Seven Soldiers of Victory, Vol. 1 (Paperback)

~ (Author), (Illustrator)

Editorial Reviews

From School Library Journal

Grade 10 Up–Superhero comics have a long tradition of team-ups and origin stories, and Morrison pays tribute to both while simultaneously breaking exciting new ground. Selecting a group of lesser-known DC characters, all endowed with something that makes them super, but all debatable as heroes, he challenges himself to find an extraordinary set of circumstances in which these characters must pull together to become a team. This first volume of the collected comics focuses mostly on background information on the characters, with some overlap between their tales, hinting at future connections. Readers will enjoy the erratic and creative nature of the plots, including everything from a Western posse rounded up to defeat a giant spider to subway pirates terrifying New York City. The art is consistently strong and well framed, with excellent coloration and great lettering. However, the book as a whole is a bit overwhelming and confusing even for seasoned comics readers, and would probably have fairly limited appeal to teens. Course language, brief sex and nudity, and horrific violence will make this a dicey choice for most school libraries.–Dawn Rutherford, King County Library System, Bellevue, WA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Noted for his imaginative approach to superheroes, Morrison was given the opportunity to rehabilitate second-string characters from throughout DC's long history. Greenlighted to totally transform his chosen protagonists, he rehabilitated marginal and altogether forgotten figures, characters "who had super powers but weren't necessarily super-heroes." The premiere volume--three more are scheduled--collects the initial stories of the first four soldiers belonging to a team that's not a team: the Shining Knight, from King Arthur's Round Table; the Guardian, an ex-cop become a newspaper's in-house crime-buster; Zatanna, a magician who's lost her powers; and rebellious Klarion the Witch Boy, an otherdimensional goth. The story of each is self-contained, but Morrison promises that the characters will soon discover they are all confronting a common enemy that threatens civilization. Seven Soldiers may not be as daring as Morrison's innovative Animal Man (see Deus ex Machina, 2003), which tested the very limits of the superhero genre, but fans of his work and of superheroes a bit out of the ordinary will enjoy the ambitious project. Gordon Flagg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: DC Comics (January 4, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1401209254
• ISBN-13: 978-1401209254
• Product Dimensions: 10.1 x 6.6 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #231,238 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars HEAVY LIFTING BUT WORTH IT, July 10, 2006

By	Rufus McGregor (Seattle, Washington) - See all my reviews

There is a literary term called "heavy lifting" that applies when an author requires the reader to do a lot of work to appreciate the story -- this "heavy lifting" almost always comes at the beginning of the story. You might also call it "labor-intensive exposition." There is considerable heavy lifting here, so much so that I almost didn't pick up the second book. But, as luck would have it, I left my bag at the comic shop and had to swing by the next day to pick it up. Glad I did. Things really start to get GOOD in the second book, so much so that moments that seemed lame or irrelevant in the first trade are illuminated in hindsight -- the whole world expands! Now I cannot wait to get three and four! But, all that being said, as one previous reviewer noted there is a great deal in the first book that feels stuttering if not downright incomprehensible. Moreover, the order that the issues have been collected -- randomly, it feels like -- did none of the stories justice and served to add to the confusion. So BOOK 1 (by itself) deserves 2 STARS. BOOK 2 (by itself) deserves 4 STARS. And the sum of the two (the hindsight effect) bumps this book up to 3 STARS. So, my final word, DO NOT BUY THIS UNLESS YOU PLAN TO READ THEM ALL. OTHERWISE, YOU'LL BE WASTING YOUR TIME & MONEY.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Returning the sense of wonder to comics., March 5, 2006

By	J.J. (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews

The transition from single issues to a collected trade was always going to be tough for Grant Morrison's Seven Soldiers of Victory project.
The series as a whole is intended to be seven miniseries, each about a particular character, and two bookend issues. Every mini can be read independently but if you read them all you get the whole overarching story.

This story is about people who have powers but aren't ready or even willing to be superheroes. By the end of their respective miniseries, these characters will be ready to be true superheroes, with all the craziness that implies.
Morrison has said in interviews that his goal was to create not realism within comics, but emotional realism within the most far out situations.

The titular seven are:
The Shining Knight
Zatanna
The Manhattan Guardian
Klarion the Witchboy
The Bulleteer
Mister Miracle
and Frankenstein

Not the most well known characters, but where is the fun of trotting out the Supermans and Batmans of the world for yet another re-imagining? Because the characters are virtual unknowns Morrison can get away with making drastic changes to them, making them relevant to today's audience.

The great accomplishment of Seven Soldiers is not that the titular characters are so well done, but that the supporting cast is so fantastic as well. There were several characters aside from the Seven that were so interesting that I wished they would get their own miniseries.

What Seven Soldiers does, like Warren Ellis' comic, Planetary, is to give you a sense of wonder. It's been a while since comics did that. Comics have been stuck in the "grim and gritty realism" for far too long. These are heroes you can get behind.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Solid, if not misguided., March 27, 2006

By	Mark Geary (Amherst, VA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

First, I wanted to address the previous reviews who think Morrison is untalented. Simply put, Morrison is an incredibly talented writer, who has maintained the concept of character driven work over the schlock of multi-issue crossovers or Xtra features Xhuming dead characters for "Xciting" movie tie-ins.

Okay, that's about the most I'm going on a soapbox in reference to another company.

The focus should be on the Seven Soldiers of victory, the footnote supergroup of the silver age, which Morrison attempts to dutifully recreate with characters that he himself selected. The idea of pacing out the characters in their own arcs prior to the beginning of the main story is ambitious, but much like 'Infinite Crisis', the problem here is that unless you have access to the material, you will feel a little overwhelmed, and if you are an fan of the characters in question, then you might feel somewhat cheated.

The choices of the Guardian, Zatanna, Klarion the Witchboy, Frankenstein, Mister Miracle, the Bulleteer, and the Shining Knight were interesting. Volume one shows a real decision to make the concept of both the SSoV and the secret war to be something that could both stand on its own and play within the restructured DC Universe. What you have is perhaps Morrison writing at his best since 'Animal Man', but in my opinion below his initial stint on 'JLA'. I think that the concept is a solid and unique idea, but it fails slightly in the execution: Outside of Zatanna, Klarion, and the Bulleteer, I really don't feel the characters gel. I'm more interested in the resurrected Spider in later works, and I feel that the stand-alone arc storylines which are connected, represented in volume one, are more interesting if you can identify with the characters.

Morrison is one of the better writers who can direct the story to both affect the character and entice the reader to care. I think that if he (Morrison) had managed to use the original Mister Miracle or Shining Knight, I think that it would have worked more.

Still, in an era of comics which are sold purely on name recognition, the SSoV strives to tell a solid story without the devotion to featuring a crossover with a known character. The choice to redevelop existing characters is one I do not agree with, but I think that if you want to read a comic that is different than the standard fair, SSoV is a start, and this collection is one to start with.