Up From Genre City

"Whoever Heard Of A Mad Horse?"

Shining Knight #1: "The Last Of Camelot"

We open on a weirded out version of the Knights Of The Round Table.  They're fighting demons with laser guns.  It's possible that all the things I said before about low-level personalized conflicts might have been a bit premature.  After all, what we're seeing here is a completely mad and epic battle between good and evil.

We're finally introduced to the Queen Of Terror here, as Justin (the Shining Knight in question) is seperated from the rest of the Knights and discovers an artifact that could turn the tide of the battle.  Although we're still early on in the series, there have been a lot of artifacts in the books, and they all serve as a kind of lynchpin to the events in the opening chapters of each series.  Strangely enough, they all can be found in the center of a strange body of water; ocassionally blue, occasionally green, occasionally toxic.  In Justin's case, it's cauldron surrounded by a green lake that, apparently, flows through time itself.

This seems to hold true as Justin and his talking flying horse Vanguard follow the cauldron into the lake and end up in present day Los Angeles.

Like all the first issues of the Seven Soldiers books, this is simply an introduction story, a set-up to propel our protaganist into the first of three relatively stand-alone adventures.  Mired as it was in celtic language and mythology, it was the least impressive book to me upon first reading.  It's clear that this first issue holds an enormous amount of detail about the true nature of the threat that the Seven Soldiers will be facing, but overall it didn't really knock my socks off.  Especially after the emminently relatable adventures of The Whip and her cabal in #0, this story about a Knight Errant just wasn't as engaging.  As a repository of detail, however, it works pretty well.

One of the better things about this particular story is the way that QoT seems to personify all of our fairy tales and legends about evil queens and stepmothers.  When she says "Let them relearn all their secret sciences and magicks," one gets the impression that all of our modern day myths are just trace memories of the atrocities that we see first hand in the opening scene of this issue: The Harrowing Of Avalon.  10,000 years later, we're left with a world with no mystery and no magic left.  Only darkness.

Not the most original of conceits, but it does have potential when you put it in the context of the rest of the series.  So, while it didn't leave as strong an impression as the prequel material, it does seem to be a necessary starting point to the series.  Onward and upward.  Or, in Justin's case, downward.

"Very Cool Stuff. I Suggest We Bond Fast And Learn To Work As A Team."

Seven Soldiers #0: "Weird Adventures"

The title alone pretty much sums up what's in store over the next year, and what's so appealing about this whole undertaking.  For a while now, Morrison has been telling stories with a very wide lens, about threats or adventures with an enormous scale.  Ali watches entire cities get razed to the ground before he finally gets the girl in Vimanarama.  Magneto decimates Manhattan in a single day in New X-Men.  Seaguy uncovers a conspiracy that spans a good 2/10ths of the entire solar system.

Seven Soldiers, from the very beginning, makes it clear that the stories we'll be reading are on a much smaller scale, even though a threat just as all-encompassing lurks in the background.  And it becomes clear almost immediately that this is a necessity.  Because we're dealing with the grass roots super-heroes here.  The kind who answer want ads and get caught up in trips to mystery swamps just to try and get the chance to do some good.

The story begins with the fate of True Thomas, who becomes I, Spyder.  We are also introduced to the Seven Bald Men who are apparently behind the formation of a team of Seven Soldiers who are, I guess, all that stands between Earth and The Queen Of Terror's Harrowing, who we still haven't officially been introduced to.  At this point, the threat that the Seven Soldiers will be tasked to face is still a mystery. We just know that it's sort of psychedelic, involves the Sheeda we've already met (and who show up in the mystery swamp very early on), and that it's naturally very very bad.

Oh, and this particular story has nothing to do with Seven Soldiers that the Mega-Series itself will be centered around.

I, Spyder, along with The Whip, Vigilante, Gimmix, Boy Blue, and Dyno-Mite Dan form the clearly-doomed-from-the-start team that we'll be following in this particular book.  it's not clear who the seventh member of the team would have been.  Vigilante describes him or her as getting "cold feet" at the last minute.

Vigilante, it should be noted, was a member of the original Seven Soldiers, of whom I know very little about.  One thing these little commentaries will not be focused on is the arcana of DC Continuity that Morrison quite adeptly brushes upon in pretty much every story in this series.  I wish I did know more about it, because it's quite fascinating the way he willfully introduces all this strangeness but never once lets the DC Universe off the hook by seperating these stories from its continuity.  It's clear that all this weird shit is going on all the time while Superman and Batman fight giant robots in Metropolis.

(Note: Most of this stuff is actually talked about in depth here.  Just click on the individual characters or the bookend links to get info on all the references.)

This is basically The Whip's story, and she's a perfect fit for this story.  Cynical on the surface but, deep down she's got an abiding love for the kind of madcap adventure that her level of super-hero is hardly ever privy to.  And that seems like an over-riding theme to this entire project.  We've been introduced, so far, to a series of characters who really just want to find that spark.  This bookend story features six of them, and they all end up dead.

What I found interesting was, in the closing pages, we learn that the Seven Bald Tailors Of The Space Time Continuum really figured that this was the team they needed to save the world.  "This wasn't meant to happen -- They were supposed to save the world."  What we'll be reading over the course of the next year or so is their Plan B.  It's sort of like seeing a commercial for that new Dance reality show on ABC with "celebrity" contestants that also features "celebrity" judges.  If the contestants are that low on the totem pole, one wonders where the judges stand.

So that's sort of where the reader is at at the end of this story.  "Man, these six guys were pretty half-assed.  What kind of shape are the backup guys going to be in?"  But what that sentiment really does is give the seven protagonists on the way an instant level of relatability and underdog status.  We're already rooting for them.

"...There's No Point In Asking, You'll Get No Reply..."

JLA: Classified #1-3: "Island Of The Mighty"/"Master Of Light"/"Seconds To Go"

While not officially part of the Seven Soliders project, Morrison's three issue inauguration of this new JLA spotlight series actually has a lot more raw data about the evil nemesis that's behind, you know, whatever it is that Seven Soldiers will eventually have to fight.  It introduces the Sheeda, which we'll be seeing a lot more of, and Neh-Buh-Loh, who shows up here and there. 

It also, by default, introduces the nemesis we first see in Shining Knight #1, when Neh-Buh-Loh drops this on us, as per his origin: "My original country is in the cold region of The Vampire Sun.  I was born of the eternal fogs, there in Last Country.  Neh-Buh-Loh, The Huntsman, am I, Master of the Wild Ride.  I prepare the way for my Queen Of Terror, who will come soon.  I will spread at her feet a carpet of skulls."  We see pretty much all of this in the opening sequence of Shining Knight #1, so it kind of makes sense that Justin's book is pretty much where the main SS story gets started.

This story also serves as a kind of antithesis to what Seven Soldiers is really all about.  This is a widescreen, big action story with Sci-Fi Closets, Gorilla Terrorists, and Hijacked Superheroes.  So, pretty much your typical Morrison JLA story.  What we'll see in Seven Soldiers is much more about the mundane aspects of superheroics, and the battles the protagonists engage in are on a much smaller and personal scale.  You'll notice that the threat in this story is global and that the only thing personalizing the conflict for, say, Batman, is the potential for destruction of everything, and by default, potentially something he has a personal investment in.  Everything that the Soldiers end up facing, threatens either themselves or someone they love directly.  An intersting and potentially important distinction.  And possibly the reason why a reader is automatically invested in a character that they have had no previous exposure to.

Also, just to note, Ed McGuiness is completely insane on this book.