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.
Hmm. I've only read the first Bulleteer issue, but I think Morrison's being a little too flattering to his audience in the portrayal of superheroes and sexual undercurrents. Because it's far too easy to find out in superhero fandom that a hell of a lot of the guys who have sexual fetishes for female superheroes aren't eroticising the thought of their strength and power, they're fantasising about them being punished for their power - vanquished/raped/tortured. Hell, even the female DC slash writers who hang out on LiveJournal tend to get off on putting the characters through emotional wringers.
Posted by: Philip | February 03, 2006 at 04:41 PM
I absolutely agree with your point about the darker side of fan fetishes, but I'm not certain I'd want to read a comic that wallowed in Identity Crisis territory even if it were for the nominal purpose of critiquing it. Also, one of Morrison's goals in Seven Soldiers seems to be recovering a more healthy, open sexuality in superhero comics--to admit the obvious allure of characters like Alix or Zatanna (whose entire miniseries can be read as a working exploration of the iconography of her costume--by the end it's one hundred percent fishnet!) without reducing them to victims or fetish objects. I would rather read that kind of counterargument by example than spend four issues in the heads of exactly the sort of fans I want to get away from.
By the way, I think the next two issues of Bulleteer improve tremendously on the already-strong first chapter (at least, if you're into the overall Seven Soldiers project). You've got some great reading ahead.
Posted by: Marc | February 03, 2006 at 11:12 PM
One other possibility for Zenith City's name; the mid-to-late-80s 2000A.D. series Zenith. Created and written by one Grant Morrison, whose overall antagonists, the Many-Angled Ones, were somewhat like the Sheeda. And Zenith's power level fluctuated with his biorhythms, which could be a numeric similarity to the power of 5 or 7 riff. Not to mention that Zenith was very much about being a superhero for the fame aspects, at least at first.
Posted by: Tom Galloway | February 04, 2006 at 01:36 AM
Actually, when I first read the issue I thought Zenith was the city from Morrison and Millar's Aztek, which would have been a perfect fit: the final issues of that series treated superheroes-as-culture in a manner very similar to Bulleteer, complete with superhero groupies and supervillain conventions (although I think those issues were more Millar's hand than Morrison's). That title also featured a looming threat not unlike the Sheeda, but alas, Aztek was located in Vanity, not Zenith. (Too bad: I got the impression Vanity was somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, a complement to the West Coast grouping of the female Soldiers, and tying its sinister architecture into the Sheeda might even have meant a long-delayed payoff for that unfortunately abbreviated comic.)
Within the DC universe, though, Zenith seems to exist only as an occasional Dial H setting, planting it firmly on the ass end of DC's fictional cities--absolutely perfect, given the level of hero we see at the convention.
Posted by: Marc | February 04, 2006 at 09:53 AM
Re: confessional autobiography...
Well, the art may not be entirely consistent on this point, but in a couple of panels Mind-Grabber has Grant Morrison's reversed initials on the front of his helmet. Given all the fun the Barbelith posters are having spotting "SS" character names, perhaps we should be on the lookout for acronymic easter eggs.
Posted by: Mark Simmons | February 05, 2006 at 12:06 AM
Well spotted, Mark! It is somehow fitting that Morrison's self-representation should be a guy who once controlled the Justice League...
Posted by: Marc | February 05, 2006 at 02:08 PM
Ow, good point!
Anyways, even if this is part of a broader pattern of "GM" references, it could still be nothing more than a coincidence or an in-joke. But still, as Gwydion/Merlin pointed out, "G" is the seventh letter of the alphabet...
Posted by: Mark Simmons | February 05, 2006 at 03:04 PM
"Controlled the Justice League" is a bit strong for Mind-Grabber Kid. His actual first appearance was right at the start of the Denny O'Neil run on JLA, when the team goes after the Creeper to determine if he's a good guy or bad guy. He was seriously lame then, and as I recall he didn't so much "control" the JLA as mislead some conveniently passing by aliens that the JLA were bad guys..
His two appearances since that I recall was Mark Waid using him as a major grown-up joke character at a Conglomerate tryout, and an appearance in Primal Force as a former insane asylum inmate who embraced his dark side and became super-villain Mind Eater.
Posted by: Tom Galloway | February 05, 2006 at 11:32 PM