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.
Thanks for the reminder of where we've seen the hammer before. I was scratching my head over that one. As I was also scratching it over that sword-breaking scene in "Shining Knight". Sure, supercompression and all that, but shouldn't the destruction of one of the *imperishable treasures* be, um, a bigger deal?
Care to make any foolish predictions, to be rendered moot in three days, about which soldier will die? My money's on one of the three who might survive it--Frankenstein, Zatanna or Miracle (although he's already had his resurrection, so probably not).
Posted by: Jones, one of the Jones boys | October 23, 2006 at 12:18 AM
I really wonder if Bianchi drew something that wasn't in the script. That whole fight made no sense anyway.
No predictions on who'll die, but for purely selfish reasons I hope it's one of the two who seem like they'd have the least potential as ongoing characters. That'd be Shining Knight and Frankenstein, who had sound high-concept premises but never quite lived up to them. Actually, Frankenstein had a few great moments--charging across Mars, storming the ramparts of Castle Revolving, shooting Melmoth's head through a train engine--but the series was too busy to do most of them justice. So Ystin it is, or should be.
Posted by: Marc | October 23, 2006 at 06:12 PM
Yeah, Bianchi's layouts just fell to pieces in those last two issues, didn't they?
I actually liked Frankenstein, mainly for the bombastic narrative captions ("Death comes to farmyard!" and all that). He seemed more interesting as a *character* than, say, the Guardian, who was straight out of the Stan Lee book of troubled everymen. But the Guardian--the newspaper--is definitely a better story engine than Frankenstein.
So I'll second you on the Shining Knight. Apart from the big reveal in #4, Ystin just wasn't that interesting. Medieval fish out of water? Ho-hum.
If only they had a Jason Todd-style hotline...
Posted by: Jones, one of the Jones boys | October 23, 2006 at 07:36 PM
I thought Frankenstein had a lot of potential, and some great moments of narrative bombast, but they got nullified in the series' relentless ramble--when every scene is an explosive combat, none of them stand out. Frankenstein meandered from issue to issue with no dramatic tension or logic, stripping the significant plot developments of their significance--I'm not sure Melmoth should have been killed in issue 2 and Neh-buh-loh casually discarded in the first half of number 4.
And I kind of liked the moment in Shining Knight #2 where Ystin decides that justice and virtue have not abandoned the modern world so long as one knight of Camelot remains to defend them (even if, in hindsight, it foretells the series' surprising reactionary streak). That also got lost in the shuffle of Galahad and Gloria Friday and Don Vicenzo (who at least got a good death scene--the real climax of the miniseries).
A Jason Todd hotline for the Seven Soldiers would be hilarious, especially if Jim Aparo drew a page of Batman cradling the lifeless body of each hero.
Posted by: Marc | October 24, 2006 at 05:39 PM
I've just read the final issue of 7S, and, having read only scraps of the preceding, what?, twenty-nine, I have to say I found it incomprehensible.
Really. I've read the KLARION mini, and an issue of MISTER MIRACLE, and an issue of GUARDIAN, and an issue of SHINING KNIGHT, and the Morrison/Williams one-shot that started it all. But damned if I can make anything out of the finale.
Obviously, a helluva lot happened in the twenty-one comics I didn't read. Either that, or the 7S finale is one of the most striking examples ever of graphic elegance coupled with narrative incoherence.
I couldn't even make sense of the respective fates of each "soldier," at tale's end.
Damn. So, how have these been repackaged at TPBs? And am I naive in hoping that reading all the "lost" stuff will somehow help me get my head around the finale?
Posted by: Charles Hatfield | October 27, 2006 at 01:03 AM
A Jason Todd hotline for the Seven Soldiers would be hilarious, especially if Jim Aparo drew a page of Batman cradling the lifeless body of each hero.
I'll get the shovel and the James Whale lightning platform, you get the art supplies. Do you think the neck bolts will keep Jim from drawing?
Posted by: Matt Rossi | October 27, 2006 at 02:19 PM
Suddenly I have this image of the reanimated Jim Aparo receiving The Brave and the Bold script pages in the mail and screaming "HANEY!!! HANEY BAD!!!!"
Charles--apparently I live in that part of the country that didn't get any Seven Soldiers #1 this week. This series has been just about the only thing keeping me interested in monthly comics for the past year and a half, and this last delay is just about enough to put me off monthlies entirely (not to mention monopolies...). So no analysis here for another week. And yeah, you missed a lot--but really, how much would you expect to understand in a novel if you skipped three-quarters of the middle chapters?
Posted by: Marc | October 27, 2006 at 02:30 PM
And yeah, you missed a lot--but really, how much would you expect to understand in a novel if you skipped three-quarters of the middle chapters?
To be fair, Marc, wasn't it initially sold as seven free-standing, self-contained miniseries bookended by a pair of one-shots? You can't blame someone for getting the impression that they're supposed to be able to understand the ending, especially if they pick up, say, the first four issues of Klarion, and the blurb at the end tells them to read Seven Soldiers #1 for the exciting conclusion. It wasn't marketed as a novel, is my point.
Posted by: Christmas | October 27, 2006 at 04:30 PM
We've known the marketing was wrong since the first issue of Shining Knight, when it became apparent that each single issue wasn't going to be a standalone story as Morrison had claimed in some interview. So I guess I can understand people being misled, but the final chapter of a story is the absolute last place I'd expect a convenient jumping-on point, no matter how it's marketed. And any more than that will have to wait until Diamond deigns to ship my copy.
And Charles, to answer your other question, the TPBs collect the issues in their original order of publication, the only way to make sense of the interlocking series. I'd imagine reading all the issues in order will help a lot.
Posted by: Marc | October 27, 2006 at 06:00 PM
The final issue does, in fact, make sense if you've read all the preceding issues, though it is extremely rushed and busy. You may need to read each page several times.
I'm waiting for someone to weigh in with the significace of the clues in the Guardian's Cryptic Crossword.
Posted by: Prankster | October 27, 2006 at 10:26 PM
One other comment: what I read in the final one-shot made me think that Morrison was splicing together NEW GODS and ETERNALS!
Posted by: Charles Hatfield | October 28, 2006 at 12:06 AM
I thought the same thing as Charles re the splicing together of the New Gods and the Eternals in Seven Soldiers #1...and it struck me as a extremely radical and unfortunate change to the fundamental premise of Kirby's Fourth World. Not a minor retcon of some piddling continuity detail, but something that cuts to the very heart of what those characters represented. So I'm not too happy about that.
Prankster, one of those crossword answers made me realize that the entire story may have been about something completely different than we were all led to believe. In the Zatanna series, Zee and Misty discuss the importance of misdirection in magic...and wouldn't it be fascinating if Morrison has done that with the entire project, if the whole narrative about the Sheeda and the Harrowing and even the seven themselves was just window dressing and sleight-of-hand to conceal the other story he was actually telling?
I don't want to say more so long as a significant portion of the country hasn't seen the last issue...but one of those crossword answers reveals something that wasn't hinted at within the relevant comics, and it's got to be there for a reason.
Posted by: RAB | October 28, 2006 at 03:28 PM
brief comment re: fatherbox -
it's my understanding that walt simonson introduced the fatherbox in his "orion" series but remember it specifically going "ting" instead of the motherbox "ping"
Posted by: alex orzeck-byrnes | November 01, 2006 at 07:11 AM
This doesn't appear to be the same Fatherbox; Simonson's was just an Apokoliptian counterpart to the Mother Box of New Genesis.
I finally read Seven Soldiers #1, and HOLY CRAP--Charles, I don't begrudge you any of your confusion. You really do need to have read all of the miniseries to make any sense of it. Not that I think that's a bad thing.
More later. Where to begin...?
Posted by: Marc | November 01, 2006 at 10:28 PM