Broken Frontier

Like six other strangers, Alix Harrower is about to be pulled from her life into a world she will hardly understand. Seven Soldiers, the year-long grand-crossover envisioned by Grant Morrison, stars a team of superheroes whose paths cross fleetingly, yet who’ve never met. The previous series have featured an odd array of out-of-place characters, revamped from comic book limbo, who may be meeting in the upcoming finale, Seven Soldiers #1.

Bulleteer, the latest of the seven miniseries to premiere, starts with a bang. The overlapping worlds of the individual soldiers have been lovingly crafted by Morrison. He creates a fantastical set of venn diagrams, with events shown in the various books from completely different perspectives in a dizzying and psychedelic crazy-quilt of action and excitement. However, as startling and fantastic as the previous books have been, the suburban, post-collegiate world of Alix and Lance Harrower is the most shocking.

Morrison paints the introduction to this new adventurer in a way that makes her seem appealing and conflicted. The Harrowers are a nice young couple who married out of college. Lance is working on something called smartskin technology, which could potentially make a person impervious to harm. When Lance suggests the idea of a husband and wife superhero team, Alix retorts "I can’t think of anything more horrible." It’s an ironic moment in more ways than one. Morrison crashes the life of Alix Harrower in the initial pages, as she survives her life-changing tragedy. For such a new creation, the Bulleteer shows the potential to be an amazingly realized, and delicately layered character.

She’s also one of the sexiest, especially as drawn by Yanick Paquette. The Bulleteer is as eye-catching as a classic pin-up, a vintage knockout. She’s a porcelain doll living in a shattered glass house. Paquette’s layouts highlight Alix’s bombastic physique. He dresses her in skimpy clothes, while never skimping on the emotional resonance of the reluctant heroine.

There’s an elegance to Michael Bair’s inks, especially when accompanied by Alex Sinclair’s searing colors. From the mundane to the otherworldly, the art shifts fluidly. The team draws the readers eye to all the right spots, showing a nuance not seen often in traditional superhero comics. The Bulleteer’s gorgeous metallic frame radiates a white-hot glow. At times it gives a wink to the notion that she might be the team’s token bombshell, yet in a seeming contradiction, a new kind of feminist figure.

This story stands out among the Seven Soldiers hyper-series, absolutely worthy of on-its-own reading, and Alix Harrower is a character worth seeing again. Bulleteer delivers a gut-shot, an unexpected explosion, the likes of which are seldom seen in comics today.