Not even a Mother Box can help you escape Seven Soldiers of Spring, though the continual progress of time will take care of it if you can wait a few more weeks.
Shilo Norman is Mister Miracle, the World's Greatest Escape Artist, one of the Seven Celebrity Wonders of the World. With Motherboxxx, he escaped the Second Dimension. Escaped the Center of the Earth. But when he seeks to escape a black hole itself, he's greeted by Metron, who explains Shilo's needed to free the Gods.
His return to the world afterward is not easy. He sees gods from both sides of some great war everywhere he looks. His doctor doesn't seem to be helping him. His best friend tries bringing him to a strange club, but the women don't seem human to him. And while trying to deal with all this, there's a new escape artist on the block, Baron Bedlam. Stealing Shilo's stunts, his fans, somehow up and walking around after clearly not escaping the traps. All of it leads to Dark Side (that's how he's referred to in this, rather than the typical spelling.)
This is the mini-series most tangentially related to the others. While trapped in the Omega Sanction - which dooms Shilo to live and die again and again, never returning to the Source - Shilo lands in a life where his brother's death as a cop drove him to use his talents for escape by keeping superhumans locked up. One of those is a far-seeing god, Aurakles, who fled his responsibility after being tortured by the Sheeda. Aurakles claims Shilo's running from responsibility as well, and helps him to see the nature of the trap that he's in.
Other than that, Shilo's nearly hit by the taxi the kids Klarion was running with were driving in his mini-series, but there's no other connection I notice. This story feels more like a prelude to Final Crisis, with Dark Side and his bunch placing their souls within humans. From Dark Side's perspective, the Sheeda are just some minor nuisance. If their rampage can make it easier for him to take control, fine. He can always crush them later.
(I remember there being some discussion on comic blogs at the time about almost all of the Apokoliptians being black, while most of the New Genesis characters were white. Orion's a notable exception on the New Genesis side, Baron Bedlam seems to be the lone white guy working for Dark Side, and since he's apparently shifting his mind between fake bodies, who knows if that's even what the body he's really inhabiting looks like. I don't think Shilo's friend ZZ, and girlfriend Joelle, are meant to be Oberon and Barda, though if they were it might change the math. But I think Shilo is just supposed to be himself, a human who became like a god of escape (read: freedom), not a human housing Scott Free's spirit. Likewise, ZZ and Joelle are other humans he's known for years, who unfortunately fall prey to Dark Side.
I'm not sure why Morrison and the art crews - but probably mostly Morrison since I think this is really his show - went that route. Is it supposed to be something about Shilo, a black man, feeling he doesn't fit with other people his color? That their goals and motivations are to make him conform to what they want? Bedlam being white feels like a comment on how white audience would always prefer to get the same entertainment from a white guy. Rappers, basketball players, etc.)
This is also the only mini-series without a consistent artist. Pasqual Ferry draws the first issue, then Billy Dallas Patton draws most of issue 2 before Freddie Williams II takes it the rest of the way. At first, I thought everything after the black hole would be a hallucination, and so Williams would draw that, and Ferry would return once Shilo escaped. As it turns out, Shilo does find himself back in the black hole in issue 4, but Ferry does not return. There was also a 3-month gap between the release of issue 1 and issue 2, so I'm guessing Ferry couldn't keep the schedule and DC just rolled with Williams. And Williams is fine; he's a decent conventional superhero comic artist, but Ferry's work feels less grounded. Not ephemeral, but there's a looseness to the lines, a blurring with the surrounding colors that suggests there's more than what we can perceive going on. Would have been interesting to see Ferry draw the whole mini-series, how it would have looked.
On the vice/virtue front, I would assign this series Envy & Kindness. People want what Shilo has. His doctor, Dezzad, wants Motherboxx, obviously, but even though we don't see it, there are apparently big parties at Shilo's house after a successful escape, and all those people want to, quote, 'hang with the big dawg,' end quote. Bedlam rises to stardom rivaling Mister Miracle, despite not actually being an escape artist. It doesn't matter that he can't actually escape these traps; he can fake like he does and tell people he really did it, and they lap it up. Shilo worked and trained - he has a workout space with machines that throw knives so he can practice escaping straitjackets under duress - but people don't want to have to work to be as good as him.
But it's kindness that brings Shilo back to himself after Dark Side whispers the Anti-Life Equation to him (which is depicted as a voice balloon almost entirely filled with black ink.) Shilo is giving in to the notion everything is doomed, when he sees a couple of guys offering their coats to women caught in the rain. That act seems to snap him out of it, and he goes back to confront Dark Side (and gets beat to shit and lit on fire.) It's kindness, in the form of actually trying to speak with the trap he's in that gives them both a chance to be free (as Shilo notes, a sentient made to be a prison for others is also a prison for itself, since that's all it gets to do.)
There's also a guilt element, as Shilo's brother was a cop who was killed in the line of duty. It apparently happened after Shilo declined help to escape a straitjacket he put himself in, because Shilo wanted to do it all himself. You could see kindness as a factor there; that Shilo rejected his brother's offer (albeit out of pride), and his brother went off and got killed. And Shilo became the World's Greatest Escape Artist to atone, or to try and escape the fate that comes for everyone eventually. In-story, it's probably less about that, than Shilo keeping himself trapped with these feelings, and needed to escape that before he can free others.
6 comments:
As I recall, it was this miniseries that caused some confusion about DC continuity and Final Crisis, because of Dark Side/Dakseid. I think it got retconned while it was being published, which must be some kind of record, with Didio switching it from happening after FC to happening before, or maybe it was the other way around, or maybe it was between panels in the crossover. it was a mess, anyway.
Granted I don't remember a lot about Final Crisis, but I had just sort of mentally put the whole Seven Soldiers thing before Final Crisis. Like Dark Side's just getting his pieces in place while everyone's distracted by the Sheeda. Whoever wins, he's confident he'll crush them when he's ready.
'got retconned while it was being published, which must be some kind of record,' made me laugh.
Ah, it was Infinite Crisis, my mistake. Morrison intended 7S to take place after IC, but DiDio decided it takes place before.
That, hmmm. Morrison's way makes more sense to me, if only because it seems weird to have Darkseid doing all this, then have the multiverse brought back in Infinite Crisis, but Darkseid doesn't adjust his plan at all.
I guess he could just find all Alex Luthor and Superboy-Prime's schemes irrelevant, but it seems like the sort of thing he'd at least be keeping watch on.
Yeah, I remember people saying at the time "hang on, this isn't making sense the way DC claims it is" and then DiDio made it worse with his "clarification".
At the time I remember it seemed a bit like DiDio was throwing 7S under the bus because IC was the "important" series but then they gave Morrison the keys to everything a couple of years later, so I suppose it all worked out.
"Didio made it worse" could probably be the tagline for DC in the 2000s.
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