Broken Frontier

Seven heroes facing a threat unlike any the world has ever seen star in seven stories unlike any comics readers have ever read. It could only have come from one mind—Grant Morrison’s. 

Deep within a mysterious swamp, seven even more mysterious men grant Thomas Dalt super-powers—a deep affinity with spiders and considerable skills with a bow and arrow. For just what reason Thomas, a.k.a. I, Spyder, has been so bestowed is further clarified when Shelly Gaynor, grand-daughter of the Golden Age hero The Whip, decides to don the family tights again. In search of higher highs than busting D-list nogoodnicks, she answers an ad in a newspaper placed by the Vigilante, one of the Seven Soldiers of Victory from her grandfather’s era. The Vigilante is reassembling his team to destroy a giant spider laying waste to the American Southwest. With their own low-rent “spider man” in tow, the threat is easily defeated, but our seven heroes soon face an even greater threat—one that looks like the beginning of the end of everything.

First of all, reading SEVEN SOLDIERS #0 at least twice is a prerequisite. As with Grant Morrison’s recent JLA CLASSIFIED arc, successive reads of this first issue are not necessitated by the complexity of the story itself. While the plot is straight-ahead pulp-era bookended by a prologue and cliffhanger highly evocative of SANDMAN’s gothic fantasy vibe, the expertise with which several fiction genres and comics tropes are interwoven (the western, the lone urban vigilante, the super-group, the female superhero as sex-object, folklore and legends come to life, and the apocalypse itself, to name just a few) suggests that the need to read SEVEN SOLDIERS #0 more than once has everything to do with style and nothing to do with substance.

Morrison employs an extreme in media res approach that eschews exposition for mood setting, character development, and encapsulating a complete story within one issue. A side effect of what he calls “modular storytelling” is the reader thrown into the thick of things with little else other than comics history itself to orient him. Though perhaps as aware of the past as the characters are, both reader and characters are “lost” in the present. The difference is that the heroes Morrison introduces us to must tap into and live up the legacy of the past if any of them (and the world as well, it seems) is to have a future. And so, though we may never have seen these particular new characters before, it’s easy to instantly sympathize with them and give a damn about what will happen next. And it’s at this point that Morrison’s natural and prodigious storytelling skills—dead-on pacing, compelling characterization, making it all hang together—kick in and take over. If there’s any comics writer as capable as him at making the very experimental very entertaining, someone please let me know.

In many ways J. H. Williams is an ideal choice as artist. Yes, SEVEN SOLDIERS #0 borrows much from PROMETHEA, particularly its pulp / fantasy / modern mythology sensibility, but Williams’ style in this new title is more grounded. More to the point, it’s a  multi-layered, naturalistic approach that—because it nails every nuance in the script so well—provides a more than fitting counterpoint to the epic scale of the story. Definitely bringing his A-game, Williams uses every inch of the panel, cramming both frame and page with as much detail and information as they can bear. Sometimes images overflow panels. Sometimes pages totally lack them, gutters wiped out along with them. No matter. Panels for Williams are a means to an end, and if they have to be decomposed to tell the story, to communicate that which words can’t, then so be it. The reader won’t regret buying a comic with his work in it.

SEVEN SOLDIERS #0 is both a stylistic tour-de-force and great storytelling. Still, who knows where any of this is going? At this point I can’t say that I care. Instead, I’m trusting that Morrison and his collaborators will leave us with something that, if not as groundbreaking as he hopes, is at least as entertainingly mind-bending as he’s always given us.

- Dexter K. Flowers