Comixfan Forums - View Single Post - COMICS FOR DUMMIES #11: THE MORRISON-FREE SEVEN SOLDIERS

Joel Phillips · Nov 23, 2004, 06:04 pm

<img src="http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/logos/cfdlogo.jpg" align=left border=0 alt="Comics For Dummies logo">By Raul Grau, RJacknite@aol.com

The Morrison-Free Seven Soldiers

In February, Grant Morrison will do what Grant Morrison does best... namely, taking existing, but underutilized concepts, and refashioning them with a touch of existential imagination. While it may turn out to be his most expansive work, Seven Soldiers is just the latest in a long line of revamps perpetrated by Morrison. Some built upon the foundation of the past, but simply slapped on a fresh coat of paint. In other instances, he has torn down the house almost entirely, leaving only the parts he wanted to rebuild around (be it a door, or a chunk of north wall, or a depressed metal man). So while we wait to see who the Seven Soldiers are, let's look back at who the Seven Soldiers of Victory were... offensive stereotypes and all.

The year was 1940, and DC had brought together their greatest heroes into one cohesive, fighting unit. Of course, I mean cohesive in the sense that they would come together as a group on a bimonthly basis, then subdivide into solo adventures, before reforming to... discuss their solo adventures (and learn a valuable life lesson), but the Justice Society of America was still the first example of a comic book superteam. Their membership contained the most powerful and best-known crimefighters of the era... Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern, and so on. So it is no wonder that when the Seven Soldiers of Victory were brought together into one cohesive, fighting unit, a year later, their lineup was a bit... lacking.

With no Men of Steel or Amazonian Princesses to call their own, the Soldiers had to make due with heroes of the non-powered variety, with the remaining slots filled by a few of their eager, young sidekicks. There was the (clean-shaven) archer Green Arrow, his adopted (drug-free) son Speedy, the medieval holdout Shining Knight, the singing cowboy Vigilante, the aptly named Star-Spangled Kid, his embarrassingly older sidekick Stripesy, and the Green Hornet-esque Crimson Avenger... not exactly the stuff of legends. Occasionally, the Seven would have an eighth in the form of Crimson Avenger's stereotypically Oriental limousine driver, Kato... no, wait, I mean Wing, the unofficial Soldier.

I would say that from 1941 through 1945, the Soldiers shared many, and varied adventures, but that would be quite misleading. Leading Comics was certainly the regular home for the stalwart Seven, but, as a quarterly title, only fourteen issues were released in that four-year period. Even their team name was in a state of flux, since, at random intervals, the Seven Soldiers were termed Law's Legionnaires, but that name never really took hold, for obvious reasons. Sure, they had some memorable battles, including their clash with Dr. Doome (a full twenty years before a phonetically similar villain reared his metal face), but #14 was their last as a combo platter of justice, since the very next issue transformed the title into a funny animal book. Not being funny animals themselves (not even Stripesy, who had the perfect name for funny animal status), the Soldiers were relegated to their solo features... assuming, of course, they still had solo features.

Crimson Avenger was the first to fall, losing his (and walking, talking offensive stereotype Wing's) spot in Detective Comics in 1944. Stripesy was edged out as Star-Spangled Kid's sidekick in 1948 by Merry ('The Girl of 1,000 Gimmicks'), and that must have been pretty humiliating for a full-grown man who dressed as a flag. In the category of karmic boomerangs, The Kid ended up losing his perch to Merry a few issues later. Shining Knight (and his aptly named winged horse, Winged Victory) was removed from the pages of Adventure Comics in 1951. Vigilante managed to outlast the others, as a Stetson-wearing, fast-drawing, harmonizing cowpoke fit right in with the general Western vibe, but he too would eventually fold, in 1954.

Green Arrow and his reverse-colored little buddy proved to be the longevity champions, but, at some indefinable point around 1955, he apparently stopped being the Golden Age millionaire playboy (and Native American folklorist) Oliver Queen, and became the Silver Age millionaire playboy (and wannabe swashbuckler) Ollie Queen. This new Queen would go on to join the fledgling Justice League of America, and he had received a brand, spanking new origin (full of cruising and boozing). Plus, he never seemed to mention his embarrassing old war buddies from the Soldiers (but really, who would?), so we can assume that he was a completely separate fellow (confusing, isn't it?). So, for all intents and purposes, Law's Seven Soldiers of Legionnaires Victory were in literary limbo. Enter the friend of the forgotten Golden Age hero, Earth-2.

You might have heard me mention this before (say, four columns ago), but the adventures of the WWII-era heroes (and heroines as well, though there were not many of those) were eventually segregated to have taken place on the oddly numbered Earth-2, and the Seven Soldiers were no exception. In 1972, the Earth was in the grip of The Hand That Shook The World!, which was (literally) a giant, cosmic-powered disembodied hand that was (again, literally) shaking the Earth... well, more of a forceful squeeze than a shake, but you get the idea. It turned out that the nebulous Hand was under the control of the Iron Hand (who was formerly known simply as the Hand) and, coincidentally, was the first villain ever defeated handily (sorry, couldn't resist) by the Seven Soldiers. Only they had the means to fold the Hand (again, my apologies), but no one seemed to remember that they had ever existed (and this was certainly serious, because the characters, and not just the fans, had forgotten about them).

It was revealed that, in 1948, that Hand man sent the Nebula Man (who did in fact have nebulous hands, as well) after the Seven Soldiers, who were apparently active as a group long after folks stopped reading (or caring) about their exploits... kind of like Congress. In the melee, one of the heroes was killed, and the others took a step to the left into a time warp, which dropped them off into separate historical periods and (for some strange reason) erased everyone's memory of the Soldiers, except for certain select individuals who had to recall them for the sake of the plot. (Granted, this time travel trap creates the problem of how to rectify those solo Soldier stories which were published after 1948, but I won't say anything if you won't.)

In order to keep the Earth from being groped into cosmic dust, the JLoA and the JSoA interrupted their yearly luncheon to divide neatly into teams of three, and rescue the Soldiers from their hilariously funny fates. Writer Len Wein let his sense of humor run wild, sending Green Arrow to a little hamlet called Nottingham and dropping Speedy into the clutches of animal-lover Circe. Then there's the Star-Spangled Kid, hiding out in a prehistoric cave, lest he accidentally infect a passing Neanderthal with his nasty flu, destroying all of human history with one sneeze. In the end, all Seven of the Soldiers were located, but the confused crime-busters learned that it had been Wing who sacrificed himself to stop the last Nebula, and a similar stunt would be required to end this one. While the other heroes debated amongst themselves about who was the most selfless, that android aviator, the Red Tornado, found time to write a note before blasting off into space to do the deed himself... which makes you wonder if Superman and the others were simply stalling for time, waiting for the easily repairable guy to risk his necklessness.

At long last, the Seven Soldiers of Victory had been reunited, and they were ready to pick up right where they had left off, nearly thirty years earlier... in limbo. After that Justice League of America arc, the Soldiers would never again stand together, group scenes and retconned flashbacks notwithstanding. Earth-1 already had its own Green Arrow (the uber-liberal), Speedy (the After School Special), and Vigilante (identical to the first, but with a fresher Born On date), so there was no need for their Earth-2 counterparts to appear. Crimson Avenger discovered that he was dying of an incurable disease (easily, the worst kind of disease), but received a noble (and potentially final) death in 1981, sacrificing himself to save New York City from a burning chemical tanker (and we thank him). Shining Knight became a regular guest star in the present, and, retroactively, a core member of the All-Star Squadron in the past, even earning his very own fiery love interest in the process. Lastly, Stripesy finally hung up his unflattering stripped shirt, but it was his still-youthful partner who refused to give up the spotlight.

In 1975, there was an influx of youth into the Justice Society of America (not surprising, as the youngest member of the team was now pushing fifty), and the Star-Spangled Kid was among the new guard. Borrowing one of Starman's old cosmic rods (I'm just sure that he had a junk drawer full of those things), the Kid received his very own, hand-me-down superpowers, and he served the JSoA with distinction... right up until he quit in protest in 1984. He would go on to help found Infinity, Inc (part superteam, part movie studio), and, right around his 60th birthday, finally made the decision to drop the 'Kid', adopting the slightly cooler codename, Skyman. Unfortunately for the hero formerly known as the Star-Spangled Kid, a run-in with a jealous Solomon Grundy, a bitter Harlequin, and an acidic Mr. Bones resulted in his terribly painful death. Just so you know, in the issue immediately following that fatal encounter, Infinity, Inc inducted Mr. Bones... makes you wonder what happened to loyalty.

Anyway, in 1985, DC published a minor work entitled Crisis on Infinite Earths, which you may or may not have heard of. In it, the number of alternate Earths was reduced significantly (from many to none), and... well, if you had an other-dimensional counterpart, and merging would be too complicated, then one of you had to go (usually, the less popular one). The Earth-2 Vigilante emerged unscathed, even picking up a few adventures from his E-1 alternate, and the other Soldiers were (if nothing else) unique, with the glaring exceptions of Green Arrow and Speedy. It was no contest really, the modern Green Arrow had a fishnet-clad girlfriend, his own irregular series of series, and a stylish goatee, whereas the GA GA had... not appeared in 13 years. At least the Golden Age Ollie had the honor of an on-panel death, going up against killer shadow demons with his boxing glove arrow of futility, the original Speedy simply vanished from fictional existence.

Time was realigned, and now DC continuity made perfect sense, with just one slight little problem. Suddenly, the Seven Soldiers of Victory only ever had five members... this would not have been a issue if they had just stayed with the Law's Legionnaires label. Roy Thomas (Golden Age plothole-filler extraordinaire) decreed that Billy Gunn (forgotten former sidekick to Vigilante) and Wing (promoted from unofficial status, though no less dead) filled the vacant slots. Billy was later retroactively dropped to make room for Stuff, the Chinatown Kid (another forgotten former sidekick of Vigilante, and an offensive stereotype in his own right), but when a later one-shot had Stuff murdered in 1944, a second Stuff (brother to the first) was created to assume the proud mantle of Chinatown Kid. Everything was finally stabilized again... so here comes Zero Hour.

Once there was an crack-shot archer from Crack Comics who inexplicably called himself Spider. He was at best a minor hero, with most of his minor appearances retconned away by Crisis, but then James Robinson found a way to make him interesting... by making him really, really evil. Spider was apparently a brutal, but exceptionally effective hero in his native St. Louis, before taking the retiring Flash's place as defender of Keystone City. The public loved him, the villains feared him, and no one seemed the notice the massive criminal empire he had secretly amassed. In Scooby Doo fashion, he would have gotten away with it too, if it were not for that meddling immortal shadow-fueled Shade, and his self-titled miniseries.

Spider might have been dead, but he was certainly memorable, and that was enough to earn him a place in Seven Soldier cannon. Wing was once again bumped down to unofficial status, and an archer (even an unrepentant criminal one) was finally back on the team. The Nebula Man story now has a new ending, with Spider betraying the team to the Iron Handed fellow, and murdering the other unofficial Soldier, Billy Gunn. Wing still dies (poor offensive stereotype), and the Avenger, the Knight, the Kid, the Stripesy, the Vigilante, and Stuff, the sequel, are all flushed down the temporal toilet. Also, Vigilante now ends up in the far too appropriate time period of the Wild West, where he spends two decades before being rescued, explaining his premature graying. So, at long last, we have a definitive and permanent line-up for the team... for now.

As for the members themselves, Crimson Avenger, Wing, Star-Spangled Kid, the first Stuff, Billy Gunn, and Spider are (amazingly enough) all still deceased, and Green Arrow & Speedy are still quite busy not ever existing. The original Vigilante and Stuff, the second, both retired from the hero game, and went into business together. Though technically nearing 900 years old, Shining Knight is still actively adventuring, seen most recently when his enchanted sword caused a certain flame-headed hero to meltdown. Even Stripesy staged a comeback of sorts, as one-half of the duo Stars & S.T.R.I.P.E., with his step-daughter Courtney as the new Star-Spangled Kid, and he as the Rock 'Em, Sock 'Em robot, S.T.R.I.P.E. (proving once and for all that the man has no fashion sense).

Out of a sense of completeness, I should mention that an unrelated grouping of Seven Soldiers came together during the Silver Age love fest known as the Silver Age event... well, more of an eventette. The Injustice League launched their most ridiculous plan to date- switching bodies with their heroic counterparts, the Justice League of America. In the midst of all this brain-swapping and 60s pseudo-science, seven non-aligned heroes came together to temporarily save the day long enough for the real heroes to... get their heads straight. These Soldiers were the perpetually deceased Deadman, the inevitably crippled Batgirl, (the walking periodic table) Metamorpho, the Top Gun Blackhawk, the mentally imbalanced Mento, (DC's answer to Flash Gordon) Adam Strange, and a second Shining Knight, who would later become the giant puppy riding Atomic Knight. Fortunately, these heroes never actually referred to themselves as the SSoV, so I can again repress that particular memory.

So now here we are, staring down the barrel of the latest Soldier rehash. Will Seven Soldiers be interesting? Almost certainly. Will it be the Seven Soldiers I remember? Absolutely not. This will definitely be the strip-mining approach to revamping, with Morrison taking the elements he likes, and jettisoning the rest. That I can rightly accept, as there really is not much more that can be done with the original team... or should be done to the original team, for that matter. However, there is a fundamental flaw with this initiative (and I don't mean the fact that these new Soldiers will never even met each other... that sounds refreshing, personal contact is pretty overrated).

The Seven Soldiers of Victory have become a running gag in the pages of DC Comics. They spent nearly thirty years missing in action, and then another thirty being retconned to within an inch of their core concepts. They were the least powerful team of their day, and the Soldiers themselves have been reduced to... well, at best, footnotes in comic history, and, at worst, the fictional equivalent of that kid in your homeroom who would not stop eating paste. All of that is true now, but it was simply not the case in 1941. When the Soldiers came together, they were seven (well, five) of the most popular characters (and their sidekicks), with each already the star of their own solo feature. It is impossible to say with a straight face that these new Soldiers are currently hot properties... The Witch Boy alone never made it above lukewarm.

If you really feel the need to bring together a semi-cohesive, fighting unit of formerly popular characters, with a few fresh faces thrown in, then do what Marvel did... call them the New Warriors.

<center><hr width=75%></center>

Raul Grau swears that he will stop writing columns filled with arcane trivia about properties being rebooted in the near future, just as soon as Marvel and DC stop rebooting old concepts. That should be more than enough incentive for the Big Two to start creating characters from scratch again.

<center><hr width=75%></center>

The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and are not reflective of ComiX-Fan or its other staff in general.

Nov 23, 2004, 06:04 pm	#1
Joel Phillips Slayer Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: California Country: Posts: 926	COMICS FOR DUMMIES #11: THE MORRISON-FREE SEVEN SOLDIERS <img src="http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/logos/cfdlogo.jpg" align=left border=0 alt="Comics For Dummies logo">By Raul Grau, RJacknite@aol.com The Morrison-Free Seven Soldiers In February, Grant Morrison will do what Grant Morrison does best... namely, taking existing, but underutilized concepts, and refashioning them with a touch of existential imagination. While it may turn out to be his most expansive work, *Seven Soldiers* is just the latest in a long line of revamps perpetrated by Morrison. Some built upon the foundation of the past, but simply slapped on a fresh coat of paint. In other instances, he has torn down the house almost entirely, leaving only the parts he wanted to rebuild around (be it a door, or a chunk of north wall, or a depressed metal man). So while we wait to see who the Seven Soldiers are, let's look back at who the Seven Soldiers of Victory were... offensive stereotypes and all. The year was 1940, and DC had brought together their greatest heroes into one cohesive, fighting unit. Of course, I mean cohesive in the sense that they would come together as a group on a bimonthly basis, then subdivide into solo adventures, before reforming to... discuss their solo adventures (and learn a valuable life lesson), but the Justice Society of America was still the first example of a comic book superteam. Their membership contained the most powerful and best-known crimefighters of the era... Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern, and so on. So it is no wonder that when the Seven Soldiers of Victory were brought together into one cohesive, fighting unit, a year later, their lineup was a bit... lacking. With no Men of Steel or Amazonian Princesses to call their own, the Soldiers had to make due with heroes of the non-powered variety, with the remaining slots filled by a few of their eager, young sidekicks. There was the (clean-shaven) archer Green Arrow, his adopted (drug-free) son Speedy, the medieval holdout Shining Knight, the singing cowboy Vigilante, the aptly named Star-Spangled Kid, his embarrassingly older sidekick Stripesy, and the Green Hornet-esque Crimson Avenger... not exactly the stuff of legends. Occasionally, the Seven would have an eighth in the form of Crimson Avenger's stereotypically Oriental limousine driver, Kato... no, wait, I mean Wing, the unofficial Soldier. I would say that from 1941 through 1945, the Soldiers shared many, and varied adventures, but that would be quite misleading. *Leading Comics* was certainly the regular home for the stalwart Seven, but, as a quarterly title, only fourteen issues were released in that four-year period. Even their team name was in a state of flux, since, at random intervals, the Seven Soldiers were termed Law's Legionnaires, but that name never really took hold, for obvious reasons. Sure, they had some memorable battles, including their clash with Dr. Doome (a full twenty years before a phonetically similar villain reared his metal face), but *#14* was their last as a combo platter of justice, since the very next issue transformed the title into a funny animal book. Not being funny animals themselves (not even Stripesy, who had the perfect name for funny animal status), the Soldiers were relegated to their solo features... assuming, of course, they still had solo features. Crimson Avenger was the first to fall, losing his (and walking, talking offensive stereotype Wing's) spot in *Detective Comics* in 1944. Stripesy was edged out as Star-Spangled Kid's sidekick in 1948 by Merry ('The Girl of 1,000 Gimmicks'), and that must have been pretty humiliating for a full-grown man who dressed as a flag. In the category of karmic boomerangs, The Kid ended up losing his perch to Merry a few issues later. Shining Knight (and his aptly named winged horse, Winged Victory) was removed from the pages of *Adventure Comics* in 1951. Vigilante managed to outlast the others, as a Stetson-wearing, fast-drawing, harmonizing cowpoke fit right in with the general Western vibe, but he too would eventually fold, in 1954. Green Arrow and his reverse-colored little buddy proved to be the longevity champions, but, at some indefinable point around 1955, he apparently stopped being the Golden Age millionaire playboy (and Native American folklorist) Oliver Queen, and became the Silver Age millionaire playboy (and wannabe swashbuckler) Ollie Queen. This new Queen would go on to join the fledgling Justice League of America, and he had received a brand, spanking new origin (full of cruising and boozing). Plus, he never seemed to mention his embarrassing old war buddies from the Soldiers (but really, who would?), so we can assume that he was a completely separate fellow (confusing, isn't it?). So, for all intents and purposes, Law's Seven Soldiers of Legionnaires Victory were in literary limbo. Enter the friend of the forgotten Golden Age hero, Earth-2. You might have heard me mention this before (say, four columns ago), but the adventures of the WWII-era heroes (and heroines as well, though there were not many of those) were eventually segregated to have taken place on the oddly numbered Earth-2, and the Seven Soldiers were no exception. In 1972, the Earth was in the grip of The Hand That Shook The World!, which was (literally) a giant, cosmic-powered disembodied hand that was (again, literally) shaking the Earth... well, more of a forceful squeeze than a shake, but you get the idea. It turned out that the nebulous Hand was under the control of the Iron Hand (who was formerly known simply as the Hand) and, coincidentally, was the first villain ever defeated handily (sorry, couldn't resist) by the Seven Soldiers. Only they had the means to fold the Hand (again, my apologies), but no one seemed to remember that they had ever existed (and this was certainly serious, because the characters, and not just the fans, had forgotten about them). It was revealed that, in 1948, that Hand man sent the Nebula Man (who did in fact have nebulous hands, as well) after the Seven Soldiers, who were apparently active as a group long after folks stopped reading (or caring) about their exploits... kind of like Congress. In the melee, one of the heroes was killed, and the others took a step to the left into a time warp, which dropped them off into separate historical periods and (for some strange reason) erased everyone's memory of the Soldiers, except for certain select individuals who had to recall them for the sake of the plot. (Granted, this time travel trap creates the problem of how to rectify those solo Soldier stories which were published after 1948, but I won't say anything if you won't.) In order to keep the Earth from being groped into cosmic dust, the JLoA and the JSoA interrupted their yearly luncheon to divide neatly into teams of three, and rescue the Soldiers from their hilariously funny fates. Writer Len Wein let his sense of humor run wild, sending Green Arrow to a little hamlet called Nottingham and dropping Speedy into the clutches of animal-lover Circe. Then there's the Star-Spangled Kid, hiding out in a prehistoric cave, lest he accidentally infect a passing Neanderthal with his nasty flu, destroying all of human history with one sneeze. In the end, all Seven of the Soldiers were located, but the confused crime-busters learned that it had been Wing who sacrificed himself to stop the last Nebula, and a similar stunt would be required to end this one. While the other heroes debated amongst themselves about who was the most selfless, that android aviator, the Red Tornado, found time to write a note before blasting off into space to do the deed himself... which makes you wonder if Superman and the others were simply stalling for time, waiting for the easily repairable guy to risk his necklessness. At long last, the Seven Soldiers of Victory had been reunited, and they were ready to pick up right where they had left off, nearly thirty years earlier... in limbo. After that *Justice League of America* arc, the Soldiers would never again stand together, group scenes and retconned flashbacks notwithstanding. Earth-1 already had its own Green Arrow (the uber-liberal), Speedy (the After School Special), and Vigilante (identical to the first, but with a fresher Born On date), so there was no need for their Earth-2 counterparts to appear. Crimson Avenger discovered that he was dying of an incurable disease (easily, the worst kind of disease), but received a noble (and potentially final) death in 1981, sacrificing himself to save New York City from a burning chemical tanker (and we thank him). Shining Knight became a regular guest star in the present, and, retroactively, a core member of the All-Star Squadron in the past, even earning his very own fiery love interest in the process. Lastly, Stripesy finally hung up his unflattering stripped shirt, but it was his still-youthful partner who refused to give up the spotlight. In 1975, there was an influx of youth into the Justice Society of America (not surprising, as the youngest member of the team was now pushing fifty), and the Star-Spangled Kid was among the new guard. Borrowing one of Starman's old cosmic rods (I'm just sure that he had a junk drawer full of those things), the Kid received his very own, hand-me-down superpowers, and he served the JSoA with distinction... right up until he quit in protest in 1984. He would go on to help found Infinity, Inc (part superteam, part movie studio), and, right around his 60th birthday, finally made the decision to drop the 'Kid', adopting the slightly cooler codename, Skyman. Unfortunately for the hero formerly known as the Star-Spangled Kid, a run-in with a jealous Solomon Grundy, a bitter Harlequin, and an acidic Mr. Bones resulted in his terribly painful death. Just so you know, in the issue immediately following that fatal encounter, Infinity, Inc inducted Mr. Bones... makes you wonder what happened to loyalty. Anyway, in 1985, DC published a minor work entitled *Crisis on Infinite Earths, which you may or may not have heard of. In it, the number of alternate Earths was reduced significantly (from many to none), and... well, if you had an other-dimensional counterpart, and merging would be too complicated, then one of you had to go (usually, the less popular one). The Earth-2 Vigilante emerged unscathed, even picking up a few adventures from his E-1 alternate, and the other Soldiers were (if nothing else) unique, with the glaring exceptions of Green Arrow and Speedy. It was no contest really, the modern Green Arrow had a fishnet-clad girlfriend, his own irregular series of series, and a stylish goatee, whereas the GA GA had... not appeared in 13 years. At least the Golden Age Ollie had the honor of an on-panel death, going up against killer shadow demons with his boxing glove arrow of futility, the original Speedy simply vanished from fictional existence. Time was realigned, and now DC continuity made perfect sense, with just one slight little problem. Suddenly, the Seven* Soldiers of Victory only ever had five members... this would not have been a issue if they had just stayed with the Law's Legionnaires label. Roy Thomas (Golden Age plothole-filler extraordinaire) decreed that Billy Gunn (forgotten former sidekick to Vigilante) and Wing (promoted from unofficial status, though no less dead) filled the vacant slots. Billy was later retroactively dropped to make room for Stuff, the Chinatown Kid (another forgotten former sidekick of Vigilante, and an offensive stereotype in his own right), but when a later one-shot had Stuff murdered in 1944, a second Stuff (brother to the first) was created to assume the proud mantle of Chinatown Kid. Everything was finally stabilized again... so here comes *Zero Hour. Once there was an crack-shot archer from Crack Comics* who inexplicably called himself Spider. He was at best a minor hero, with most of his minor appearances retconned away by *Crisis, but then James Robinson found a way to make him interesting... by making him really, really evil. Spider was apparently a brutal, but exceptionally effective hero in his native St. Louis, before taking the retiring Flash's place as defender of Keystone City. The public loved him, the villains feared him, and no one seemed the notice the massive criminal empire he had secretly amassed. In Scooby Doo fashion, he would have gotten away with it too, if it were not for that meddling immortal shadow-fueled Shade, and his self-titled miniseries. Spider might have been dead, but he was certainly memorable, and that was enough to earn him a place in Seven Soldier cannon. Wing was once again bumped down to unofficial status, and an archer (even an unrepentant criminal one) was finally back on the team. The Nebula Man story now has a new ending, with Spider betraying the team to the Iron Handed fellow, and murdering the other unofficial Soldier, Billy Gunn. Wing still dies (poor offensive stereotype), and the Avenger, the Knight, the Kid, the Stripesy, the Vigilante, and Stuff, the sequel, are all flushed down the temporal toilet. Also, Vigilante now ends up in the far too appropriate time period of the Wild West, where he spends two decades before being rescued, explaining his premature graying. So, at long last, we have a definitive and permanent line-up for the team... for now. As for the members themselves, Crimson Avenger, Wing, Star-Spangled Kid, the first Stuff, Billy Gunn, and Spider are (amazingly enough) all still deceased, and Green Arrow & Speedy are still quite busy not ever existing. The original Vigilante and Stuff, the second, both retired from the hero game, and went into business together. Though technically nearing 900 years old, Shining Knight is still actively adventuring, seen most recently when his enchanted sword caused a certain flame-headed hero to meltdown. Even Stripesy staged a comeback of sorts, as one-half of the duo Stars & S.T.R.I.P.E., with his step-daughter Courtney as the new Star-Spangled Kid, and he as the Rock 'Em, Sock 'Em robot, S.T.R.I.P.E. (proving once and for all that the man has no fashion sense). Out of a sense of completeness, I should mention that an unrelated grouping of Seven Soldiers came together during the Silver Age love fest known as the Silver Age* event... well, more of an eventette. The Injustice League launched their most ridiculous plan to date- switching bodies with their heroic counterparts, the Justice League of America. In the midst of all this brain-swapping and 60s pseudo-science, seven non-aligned heroes came together to temporarily save the day long enough for the real heroes to... get their heads straight. These Soldiers were the perpetually deceased Deadman, the inevitably crippled Batgirl, (the walking periodic table) Metamorpho, the Top Gun Blackhawk, the mentally imbalanced Mento, (DC's answer to Flash Gordon) Adam Strange, and a second Shining Knight, who would later become the giant puppy riding Atomic Knight. Fortunately, these heroes never actually referred to themselves as the SSoV, so I can again repress that particular memory. So now here we are, staring down the barrel of the latest Soldier rehash. Will *Seven Soldiers* be interesting? Almost certainly. Will it be the Seven Soldiers I remember? Absolutely not. This will definitely be the strip-mining approach to revamping, with Morrison taking the elements he likes, and jettisoning the rest. That I can rightly accept, as there really is not much more that can be done with the original team... or should be done to the original team, for that matter. However, there is a fundamental flaw with this initiative (and I don't mean the fact that these new Soldiers will never even met each other... that sounds refreshing, personal contact is pretty overrated). The Seven Soldiers of Victory have become a running gag in the pages of DC Comics. They spent nearly thirty years missing in action, and then another thirty being retconned to within an inch of their core concepts. They were the least powerful team of their day, and the Soldiers themselves have been reduced to... well, at best, footnotes in comic history, and, at worst, the fictional equivalent of that kid in your homeroom who would not stop eating paste. All of that is true now, but it was simply not the case in 1941. When the Soldiers came together, they were seven (well, five) of the most popular characters (and their sidekicks), with each already the star of their own solo feature. It is impossible to say with a straight face that these new Soldiers are currently hot properties... The Witch Boy alone never made it above lukewarm. If you really feel the need to bring together a semi-cohesive, fighting unit of formerly popular characters, with a few fresh faces thrown in, then do what Marvel did... call them the *New Warriors*. <center><hr width=75%></center> Raul Grau swears that he will stop writing columns filled with arcane trivia about properties being rebooted in the near future, just as soon as Marvel and DC stop rebooting old concepts. That should be more than enough incentive for the Big Two to start creating characters from scratch again. <center><hr width=75%></center> The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and are not reflective of ComiX-Fan or its other staff in general.