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.

Comments

[nicholas danger]

I was waiting for you to get around to posting a proper review of this issue, and I wasn't disappointed. Some of your conclusions I'd come to myself, some I'd read on barbelith and elsewhere, but excellent analyzation of what I feel is one of the most ambitious projects Morrison's attempted to date.

A couple more specific things:
I suspected Hannah Control was a robot as soon as I finished Guardian #3, so the confirmation of my suspicion was nice.

I thought the page of Zatanna "awakening the universe" was nice, if too much of an echo to her own mini, but what do you make of the fact that the response to her was not "Ready" spelled backwards ("ydaer"), like her and Misty's spells, but that it was actually written mirror-image style (actually backwards)? Are we to take this as the reader/universe responding to Zatanna?

But anyway, nice review/wrap-up.

[RAB]

Of course I've been waiting eagerly to see your take on this, and I am not disappointed. But I think we diverge on two points.

I really don't see Aurakles as any sort of reference to Alan Moore. There are more than a few direct allusions to Morrison's bete noire scattered through Zatanna, yes...but that doesn't mean every longhaired bearded madman is some kind of dig or veiled reference. His role as "Earth's first superhero" makes this additionally suspect, as Morrison would not lightly credit Moore with being "first" at anything.

Aurakles (or Oracle as he was previously known) comes straight out of Justice League of America issues #100-102 -- i.e., the revival of the original Seven Soldiers of Victory written by Len Wein, to whom Morrison has said the whole project is dedicated. IMHO what Aurakles represents here is the original sense of heroism, the morality and ethos of superheroes Morrison feels was epitomized by Wein's stories, and which has its origin in the works of Kirby among others. Perhaps Morrison is saying that noble conception of the hero has been bound and broken by darkness and deconstruction, and now it's time to set that idea free.

My second quibble (and this may just be me being dense) is that I think you overstate the importance of Darkseid in this story. GM clearly has something new in mind for the Fourth World characters and this series helps lay the groundwork for whatever that is...but the whole New Gods aspect of this story is just one of many concurrent threads, not necessarily more important than several others. But I'll definitely have to give this more thought...

[Marc]

Nicholas: "Are we to take this as the reader/universe responding to Zatanna?"

I think so.

RAB: Who says Aurakles can only mean one thing? In his original form he's the first superhero, but the aged, broken, bearded figure we see in Mister Miracle #4 has become a problematic patriarch who offers freedom through destruction and sends Shilo into the degraded world of modern superhero comics. Aurakles is an in-text equivalent to Moore, the figure who most combines the roles of benevolent forerunner and bad dad. (And his resemblance to Urizen evokes Moore through Moore's very public fealty to William Blake.)

((Just to tie Blake further into the book's Kirby-inspired mythology... are you reading this, Matt Rossi?... to what group or entity does Urizen belong? The Eternals!))

"...that doesn't mean every longhaired bearded madman is some kind of dig or veiled reference."

Does this mean you don't want to hear my take on No-Beard vs. All-Beard, then?

Or the implications of the Unknown Man shaving Zor? :)

As for Darkseid, I don't think I'm overstating his importance at all. Seven Soldiers #1 frames the entire project in the mythology of the New Gods and gives Dark Side the last word (if not the last image). In fact, the only way Morrison ties in Mister Miracle is to imply that its cosmic struggles have undergirded the rest of the plot, like the divine avatars heavily disgused in material form.

[Jer]

Nice overview. I wonder, though, if Alan Moore is the only good/bad father figure/creator that Morrison uses in this project. Kirby is the "father" of 3 of the 7 soldiers (Guardian, Mister Miracle, and Klarion), and my initial reading of Guardian had me putting Ed Stargard into the role of Jack Kirby - a child who grew older but never grew up, who watched his creations and friends get perverted by other creators (Zor) and his former business partners (I'm fairly certain that Stratos, the bodyguard for Silencio, was one of the "elemental golems" that Baby Brain created as crimefighters) taking them away from the heroic ideal he set out for them.

And the way that Baby Brain is drawn in the scene where he "tells" Zor that he knew Zor would be beaten makes him look very much like one of the Unknown Men. And, thinking about it, Stargard fits the role of an Unknown Man fairly well - what he does for Jake is almost exactly what the Unknown Men do for Dalt - take a man who has it in him to be a hero and "stitch up a costume" to make his outside fit his inner hero. And its fitting that a Kirby analogue would be one of the secret architects of the universe.

I think that somehow Darkseid fits into the "bad dad" side of the equation as well, though I can't yet put those feelings into words (maybe after another read-through of the series). My gut may just be reading too much into the association of Darkseid and Kirby and wanting to map the two of them together, instead of any rational symbolism purposefully planted between them.

[Alex Freed]

I've been looking forward to your take on this issue, Marc (and Jog's, as well--still waiting for that one!). There's much to say, but one specific point I'd like to flag regards Alix's concluding moments:

Although I would've liked to have seen more time devoted to Alix, too (Bulleteer was one of my favorite series, next to Shining Knight), this ending worked for me. Just like in Bulleteer #3, Alix "wins" because she forsakes violent superheroics in favor of compassion. Her choices are vindicated here--it was the right choice to take Sally to the hospital not just on a personal level, but also on a cosmic level.

(Someone else may have mentioned this first--it might even have been you, Marc--but does Alix remind anyone else of Audrey Murray from The Invisibles? King Mob's final words to her could apply equally well to the Bulleteer, I think.)

[Marc]

I think you're absolutely right about Kirby, Jer, and I'd made the same guess about Stratos--wonder what happened to the other two golems? Interesting that while Moore is rebuked for forcing a jaded, narrow vision of maturity on superheroes (nor is he the only one--Miller is visually cited and then dispatched in Seven Soldiers #0), Kirby is gently chided through the figure of Baby Brain for keeping them in arrested immaturity. Neither approach is sufficient on its own and Morrison is looking for that third road.

[Jer]

Miller is visually cited and then dispatched in Seven Soldiers #0

Really? Where? I don't think I know what Frank Miller looks like, so I wouldn't recognize that anyone in particular was supposed to be him.

[Marc]

Sorry, that was a shorthand for Miller's style, which appears in the scene where the Whip licks her wounds and calls up the Vigilante. Even the captions begin as terse Millerisms, until Shelly admits "I've taken this whole morally ambiguous urban vigilante thing about as far as I can" and starts gushing about cosmic funerals and rogue gods.

[Craig]

Is the crossword telling us that the real action, the real war has been happening on this remote plane all along?

I don't think so. To me, Dark Side throughout the Seven Soldiers project has been the personification of "realism" in comics - a point driven in my Morrison's reimagining of the New Gods, one of Kirby's wildest and most imaginative ideas, as street-level thugs, pimps, and hos. He spends the entire Mr. Miracle series trying to destroy Shilo Norman, avatar of the DC Universe. (Don't believe Shilo-as-DC? Every other character in the miniseries belittles him - from Jonelle's "All this good and evil, genesis and apocalypse stuff... it's not cool," to Dezard's constant entreaties to treat everything as metaphor. Interestingly enough, once you settle on this interpretation, Bedlam-as-Marvel naturally leaps to the forefront and issue 3 reads very differently.) Shilo only escapes after suffering through endless "realistic" stories - among them Infinite Crisis - and pleading with the comic book itself to let him be escapist fantasy: "...How about you and me escape together?"

Dark Side in 7S #1 is by working with the Sheeda, who have always represented the comic creators/industry. (Never creating, but merely harvesting the gods, Arthurian myths, and original superhero tales to sustain their existence.) This hackish sort of business model is ripe for realistic stories - once the Sheeda have destroyed everything that makes comics great, Dark Side can "hunt the living gods themselves through the ruins". To this end he's chained up the Alan Moore analogue, essentially the father of realistic comics, and profits from the outside money "realism brings in - mainly Hollywood ("You'd be surprised how many curious rich folks like you stop by for an evening's entertainment.)

Dark Side's last comment is making the argument that realism is inevitable, and will always win out, a point proven wrong on the very next page, when Shilo does the least realistic thing possible, and comes back from the dead.

[Marc]

I don't buy into all the points of this industry allegory, Craig; for example, I don't think Bedlam, "A plastic man who smoothes away all the rough edges for maximum appeal," could correspond to Marvel, which was known for adding rough edges to humanize its characters. He's a commercialized copy of Shilo, not the radical departure from DC formula that built Marvel. But that isn't the main reason I have to differ.

Metacommentary runs throughout the Mister Miracle plot, but to reduce it all to industry allegory strips Seven Soldiers of some of its most emotionally moving scenes and turns the project into just another comic about comics, not so different from the Infinite Crisis it criticizes (which also wrings its hands about gritty realism while gleefully upping the body count). It has the metacommentary, sure; but thank god it has something else.

When Shilo turns to the reader at the end of MM #4 and says "How about you and me escape together?" he's talking to all of us--his tormentors, his friends, you, me--telling us that he embodies something fundamental in us, a universal desire to be free that we can realize if we forgive our enemies and ourselves. I'd rather read that comic than one that stops at the level of allegory and has Shilo talking to nothing more than the borders of his own comic book. I think your reading of the industry allegory is more right than not, but Seven Soldiers has been at its best when it goes beyond the allegorical to express other truths through other kinds of meaning.

Dezard alludes to these more universal, embodied, tropological meanings when he tells Shilo, "Demons and angels are fighting within us. Their titanic campaigns are fought over and over in the churning mud of human hearts and minds." That isn't so different from Shelly Gaynor's final column--"the themes may seem unfamiliar but trust me, those are human stories writ large, dressed in capes and riding magic carpets to other universes"--a viewpoint Morrison endorses. Both Dezard and Shelly say that the cosmic battles of superhero comics are most significant as dramatizations or extrapolations of our own warring emotions and desires. Dezard parts company only in his misuse of this insight, telling Shilo to ignore the cosmic manifestations in a world where they're real (but handing us a pretty good strategy for decoding them in our world). The point is still the human battles, not the industry ones.

[Jones, one of the Jones boys]

Nice review, like all your other ones for the series.

Did you think it an odd storytelling move to announce on page *2* that Gloriana's "plans of conquest lie in ruins but she thinks victory's still assured"? Of course her defeat is a foregone conclusion, outside the narrative, (it's the last issue, after all). But that caption robbed the issue of a lot of narrative momentum.

And, like you, I too found the Mister Miracle beats unsatisfying, a wholesale rehash of #4 of his own series. Really, does he do *anything* here that he didn't already do there? Ah well, even Homer nods.

[Jones, one of the Jones boys]

Speaking of Morrison v. Moore, the series got me thinking that a good comparative framework is Nietzsche's concept of Dionysian v. Apollonian style. Moore, of course, is the stately Apollonian formalist, and Morrison the wild Dionysian enthusiast.

This helps illuminate the series' greatest "failure", namely that it doesn't cohere, at various levels (at least, not without a tremendous amount of fancy hermeneutic reconstruction from the charitable reader). Had Moore written it, all the structural "i"s would have been dotted and the "t"s crossed, as with his smaller-scale but similarly Altmanesque "Top Ten". But Morrison seems to consider such formal perfection the bugbear of small minds. And so instead we get a mad rush of ideas which don't all fit together well but is more viscerally powerful.

(Am I the only one who thinks "Lost Girls" would have been better had Morrison written it? It certainly would have been a lot more fun!)

No, wait. An even better comparative framework is Bert and Ernie, with the "super-hero" archetype as the rubber duckie...

[Derek B. Haas]

The I, Spyder bits said to me that Mr. Miracle was never one of the seven soldiers--that Spyder was, all along, and that Mr. Miracle was just an intimate participant in the underlying mythology of the project, from the New Gods and the creation of heroes, to the basic themes of slipping the traps of binary thinking, stunted/forced/restrained growth, etc.

[Marc]

First of all, thanks to everybody for the kind words and the discussion.

--Interesting theory, Derek, and it fits with Shilo's role as a glossary on the action rather than a participant in it.

--Alex, I thought the ending was right for Alix as well--I just wish we'd seen more of it. The moment Alix decides to take Sally to the hospital she becomes a mature, compassionate hero (whether she sees herself that way or not) and she saves the world. But we never see that decision, a huge oversight.

--Jones, I think the caption on page 2 was referring to the destruction of Gloriana's fleet in the last issue of Frankenstein. Of course, that just highlights the problem that maybe Gloriana's fleet should have been destroyed in the final issue. It would've given Frankenstein something to do.

And I have to ask... what do you have against Zizek? :)

[Jones, one of the Jones boys]

One word: Lacan.

Besides, my real name @yahoo was already taken. Who knew there were so many other people called ihateheidegger?

[Mark Parsons]

Marc, this piece is far & away the best piece of SSoV analysis I've yet seen.

***Please, please, PLEASE try & pitch a SSoV companion book that you can edit & write! Something like Jess Nevins' LoEG books with annotations, analysis and INTERVIEWS!

Dude, it could easily become a reality and as far as I can see, you are just fantastically qualified. I look FWD to checking out the rest of the blog. Glad I found your site!

[Charles Hatfield]

Criminy, I guess I'm going to HAVE to get all of 7S and read it after all.

I don't know, but the various comments here give the impression of an almost-impossible richness, imperfectly but interestingly "wrapped up" in grand-standing finale.

Marc, you and I haven't talked about this, but what's your take on Klock's HOW TO READ SUPERHERO COMICS AND WHY? The Bloomian notions of misprision/anxiety of influence that dominate Klock's readings seem hospitable to your readings of Morrison v. Moore.

[Derek B. Haas]

On the Mr. Miracle front, someone on Comics Should Be Good points-out that the Len Wein Justice League of America story that Morrison has said inspired this featured as a significant plot point that Wing, the "eighth soldier", sacrificing himself.

[Charles Hatfield]

Marc, read and enjoyed your piece on ARKHAM ASYLUM in the latest International Journal of Comic Art (8.2), just received today. I see you fencing a bit with Klock there, though his take on AA is really tangential to his.

[Charles Hatfield]

Argh, I meant to say that Klock's take on AA seems tangential to YOURS. Sorry, synapse misfire.

[Marc]

As mine is to his. I generally don't like the elaborate schematics of Bloomian criticism (or the Warren Ellis comics that Klock exalts through those schematics), but you have to use the best tools for the job and Seven Soldiers practically demands a Bloomian reading. (I should also add that I like many of Klock's local readings of individual comics, even if I'm less interested in his larger argument about comics as metacommentary, which I find too claustrophobic.)

I'm still waiting for the latest IJOCA myself--normally the fall issue debut is one of the highlights of ICAF. What else looks good in it?

[Charles Hatfield]

There's also an article re: Morrison's determined blurring of the "real" and the fictive, or, rather, his questioning of those very categories. Pretty interesting; unfortch, I don't have it on hand at the moment and cannot recall the author's name.

Other intriguing features include transcripts by Mike Rhode of the two Pekar panels at last year's SPX, a long interview between Marjane Satrapi and Christian Hill, a revised version of Jose Alaniz's essay on "Lost Girls," and, IIRC, a few other essays that started life at ICAF. An essay on humor by Fang Cheng is included, as is Alaniz's review of Ana Merino's book on Spanish comics. Not quite as huge as the last IJOCA, but still a bounty of interesting and useful work.

[Mikel Midnight]

I can't believe you missed the obvious reference in Misty's revealed history: she's Snow White! Another group of Seven that Morrison is just playing with.

You also missed the point of Zatanna's spell. The spell was, in fact, the whole point of the entire series.

Problem: we had seven disparate heroes, the requisite number to defeat the Sheeda, but they are nonoperative as a team. She could possibly have gathered seven random heroes together to attack the Sheeda, but she was no strategist and could potentially have been pulling people from where they were needed at the moment.

In what sense were the seven disparate heroes linked together? Only in one sense: they were published by DC Comics as a set of interlinked miniseries under the rubric 'Seven Soldiers.'

Zatanna had a demon who was MADE OF WORDS. What she used it to do, was to cause the DC universe to become aware of itself as a comic book universe, and thus to conceptually link together herself and the rest so that they could fulfill the prophecy.

It was the culmination of her metafictional awareness as detailed in her own miniseries, and the most fantastic piece of metafiction I have seen in any comic.

[Marc]

I can't believe you missed the obvious reference in Misty's revealed history: she's Snow White!

That was pretty clear since Zatanna #3.

You also missed the point of Zatanna's spell. The spell was, in fact, the whole point of the entire series.

Actually, I think we noticed the same things about Zatanna's spell and Gwydion's metamorphosis into the DC universe (please see p. 25), I just don't rate them as highly as you do. As I said to Craig, I would rather the whole point of Seven Soldiers be something more than mere metafiction, and I'm afraid this isn't even the most fantastic piece of metafiction in Morrison's own catalogue. Buddy Baker's self-awareness had the virtue of dramatizing something outside itself, the dilemma of being a human at the mercy of capricious, unknowable gods; the spell was little more than a plot device and a wink at the reader so overt it hardly needs explication. But at least it came in cool 3-D colors. I need to find me a pair of glasses...