Customer Reviews

Seven Soldiers of Victory, Vol. 1

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

In his intro to this volume, writer Grant Morrison (DOOM PATROL, THE FILTH, WE3) mentions that the entire 30-issue SEVEN SOLDIERS series was intended to be "modular," or capable of being read in a variety of different ways. I initially dismissed this "modular comic series" idea as the sort of pseudo-intellectual gobbledygook that Morrison is occasionally prone to spouting, but now I freely admit it - I was wrong!

I actually found this to be one of Morrison's best works - complex, mysterious, and rich with cool surprises. But more than anything this is a series that begs to be reread at least twice, and even becomes more appealing each time. And this somewhat unique effect is made possible by - you guessed it - the series' aforementioned "modular" quality.

So here's my advice for how to best tackle this unruly beast called SEVEN SOLDIERS OF VICTORY. The first time around, simply read the series as it is presented in these four paperback editions. Like this:

SEVEN SOLDIERS OF VICTORY VOLUMES 1-4.

Simple enough. But next time, read each of the seven four-issue mini-series in their entirety, bookended by issues #0 and #1. I found it worked well to read each series in the order in which they first appeared in the graphic novel format. So here is the order of the individual issues - not the book volumes - to reread the series in:

SEVEN SOLDIERS OF VICTORY #0
THE SHINING KNIGHT #1-4
THE MANHATTAN GUARDIAN #1-4
ZATANNA #1-4
KLARION THE WITCHBOY #1-4
MISTER MIRACLE #1-4
THE BULLETEER #1-4
FRANKENSTEIN #1-4
SEVEN SOLDIERS OF VICTORY #1

I think you'll find this to be a much less disorienting reading experience than the first way, due to the fact that you follow each characters' individual stories in complete chunks. But if you were to try to read the series this way the first time around, I think you would have much more difficulty making some of the overarching stories' subtle, yet important, connections.

And finally, the third time around, try it this way:

SEVEN SOLDIERS OF VICTORY #0
THE SHINING KNIGHT #1
THE MANHATTAN GUARDIAN #1
ZATANNA #1
KLARION THE WITCHBOY #1
MISTER MIRACLE #1
THE BULLETEER #1
FRANKENSTEIN #1
THE SHINING KNIGHT #2
THE MANHATTAN GUARDIAN #2
ZATANNA #2
KLARION THE WITCHBOY #2
MISTER MIRACLE #2
THE BULLETEER #2
FRANKENSTEIN #2
THE SHINING KNIGHT #3
THE MANHATTAN GUARDIAN #3
ZATANNA #3
KLARION THE WITCHBOY #3
MISTER MIRACLE #3
THE BULLETEER #3
FRANKENSTEIN #3
THE SHINING KNIGHT #4
THE MANHATTAN GUARDIAN #4
ZATANNA #4
KLARION THE WITCHBOY #4
MISTER MIRACLE #4
THE BULLETEER #4
FRANKENSTEIN #4
SEVEN SOLDIERS OF VICTORY #1

This final way is the trickiest, but it won't be a problem if it's your third time around. In fact, the increased complexity is what makes this such a great way to go if you're already familiar with the story. And I pretty much guarantee that you'll still be picking up on all kinds of interesting stuff that you missed the first two times.

And as for a fourth time around? Come up with your own technique...and let me know how it went.

Enjoy.

I picked these up in original issue form. If you like Morrison's work, then you likely will appreciate this series. The structure and characters are interesting to say the least. While not groundbreaking or as deep Morrison's best works, the storyline is entertaining, and the writing is tight. It is an enjoyable ride that helps to reinvent and revitalize what I consider to be the rather stagnant DC Universe, and that's not such an easy task. I have no idea why the other reviewers here are blind to the kind of talent and intelligence this kind of effort requires.

Everyone else has covered the book in detail and done a fine job of it so not much more to add except for my two cents... I agree with the reviewer who said do not buy the book unless you plan on buying all four in the series.. the book was SO great, as was number two in the series, then number three then number four.... and this is where the "sigh" part comes in.. after so many fantastic little mini-stories put together into this amazing series of graphic novels you'd expect a "solid", satisfying ending .... but the bad guy was defeated SO quickly and SO abruptly I felt "cheated" at the end of graphic novel four in the series, almost as if the writers had decided " Okay, story's getting too long, better wrap it up quick"... the writers explain they were trying to make the end seem like it was written as if it came from a newspaper article's point of view in which case I could see it being a "just the facts" approach but still - overall in my humble opinion the ending was very weak.... it might still be worth purchasing just because the rest of the series is so great but... overall an awful ending that tarnishes would could have been a fantastic series... :(

Every artist represented in this volume (there are six) blew me away - each for a different reason. The artwork in the introductory chapter, by J. H. Williams III, seemed, to me, the most significantly accomplished of the lot. Keep in mind that I do not regularly read contemporary superhero stories, so I had no preconceptions about any of these artists. There's something distinctly Silver Age about Williams' storytelling techniques (and I mean "calm and collected and cool and almost formal Infantino and Oskner DC Silver Age," not "crazy genius Kirby and Ditko Marvel Silver Age," by the way), though the outer layer, the Photoshopped slickness, is (and probably has to be) thoroughly contemporary. In Williams' case, the slickness refuses to obscure an outstanding and versatile line, among other things. There's the scratchy Wrightson-like opening in a swamp. There's the wide, western landscape that reminded me, more than anything, of an old Mickey Mouse adventure digest comic I had when I was a kid - except, you know, more realistic, and creepier. Maybe it was just the cartoony prickly pears everywhere. Or something. Williams' storytelling and character-building skills are as strong as any I've seen in comics. These characters - ultimately dispensible - come alive from the first moment they appear. Surely Williams is considered one of the top stylists of contemporary mainstream comics, maybe even the top stylist. I was particularly impressed with the final battle sequence, in which a great deal of information about a large number of characters performing very complex manuevers was presented so calmly and well (and with such perfect graphic design) that I didn't even notice that, hey, wow, that must have been a difficult sequence to pull off, until I'd read it three or four times.

(the above is excerpted from my longer review at graphicnovelreview.com)

Grant Morrison can be a very difficult writer to read and I've been burned by him more than once. With his poetic flourishes, heavy use of symbolism and sometimes bewildering, bordering on nonsensical, dialog the reader is often left scratching his or her head in confusion. Such is the case with many who've read the Seven Soldiers of Victory. In order to give Morrison every opportunity I decided to read through the first volume twice. The second time through I proceeded very slowly trying to fully understand what the writer was trying to convey if that was even possible. Morrison always walks that fine line between profoundly deep and pseudo intellectual gobbledygook and occasionally he fails, sometimes spectacularly.

Seven Soldiers of Victory collects seven different four issue limited series all written by Grant Morrison and presents them in the order in which they were published. The new Seven Soldiers are made up of Mister Miracle, Zatanna, The Guardian, Klarion the Witchboy, Bulleteer, Shining Knight and Frankenstein. To call them a team would be a mistake because although they all fight different aspects of the same foe they operate completely independently. The enemy is a race called the Sheeda that either ride large spiders or tiny mosquito like insects. Volume one focuses exclusively on Klarion, The Guardian, Zatanna and the Shining Knight. Morrison manages to keep the Sheeda very subtle, mysterious and elusive. In one storyline the characters fight an enormous spider with an empty saddle but I don't remember the name Sheeda ever being mentioned. The Guardian has the least interaction and as yet no mention or implication of the Sheeda has been made. It works effectively in building up the intrigue.

The entire story revolves in around and under New York City (which I didn't think even existed in the DCU). The Shining Knight ends up inadvertently time traveling to The Big Apple while The Guardian finds himself in a bizarre subterranean realm where pirates of the subways travel in hidden railways to plunder the treasures of old New York. Below that lay the dark Puritanical village of Klarion the Witchboy whose residents raise the dead (referred to as Grundy's) to work clearing the rocks in which the city is encased. It's very interesting how Morrison creates this multilayered NYC to physically separate the action while keeping it within the same vicinity.

My final verdict is that Seven Soldiers is worth the extra time and effort it takes to understand what's going on. I've read other Grant Morrison stories that weren't worth a single read through but in this case Morrison managed to connect with me. Of course it's all contingent on the various threads tying together nicely in the end but at this point I'm hooked. All of the books contain dramatically different art styles but each one is beautiful. Grant Morrison has tended to be blessed with wonderful artists rendering his vision. There was one point in the Zatanna story where Morrison started spewing a bunch of theoretic scientific terms culled from string theory which I found rather tiresome and his frequent dabbling in poetry generally causes my eyes to glaze over but overall I give this book very high marks. This is one book where repeated readings increased my enjoyment considerably.

Grant Morrison's Seven Soldiers are absolutely nothing like the old version. Well, apart from the bit with Vigilante in it early on.

New versions of Klarion the Witch Boy, and the Shining Knight, and quite a lot of the supernatural alien type of influence.

Grant Morrison began this series intending to, I believe, emulate the critically popular but poorly recieved 'Fourth World' by Jack Kirby. In it, the titular 'Seven Soldiers' each have their own four issue title that all tie in together in a final 'book end' chapter. However, each story is enjoyable in its own right. Reading them together, you can pick up on the subtle interactions - what story happens when in comparison, how part x of one story ties in to part y of another.

However, it isn't the interactions, or even the superheroics, that make Morrison's 'Seven Soldiers of Victory' a stunning success - it's the human element. It's the inspiration of Jake Jordan as he learns to become the Manhattan Guardian. It's the building hope of Alix Harrower as she slowly rebuilds her life from tragedy. It's Klarion's charming exploration of his religion and the boundaries of his society. Every character tells a different kind of story, and while they may not be everyone's cup of tea, each story is charming and inspirational in it's own way...and they all build up to an even greater whole.