Kerry Birmingham
Mar 13, 2006, 04:46 am
<a href="http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/previews/dc/0306/SevenSoldiersMrMiracleCv4.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/previews/dc/0306/SevenSoldiersMrMiracleCv4t.jpg" hspace=10 align=left alt="Seven Soldiers: Mister Miracle #4"></a>Reviewer: Kerry Birmingham, birmy@juno.com
Story Title: "Forever Flavored Man"
Not a Hoax, Not a Dream, Not an Imaginary Story... but possibly all of the above.
Writer: Grant Morrison
Artist: Freddie E. Williams II
Colorist: Dave McCaig
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Assoc. Editor: Michael Siglain
Editor: Peter Tomasi
Published by: DC Comics (www.dccomics.com)
New Gods Created by: Jack Kirby
Towards the end of his forty-plus issue run on New X-Men, I was starting to have my doubts. Whether or not he had actually planned it from the beginning, I was beginning to think he couldn’t bring it home: too many disparate plots, too many disparate characters, and jumping the final story arc ahead by a hundred years or so didn’t do much for the exposition-starved reader. Then, in his final issue, he hooked it all together... and it took three whole panels. There were loose ends, sure, but he managed to make the big picture a sensible, if typically convoluted, one.
Much the same is happening with Seven Soldiers of Victory, Morrison’s no less ambitious take on a bevy of obscure DC characters. A series of seven four-issue mini-series, each has focused on one character’s largely oblivious role in the murderous Sheeda civilization’s infestation of Earth. Seven different characters, seven different tones, from the high magic of Zatanna to the Puritan horrors of Klarion to the medieval fantasy of Shining Knight, and so on. The biggest question mark was Mister Miracle: already well established in the ensemble of Jack Kirby’s New Gods, a new take on the character seemed unnecessary and, my personal taste being what it is, I had never cottoned to any of Kirby’s New Gods/Fourth World stuff. Kirby’s solo work never quite had the life of his Stan Lee collaborations (and Stan at least had collaborators of Kirby’s caliber to elevate his work). The New Gods always struck me as sort of silly, clowns in zig-zagged unitards with death on a pair of cross-country skis. Many admirers and occasional resurgences in popularity prove me wrong on that one.
This is not Kirby’s Mr. Miracle, aka Scott Free, escape artist. This is Shilo Norman, who uses the name, costume, and technology of Mr. Miracle to live as an Evel Knievel-like celebrity daredevil. Instead of jumping over cars in a motorbike, he’s evading guided missiles and sidestepping black holes. Things have been weird for Shilo since that black hole escape, as his life has been slowly corrupted by warring factions of New Gods and their evil counterparts, manifested here as a gang of homeless cripples and a slick, Suge Knight-style gang of hustlers. Shilo doesn’t know what’s going on, but he knows he’s losing: “Dark Side” has defeated, and put in an inescapable situation: the Life Trap, which forces him to relive infinite variations of his own life – life, of course, being the trap that follows you wherever you go.
Like most of Morrison’s stories, there’s a lot of layers at work here. There are more unreal stories in Seven Soldiers, but this one is the most surreal, like David Lynch doing fetish superheroes. There’s no distinction between conscious and subconscious, fact and fiction; Shilo’s life has gone to hell and back, and the reader is right there with him, just as informed (or uninformed) and just as very, very confused. This is Shilo’s personal nightmare scenario, having watched his friends and family degraded and tainted by Dark Side until he can’t even rely on himself. The Kirbyian elements are all here, and, though veiled, are apparent to anyone with a knowledge of the New Gods characters. Mother boxes, Desaad, Metron, Anti-Life, the whole bit. These characters, even in these different permutations, are obvious enough for the fans but casual readers might be left in the dark; a passing knowledge of those character dynamics probably goes a long way towards parsing the cosmic conflict into which Shilo is drawn. Make no mistake: Seven Soldiers is dense, full of subtext and metatext in service to the individual stories and the Sheeda invasion arc, and jumping in this late is a mistake for even diehard Kirbyites with fond memories of the characters.
The textured storytelling is leavened by the light linework of Feddie Williams II. This was the only Seven Soldiers series to have abrupt changes in artists, moving from Pacual Ferry to Billy Dallas Patton until settling on Williams. Ferry has the experience and an easily appreciable style, and it would have been nice to see him finish out the series, but Williams does a good job of pinch-hitting in a style similar enough to Ferry’s to make the change almost negligible. Williams’s art is largely unknown to me, but my initial impression is that his art skews a little too much toward manga-esque exaggerations, but a little polish on his perspective and anatomy work might turn an already agreeable artist into something work seeking out.
Not unlike those three panels in New X-Men, the last few pages of the book bring much of Shilo’s tribulations into focus. Without spoiling anything, it’s the sort of ending that would normally be considered a categorically hack and taboo plot device, but in Morrison’s hands, even a tired old chestnut like the trick ending here makes sense. It doesn’t tie up everything (where IS Scott Free, anyway?) – there is, after all, a character-inclusive one-shot to wrap things up when all is said and done – but it contextualizes Shilo’s very bad week and ties together the more madcap aspects of his struggle to stay sane in the middle of Godly conflict.
It’s hard to recommend this issue based solely on its own merits, or this series as a whole outside the context of Seven Soldiers. It’s easy to recommend, however, as part of the growing catalog of comics in which Grant Morrison turns traditional concepts in comics into his own experiment. This is more for Morrison fans, not Kirby devotees. Morrison’s tendency is to redefine his stories and his characters as he goes, and the finale of Mister Miracle is no exception to this. The mind-bending can be a lot to bear, and even Morrison’s considerable sense of dialogue is sometimes off (“Become what you were born to be,” one character intones, presumably with the voice of Hugo Weaving from The Return of the King). Those willing to go along with his perverse metaphysics and flights of fancy will enjoy this; those with a casual interest should wait for the trade paperback and prepare themselves for the off-kilter cosmology brewed by Kirby and fermented into something else entirely by Morrison.
ART:
http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/dcfull.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/dcfull.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/dcfull.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/dchalf.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/dcnone.jpg
STORY:
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OVERALL:
http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/dcfull.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/dcfull.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/dcfull.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/dcfull.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/dcnone.jpg
There’s no escaping value! BUY at X-WORLD and SAVE! (http://x-worldcomics.com/yourvirtualstore/shopexd.asp?id=18765)
Story Title: "Forever Flavored Man"
Not a Hoax, Not a Dream, Not an Imaginary Story... but possibly all of the above.
Writer: Grant Morrison
Artist: Freddie E. Williams II
Colorist: Dave McCaig
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Assoc. Editor: Michael Siglain
Editor: Peter Tomasi
Published by: DC Comics (www.dccomics.com)
New Gods Created by: Jack Kirby
Towards the end of his forty-plus issue run on New X-Men, I was starting to have my doubts. Whether or not he had actually planned it from the beginning, I was beginning to think he couldn’t bring it home: too many disparate plots, too many disparate characters, and jumping the final story arc ahead by a hundred years or so didn’t do much for the exposition-starved reader. Then, in his final issue, he hooked it all together... and it took three whole panels. There were loose ends, sure, but he managed to make the big picture a sensible, if typically convoluted, one.
Much the same is happening with Seven Soldiers of Victory, Morrison’s no less ambitious take on a bevy of obscure DC characters. A series of seven four-issue mini-series, each has focused on one character’s largely oblivious role in the murderous Sheeda civilization’s infestation of Earth. Seven different characters, seven different tones, from the high magic of Zatanna to the Puritan horrors of Klarion to the medieval fantasy of Shining Knight, and so on. The biggest question mark was Mister Miracle: already well established in the ensemble of Jack Kirby’s New Gods, a new take on the character seemed unnecessary and, my personal taste being what it is, I had never cottoned to any of Kirby’s New Gods/Fourth World stuff. Kirby’s solo work never quite had the life of his Stan Lee collaborations (and Stan at least had collaborators of Kirby’s caliber to elevate his work). The New Gods always struck me as sort of silly, clowns in zig-zagged unitards with death on a pair of cross-country skis. Many admirers and occasional resurgences in popularity prove me wrong on that one.
This is not Kirby’s Mr. Miracle, aka Scott Free, escape artist. This is Shilo Norman, who uses the name, costume, and technology of Mr. Miracle to live as an Evel Knievel-like celebrity daredevil. Instead of jumping over cars in a motorbike, he’s evading guided missiles and sidestepping black holes. Things have been weird for Shilo since that black hole escape, as his life has been slowly corrupted by warring factions of New Gods and their evil counterparts, manifested here as a gang of homeless cripples and a slick, Suge Knight-style gang of hustlers. Shilo doesn’t know what’s going on, but he knows he’s losing: “Dark Side” has defeated, and put in an inescapable situation: the Life Trap, which forces him to relive infinite variations of his own life – life, of course, being the trap that follows you wherever you go.
Like most of Morrison’s stories, there’s a lot of layers at work here. There are more unreal stories in Seven Soldiers, but this one is the most surreal, like David Lynch doing fetish superheroes. There’s no distinction between conscious and subconscious, fact and fiction; Shilo’s life has gone to hell and back, and the reader is right there with him, just as informed (or uninformed) and just as very, very confused. This is Shilo’s personal nightmare scenario, having watched his friends and family degraded and tainted by Dark Side until he can’t even rely on himself. The Kirbyian elements are all here, and, though veiled, are apparent to anyone with a knowledge of the New Gods characters. Mother boxes, Desaad, Metron, Anti-Life, the whole bit. These characters, even in these different permutations, are obvious enough for the fans but casual readers might be left in the dark; a passing knowledge of those character dynamics probably goes a long way towards parsing the cosmic conflict into which Shilo is drawn. Make no mistake: Seven Soldiers is dense, full of subtext and metatext in service to the individual stories and the Sheeda invasion arc, and jumping in this late is a mistake for even diehard Kirbyites with fond memories of the characters.
The textured storytelling is leavened by the light linework of Feddie Williams II. This was the only Seven Soldiers series to have abrupt changes in artists, moving from Pacual Ferry to Billy Dallas Patton until settling on Williams. Ferry has the experience and an easily appreciable style, and it would have been nice to see him finish out the series, but Williams does a good job of pinch-hitting in a style similar enough to Ferry’s to make the change almost negligible. Williams’s art is largely unknown to me, but my initial impression is that his art skews a little too much toward manga-esque exaggerations, but a little polish on his perspective and anatomy work might turn an already agreeable artist into something work seeking out.
Not unlike those three panels in New X-Men, the last few pages of the book bring much of Shilo’s tribulations into focus. Without spoiling anything, it’s the sort of ending that would normally be considered a categorically hack and taboo plot device, but in Morrison’s hands, even a tired old chestnut like the trick ending here makes sense. It doesn’t tie up everything (where IS Scott Free, anyway?) – there is, after all, a character-inclusive one-shot to wrap things up when all is said and done – but it contextualizes Shilo’s very bad week and ties together the more madcap aspects of his struggle to stay sane in the middle of Godly conflict.
It’s hard to recommend this issue based solely on its own merits, or this series as a whole outside the context of Seven Soldiers. It’s easy to recommend, however, as part of the growing catalog of comics in which Grant Morrison turns traditional concepts in comics into his own experiment. This is more for Morrison fans, not Kirby devotees. Morrison’s tendency is to redefine his stories and his characters as he goes, and the finale of Mister Miracle is no exception to this. The mind-bending can be a lot to bear, and even Morrison’s considerable sense of dialogue is sometimes off (“Become what you were born to be,” one character intones, presumably with the voice of Hugo Weaving from The Return of the King). Those willing to go along with his perverse metaphysics and flights of fancy will enjoy this; those with a casual interest should wait for the trade paperback and prepare themselves for the off-kilter cosmology brewed by Kirby and fermented into something else entirely by Morrison.
ART:
http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/dcfull.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/dcfull.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/dcfull.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/dchalf.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/dcnone.jpg
STORY:
http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/dcfull.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/dcfull.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/dcfull.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/dcfull.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/dcnone.jpg
OVERALL:
http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/dcfull.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/dcfull.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/dcfull.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/dcfull.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/dcnone.jpg
There’s no escaping value! BUY at X-WORLD and SAVE! (http://x-worldcomics.com/yourvirtualstore/shopexd.asp?id=18765)