Broken Frontier

This article is part of a series of spotlight articles on the winners of the Broken Frontier Awards 2005.

“How do you know you’ve become a superhero and not just a crazy fetish person with a death wish?” asked Shelly Gaynor, the heir to the mantle of The Whip. After a day of chasing bank robbers on atomic powered pogo-sticks she licks her wounds and enjoys a glass of wine. Shelly’s been able to turn her superhero fetish into a career, crafting a workout regimen called Body Thunder, or How I turned my body into a living weapon to beat the 21st Century Blues. She still longs for more. She seeks out her destiny by answering a classified ad placed by the original super-cowboy who was once called The Vigilante.

There’s a story that begins in Slaughter Swamp and Miracle Mesa. Six z-grade adventurers and wanna-bes team up to hunt down the Monster of Miracle Mesa. Five of them are unaware that behind the scenes they’re being guided by Seven Unknown Men. None of them know that they’re completely out of their depth.

Grant Morrison, famous for his chaos-magick inspired epic The Invisibles, and even better known for his mainstream super-hero work on titles like JLA and New X-Men, sought to create a challenge that only he’d be able to undertake. The challenge was multi-tiered and perhaps only wholly apparent to those fans that had followed his work over the decades. Like the occultists credited for the invention of Opera, Morrison endeavored to create an epic so gargantuan that it would leave audiences’ minds blown wide open. Morrison’s revitalizing of the Seven Soldiers of Victory is perhaps the largest accomplishment in traditional superhero story-telling. A story with a structure too large for one series, the Seven Soldiers event is presented as seven four-issue mini-series, book-ended by two magnificent special issues with art by J.H. Williams.

It seems improbable, but Morrison has created a super-team who never meet. Morrison has revised and revived some of DC’s most obscure characters: Klarion the Witch Boy, Guardian, Shining Knight, The Bulleteer, Mister Miracle and Frankenstein, along with Justice League alumnus Zatanna; and given them an adventure that they can’t handle on their own. For the fullest experience of the series, readers would have to commit themselves to thirty issues published over the course of 2005 and into early 2006. Each of the individual series would be uniquely envisioned by the comics world’s hot names and fresh talents: Simone Bianchi, Ryan Sook, Frazer Irving, Cameron Stewart, Yanick Paquette, Pasqual Ferry and Doug Mahnke.

Each of the seven mini-series is a complete experience unto itself, yet presents merely a facet of a larger imagination. The seven heroes each have their own concerns, foibles and mysteries, while all are carried together on the currents of a grander destiny.

The story is even too big for its own series. It started with the first Justice League: Classified story, written by Morrison and with art by Ed McGuinness, when the Sheeda were first unleashed on the world. Batman had teamed up with former members of the Global Guardians, now calling themselves The UltraMarine Corps, against the homicidal monster, Gorilla Grodd. When the Sheeda were first shown, tiny riders on insect steeds, the readers never knew that they were witnessing the beginning of a bigger and bolder new adventure.

The first was the time-lost knight, Sir Justin, accompanied only by a sword and a talking, winged horse. Drawn in a lush, romantic style by Simone Bianchi, The Shining Knight revealed only the first glimpse of the scope of this battle. Soon to follow was the urban outlandishness of The Manhattan Guardian, with streetwise art by Cameron Stewart. Jake Jordan is a disgraced cop who takes on a job as an adventuring reporter. After an adventure fighting New York’s subway pirates, Jake continues battling only to find that things are not anywhere close to being as simple as they seem.

The subsequent appearances by the remaining five soldiers would seem wildly mismatched in the pages of a single title: a sheltered witch-boy, an erudite monster, a superstar escape artist, a trophy-wife betrayed and the most powerful former member of the Justice League of America, now attending group therapy sessions. Most of these heroes (or their forebears) are so obscure that only the most rabid of fans might be able to claim familiarity with most of them. Even still, Morrison takes the care to craft their characters lovingly.

It’s not simply for characterization that Seven Soldiers must be recognized, nor for the magnificence of its scale. Hidden within this prismatic structure is a full realization of a notion that was merely introduced by the time-tripping characters of The Invisibles, paraphrased:

Reality is the intersection of opposing points of view.

Morrison appears to have simulated a picture of a reality in the pages of a ridiculous comic book. Seven Soldiers creates an intricate Venn diagram of events and characters that overlap and intersect to bridge the stunningly disparate points of view of the soldiers to the worlds created in the minds of the readers.

Seven Soldiers is a mind-boggling achievement. For all of their bold characterizations, stylish experimentation, the apparent love of classic comics, as well as the leviathan girth of the story itself, the adventures of these obscure heroes combine a crystalline structure with an outrageous sense of whimsy. Morrison’s challenge seems certain: entertain and illuminate readers while reinventing serial story-telling in the process.