Author: Grant Morrison
Publisher: DC
My take: Well-written, but definitely not my cup of tea
Spoiler-free synopsis: The stories of seven different people, who pretty much never meet, but who all have a piece in stopping a great evil
And
Title: Seven Soldiers of Victory Archives 2
Author: Various
Publisher: DC
My take: Oh God. Golden Age comics. That’s really all I have to say.
Spoiler-free synopsis: A loose collection of heroes group together to stop the machinations of various and sundry golden-age baddies.
Seven Soldiers 1-4
Starting off, I apologize for this being not as detailed as I might like. I finished it a while ago and just now got around to writing this, but I’ve returned the books, so I can’t use them for reference like I usually do in these.
The book follows seven characters: Shining Knight, Guardian, Bulleteer, Klarion, Frankenstein, Zatanna and Mister Miracle. And the problem with a story being told from this many disjointed viewpoints simultaneously is that if you’re not paying attention equally to them all the overall story just won’t make as much sense.
And I was not paying attention to them all, I’m sorry to say.
Guardian’s parts were pretty good, but really, REALLY tragedy-heavy (at least for the tone it gave me at the start). Shining Knight was hard to deal with because it was just text. It was so much talking and explaining and considering, and I’m just thinking “GET on your FLYING HORSE and CUT A BITCH!” I loves the way Klarion’s parts looked but found myself going, “Wait, what?” quite a lot. Frankenstein’s was fun, Bulleteer’s was… eh, okay, Zatanna and Mister Miracle’s were both okay, but they felt a little out of place to me because they’re both an order of magnitude higher on the DC importance chain than any of the others (as far as I can tell, I’m still new to this).
The overall story involves Darkseid essentially selling Earth to the Sheeda (I thought Guy Gardener was the last certified owner of Earth?) in exchange for… someone, another superhero (I think he was supposed to be one of or the first superhero – this is where having the reference material is helpful).
All in all, I look at this the way I look at Sandman. I think it’s well written, but the characters just didn’t work for me personally. I’d definitely recommend giving the first volume a try. You’ll know pretty quick if there’s something there to keep you going, and if there is… well, the art is definitely worth the price of admission on its own, especially in Klarion’s sections of the story.
Seven Soldiers of Victory Archives 2
Almost unrelated is the Seven Soldiers of Victory Anthology 2. This earlier incarnation of the team, in the golden age, was a bit more straightforward. You have seven characters again: Shining Knight, Star-Spangled Kid, Stripsey, Green Arrow, Speedy, Vigilante, the Crimson Avenger and Wing, his sidekick.
Wait… that’s eight. And I want to pretend it’s six.
Yes, that’s the first thing I have to say about this – Wing is not a character, he’s a horrid racial stereotype of a Chinese man, and I literally could not read any of the sections with the two of them in it – or when I did I had to skim over those panels. It was awful – truly, utterly awful. I understand where these things come from, but seriously…
So, forgive me if you hear little about them. And as for the rest… well, there wasn’t a whole lot of characterization. Or drama. Or sense, at times. And reading it today, I find myself laughing at dialogue that probably wasn’t intended to be funny.
Really, the only reason I liked this book – and excepting the Crimson Avenger’s parts I did like it – was the sheer, joyful campiness of the whole thing. I mean, of course there’s time travel (How about that Leonardo DaVinci)
And there’s some intense moments where our heroes – most often Vigilante – use never-before-seen tactics to escape from the bad guys, such as avoiding a gunshot by ducking out of the way, or… well, I’ll let the bad guys explain it:
((Seriously, their big secret attack was to lasso people? I swear the cowboy had some of the most WTF escapes in the book))
Star-spangled Kid is supposed to be super smart and certainly looks the part when compared to his sidekick. They feel sort of like a prototypical Hawk and Dove, specifically the Halls, just less developed. Also, the Kid thinks himself something of a wit.
The Green Arrow and his sidekick are pretty good, if shallow representations of who they’d become. Vigilante is a… cowboy. And Shining Knight is pretty consistently the most useful member of the team. He’s portrayed as smart, pretty calm and collected and observant. I’m sort of sad he faded out after the war, since it seems like there really might have been a place for him something like Cap in Marvel. I guess they have Superman for that role though.
All in all? Not that great, and I imagine if I were more familiar with Golden Age comics I wouldn’t really like it. But for the sheer novelty of the story style, I’m ashamed to say I really *do* like it.
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