| |
|
There are already eight different threads on Seven Soldiers. Here’s another. It’s for people who’ve read the series, and it’s dedicated to the modest proposal that the series, popular as it’s been on Barbelith, totally sucks. The main threads already more than a thousand posts long, full of speculation and spiral dynamics and subsequent sightings of the SS Seven, and within a few short days it’ll be full of the new issue. I felt a new thread would be better able to step aside from all that As The Series Continues… stuff and to concentrate more on being critical.
It hopefully goes without saying that this thread is full of SPOILERS.
Let’s begin with my expectations. I’ve gone off superheroes generally but loved the Morrison JLA, so I was there for the prologue. I was hoping for two things, both promised in pre-publicity:
1) Seven different mini-series, each telling a stand-alone story
2) One over-arching story 30 issues long
SS #0 was great. The sheer audacity of beginning a series about seven soldiers with six completely different soldiers, showing their recruitment and their massacre, was fantastic. The writing felt dense; no-one had written about the world attached to super-heroes before, their trade mags and neophytes and wannabes, the desire to be one and how you get into the game. In a few pages with The Whip we see the rewards, the price, and the addiction of it.
I enjoyed the first issues of the first four as well, but they weren’t fantastic. A single issue prologue was better than all four. With the completion of the initial four minis, it became clear we’d been sold a partial pup. A stand-alone story doesn’t conclude with “A Soldier Will Die! Will it be etc.” The series felt like try-outs for new characters, a way of using some of the concepts from the famous Morrison Notebooks without really expanding on them much. And the problems I complained about in the Authority thread – storytelling, lazy splashes, weak plots – were becoming motifs.
Unanswered questions: Why, exactly, was Zatanna’s ideal man the Herald of the Apocalypse? Why did their worries about the Sheeda lead to her father’s books? If he’s the Herald, how come he’s a shapeshifting demon a month later? What was the point of that Phantom Stranger cameo? Why’s
In the Guardian, Soapy’s map is torn from his back by No-Beard. The next time we see him, he’s about to be roasted alive by All-Beard, whose name he invoked pages earlier. What happened there, then?
Why exactly does Helligan take Alix to see the Iron Hand? To get something against her sister’s husband-to-be? I couldn’t see any reason why she’d link the dead Soldiers with her sister, apart from the coincidence that gets dropped in during conversation.
Cliché: A fake attack serving as The Guardian’s interview? Unoriginal. The superhero’s family getting coincidentally kidnapped in his very first case? Very unoriginal.
Unnecessary spreads: Currently re-reading the series (in the vague hope that maybe it wouldn’t suck) the next issue I picked up was Klarion #4. Three one-page splashes and a double-page spread. That’s just less than a quarter of the comics length, for an issue which admittedly is the climax but isn’t in any way widescreen. In the issues I’ve read since, two full-page shots is the absolute minimum.
That’s not to say they’re always badly chosen – the two-pager at the end of Guardian #3 is powerful, a lot of the opening splashes are fun. But they’re appearing far too often and they’re not, as in Ellis’s Authority run or similar, a part of the storytelling technique. They read like a writer’s shortcut – big, wordless page here, make it plenty dramatic. Another one down.
Storytelling issues: These have been discussed at length on Barbelith already. In Klarion #3, as discussed on here, the whole sequence with the museum requires a couple of reads to puzzle it out. Is it closed or open? Why does Teekl have to watch the guards when the kids are in there already?
In Guardian #4, the events that split the Newsboy Army were recounted in a page, mainly a panel, and required extensive decoding before we knew what happened. Mr Miracle #2’s first few pages are a complete trainwreck. Who’s where? What’s going on? The fill-in artist’s probably to blame for that one, but when the storytelling troubles begin with JLA Classified and run right through, then the issues aren’t all with the artists.
The Guardian, in #3, lands in a simulated world which we’re told about in great detail. It sounds intriguing. This is a representation of Earth which truly is representative.
Until we get to the story, which is the same old theme-park-robots-gone-bad rubbish that’s been done so often before. Australia’s about the size of Fred’s Weather Map. Most of the robots are comedy Europeans in national costume.
In Bulleteer #1, Alix survived because she was wearing her ring. Her husband died because he wasn’t. This was presumably meant to be clear, with various close-ups of hands and rings, but was hell to puzzle out. In #4, there’s a storytelling screw-up which destroys the whole issue – Sally Sonics can’t grow up. But she’s drawn as a grown woman. She’s got boobs; okay, not on the scale of Alix’s Boob War specials, but certainly enough that the creepy paedophile feel we’re picking up from the dialogue is entirely absent from the art.
And those are just the best examples of muddled storytelling. Far more often, there’s nothing that can be particularly pointed to but it seems lazy. Any given issue, after the first four or five, does no more than it should and a lot less. The only rereading in the comics is to work out what happened when it’s not made clear. There’s nothing extra to pick up. There’s only one layer. Once the series is going, every chapter feels like a first draft. We found out more about super-wannabes in a few pages of SS#1 than in the whole of Bulleteer #3.
The fragments of the overarching story looked good, but they weren’t backed up. The members of the Newsboy Army looked set to appear more often, and didn’t. The seven treasures of the series were only intermittently referenced. The Sheeda didn’t turn up half the time. It was left to Frankenstein to dot all the I’s and cross the t’s – taking out the Sheeda invasion in #1, Melmoth in #2, getting a solo adventure in #3 (Hey, kids! This is what a Frankenstein series would be like!) and taking out Nebula Man and the Sheeda forces in #4. The death of Nebula Man’s particularly weak – the seeds of his doom were planted in a prologue which hadn’t been referenced until now.
You can do a single large story by telling the individual stories of disparate characters who rarely, if ever, meet. I can’t think of an example in comics, but the middle two books of James Ellroy’s LA Quartet do this, and William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy pulls it off, especially Count Zero.
These criticisms are premature, obviously. SS#1’s out this week and could, I suppose, brilliantly tie everything together. I can’t see it, though. That’s not exactly a Morrison specialty, after all. I imagine the last issue will be enjoyable, and should answer a few of the dangling questions, but it’ll leave a lot behind.
The opinion that Morrison’s spreading himself too thin has surfaced over the last few days on Barbelith. (Grant Morrison Bites, Seven Soldiers Sucks… please, keep the next thread attacking GM or his work in line with the oral contempt theme and say something Blows.) It fits; this period of work, much of which I’m skipping or Byrne-stealing, reminds me of Invisibles v2 when there was too much work for it all to be good. There were obviously parts of SS I enjoyed. Zatanna’s characterisation was perfect throughout, Frankenstein captured that horror-pulp mood, Klarion and the Guardian were wonderful creations. Overall, though, the ideas and characters that are always there in GM's work are badly served by the actual writing. |
|
|
