There are many words one could use to describe Seven Soldiers the project. Ambitious is one. Gloriously insane and potentially unwieldy are a few more. Can Morrison really wrangle all of these crazy, 4-issue miniseries together into one coherent tale, or is it destined to be a delightful mess filled with beautiful, wonderful bits thanks to the talents of the creators involved? If Seven Soldiers #0 is any indicator, I'll be betting on the former. This is a tough one to describe, a genre-breaker in some ways, despite a very conventional backbone, and the fact that it is both difficult to put into words and yet works perfectly well is an indication that Morrison knows his way around breaking genre conventions without destroying the narrative. J.H. Williams, meanwhile, gives every indication that Morrison and editor Peter Tomasi have chosen their art talent well, picking out names who not only have beautiful, distinctive art styles but who can think and create on the level which they will need to in order to make Seven Soldiers a success.
Seven Soldiers #0 is at once the prologue to a larger tale and a self-contained story. It has the "gathering the team" structure of many first issues, combined with the epic battle that you usually see in last issues or shaking-up story arcs and it even ends on a cliffhanger more akin to your middle of the story issues or, perhaps more appropriately, to the pulp serials that asked the audience to come back next week to find out what happened next. Structurally, Seven Soldiers is a blend of different influences, just conventional enough to hook in the superhero audience and yet off-kilter enough that the indy crowd should give it a look as well. Whether you're looking for good interpersonal team dynamics, solid action, big crazy ideas or just some interesting speculation on the nature of fiction and heroic archetypes, Seven Soldiers has all of those things.
If Seven Soldiers reminds me of anything, it's the strange anti-hero yet reverent hero worship vibe that Starman had, filtered through the larger-than-life scattershot sensibilities of Morrison's run on New X-Men or JLA. Morrison's heroes are very real, given to smoking, sex, drinking and lesser vices like rampant fanboyism or just plain arrogance, but their gimmicks and powers are very over-the-top and unreal, including a man who bought powers off the Internet and a woman whose motivation comes largely from thrill-seeking and whose abilities come largely through a lucky inheritance from her grandfather. Morrison creates five new characters in this story, and puts a new spin on two others (one of whom was an important cast member from Starman), and the story never feels crowded and the characters never feel shorted. I'm kind of amazed, actually, at how much goes on in this story given the relatively limited space, and I'm quite sure even after two read-throughs that there are more layers yet undiscovered.
Of course, Morrison had the advantage in doing a book this tightly packed that he had J.H. Williams, just coming off a run on the superdense, weird philosophical book Promethea. Seven Soldiers is not quite as out there as Promethea, and has a much more conventional narrative, but the same ultra-detailed, multi-layered approach that Williams brought to Promethea is very much in evidence in the pages of Seven Soldiers. His realistic take on the characters would seem likely to work against the wild, unreal vibe that Morrison is going for, but Williams and and Stewart are just as good at presenting vivid, unreal elements like giant spiders or mystery man gimmicks as they are at doing believable city landscapes or costumes that have all the wrinkles and folds of real clothing. There's a nice, somewhat skewed reality to Williams' designs (I love the bondage leather look of The Whip and the grizzled Eastwood-ian appeal of Vigilante) that perfectly encapsulates the balance of story here. Realism, in terms of being true to the characters and to how humans think and act, is paramount, and yet larger-than-life concepts and how normal humans would react to them are just as important.
So Seven Soldiers seems like an unbelievably ambitious project, and one that few people besides Morrison would have the commercial clout to pull off. I mean, seriously, seven 4-issue miniseries plus two bookends, running more than a year in length before the entire story is told? It's madness. And yet... if this is an indication of the quality and creativity we can expect from this event, I will be there for every issue, as soon as I can get them into my hands. Morrison has done his bit to shake up two of the big franchises at Marvel and DC, now he's moving on to something a little bigger, trying to shake up the entire universe by using less familiar characters. It's a tough act to pull off, but everything I've seen from him recently leads me to believe he can do it, and Seven Soldiers #0 only serves to reward my faith. 10/10
