniability that lets readers pretend superheroines aren’t sex objects.  (The Whip’s fetish outfit in Seven Soldiers #0 does much the same.)  Morrison is so smitten with this new look that he has one of the other characters tell Zatanna it’s sensational; normally I hate that sort of thing, but damn it, he’s right.  The costume displays Morrison’s admirable knack for finding a concept’s core appeal and unabashedly amplifying it.

Klarion the Witch Boy:  The most untapped potential, with a fascinating world it barely explores.  I was fully prepared, until I reread these issues, to say that Morrison’s much-vaunted “supercompressed” pacing is sometimes a little too compressed – a complaint I never thought I’d make in this age of attenuated six-part arcs gasping out their two-issue plot for the trade paperback.  One of the weaknesses of Klarion, and to a lesser extent of Seven Soldiers in general, is that Morrison throws out concepts so quickly he doesn’t have time to develop them all; some good ones die on the vine.

For example, I was surprised that we never actually see the High Market of Vanity Fair in Klarion, especially after all the build-up; it would make the perfect way station between Klarion’s underground civilization/penal colony and the fabled homeland of Blue Rafters, which could sensibly be reserved for the final issue.  Instead we skip it entirely. (This presumes Morrison isn’t saving the market for some later Seven Soldiers issue.)  Klarion has the richest and strangest terrain of any of the series thus far, and I wish he had given us more time to explore it.

But some of the details I thought were missing turn out to be there after all, lurking in the compression and waiting for later issues to explain them.  After the first issue, I had thought the clash between the Witch-men’s Parliament and the Submissionaries was more explained than shown, and ended before it had been given a chance to develop.

Now I’m not so sure.  We know the Witch-men are initiated with a trip beyond the Wicket Gate to see the god Croatoan and "find out the sad, miraculous truth behind all the old stories."  Their new Parliament threatens the Submissionaries, who want to keep the town safe and pure by sealing it off from the upper world, who interpret orders from Croatoan by staining the iron pages of his book with their own blood, who rule through the fear of outside enemies and the fear of their god.  Obviously a commentary on the fundamentalists who attacked America and the fundamentalists who run it (though it’s leaps and bounds more effective than the Iraq commentary in something like Phil Jiminez’s The Return of Donna Troy, proof that sometimes agreeing with the politics just isn’t enough).

But this conflict deepens once we read the second issue and discover the big secret, the thing that has the Witch-men inventing democracies and steam engines and the Submissionaries closing the gates:  Croatoan is gone, and the Witch-men know it.  Suddenly Klarion’s society seems much more carefully developed, if only glimpsed briefly, and Klarion itself seems less rushed than dense with meaning.

Two other quick notes on Klarion, both trivial but both signs that I’ve invested more time thinking about this series than any other. First, Jog was right - that really needed to be a Twinkie wrapper.  It’s even called a "cake of light," for God’s sake!  If executed, this simple revision would allow Morrison to claim Seven Soldiers intersects with the entire Hostess advertisement oeuvre to form a multi-universal hypersigil, so you know he's up for it.

But I have to take exception with Ebeneezer Badde:  great foil for Klarion, horrible name, and what I can only assume is a reference to possibly the most precious single of all time, the Shamen's "Ebeneezer Goode."  I'll let Simon Reynolds explain:

...the song anthropomorphized Ecstasy as a Dickensian scoundrel who always livens up the party.  Despite a chorus of "‘eezer Goode, ‘eezer Goode" that sounded suspiciously like advocacy ("Es are good," get it?), the Shamen disingenuously insisted that the song wasn’t about drugs at all.

And you thought "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" was pretentious twee shit, didn’t you?  Anyway, if Morrison is now naming characters "‘eezer Badde" then he’s gone even more straight-edge than I’d imagined.

Interconnections:  I’ve resisted blogging about Seven Soldiers until now because if Morrison’s pronouncements were accurate (and that is always a big if) much of its innovation was supposed to lie in the interconnections between the various series.  The relatively flat reception of the first four issues wasn’t surprising, given that at that stage the interconnections amounted to little more than a shared setting.  (It also wasn't that surprising given the staggered bimonthly release of each of the series, which can’t have been good for sales.) But now that they’ve reached their halfway point it’s become clear that not only are the individual series becoming more complex, the connections are increasing exponentially.

Some of those connections are fairly shallow, just elements of a shared continuity:  Klarion moving through the underground world shortly after the events of Guardian #2, Cassandra Craft revealing who the old man at the bus stop in Shining Knight was.  Others are hidden jokes:  I guess now we know why Dyna-Mite Dan didn’t do anything in the bookend if Cassandra has been selling forged TNT rings.  Others are pure plot speculation:  was that Zatara returning for his books?  Has he become one of the Seven Unknown Men?  Are all the Seven Unknown Men old, dead, or transcended superheroes/magicians like Ali ka-Zoom?

But some of the intersections are starting to approach shared themes, ones that Morrison has enough subtlety to leave unspoken anywhere but the intersections.  There are the fish out of water, strangers to the modern world (Shining Knight, Klarion); there are the abandoned children, searching for missing fathers or trying to complete their legacy (Klarion, Zatanna); there are the fallen heroes, looking for a second chance (Zatanna, Guardian, Shining Knight).  Weirdest of all, in a project called Seven Soldiers, there are the sixes:  groups of six heroes, abandoned by their sevenths, who meet terrible fates, and the strange dice that control fate, all that remains of the absent gods and Philosopher’s Stones the characters seek.  The project has been built so much around absence, I wonder what Morrison is going to do when he finally starts that seventh miniseries.

Dispersing themes across different stories may be an effective and enjoyable narrative tactic but, contra Morrison’s own ceaseless hype, it’s hardly innovative.  It still remains to be seen if Seven Soldiers is going to amount to anything other than seven well-conceived character revisions, delivered through seven well-executed miniseries, and united to develop a few common ideas about power, authority, and heroism.

But isn’t that enough?