Bookending the seven mini-series we've looked at were a #0 and #1 issue. The first sort of puts things in motion, as the Vigilante tries to pull together a new Seven Soldiers to deal with an old threat. Unfortunately, one of his picks - Bulleteer - changes her mind at the last minute. So it's a team of 6, not 7, that travel to Miracle Mesa, and those six are mostly wiped out by Neh-Buh-Loh and an advance group of giant spiders. The Spyder survives, remade by the Sheeda to be their weapon. Too bad for them, someone else remade him first.
Williams alternates between pages where the panels are aligned like sigils or family crests, though I couldn't tell you what they mean, to very straightforward pages of short, wide panels stacked neatly atop each other when it looks like the Soldiers are winning. When it goes bad, the panels start to distort and warp. White panel borders become black, and it's all just images of death and terror scattered across the page.
By issue 1, the Sheeda invasion is in full swing. Or as full swing as it can get with Neh-Buh-Loh dead and much of the Sheeda Queen's fleet destroyed by Frankenstein. Still, the Sheeda have turned a lot of people, and heroes are kind of thin on the ground, so it looks like it could go either way, but apparently the end's been preordained for over 40,000 years.
It's hard to really lay out how it all works. The New Gods apparently came to Earth long ago and did their own version of what the Celestials pulled over at Marvel, or the stone pillar in 2001. They created a combination of Neanderthal and God that became Aurakles (who Mister Miracle jailed in one of his Omega Sanction lives), who was given seven gifts to defend mankind. But this golden age sends a time machine into the future, where Melmoth finds it and the Sheeda reverse engineer it to come to the past and commit their first Harrowing. So in that sense, the past reached the future first, and it was via that gift the future turned back and reaped the past. And everything has built from that point.
(Williams draws that whole sequence in faux-Jack Kirby style, although the colors are somewhat less crisp. I don't know if that's because it's a story being viewed as a saga, and so some of the details are necessarily lost to the ages of time, or what.)
Except there's also the Seven Unknown Men of Slaughter Swamp. The Spyder was hired to kill them, except they actually hired him to get him there, so they could remake him and send him out with Vigilante's group. And though they're apparently panicked at the failure of Vigilante's group, they also perhaps planned for Spyder to strike at the Sheeda Queen from within, once Sir Justin destroyed the Cauldron of Rebirth?
The Sheeda themselves are apparently the creation of the Eighth of the Seven Unknown Men, the one known as Zor (who Zatanna defeated in the conclusion of her mini-series.) An idea or concept, that the renegade came up with. So, it's some thing within Morrison that wants to feed on past ideas to the extent of destroying them almost entirely? Some inner conflict he's trying to resolve in himself about his work?
But behind all that, seemingly taking place where no one's looking, is the struggle between Dark Side and Mister Miracle. Shilo Norman escaped the black hole, escaped the Omega Sanction, and now able to see the truth of Dark Side. Williams draws Dark Side's human self as such, but all around him is the visage of the true Darkseid, like a hologram of a stone carving. Dark Side is a figure of Kingpin-esque size and proportions, but he's a small piece of the panel, with Darkseid's head dominating the image. Mister Miracle bargains for Aurakles' freedom, betting he can escape any prison Dark Side can conjure.
So Dark Side shoots him in the head. Aurakles is free, so that the spear - named both "love" and "vengeance", and apparently is, or is represented by Bulleteer - he threw 40,000 years ago can finally strike down the Sheeda Queen. (In that she's hit by a car Bulleteer is driving. Or is that Bulleteer and Sally Sonic, who regains consciousness and starts a fight, which causes the car wreck that kills the Queen, represent the two sides together? Feels a little too Madonna/whore dichotomy, but maybe that's it.)
But may not even matter. All this with the Sheeda is just an amusing distraction to Darkseid. The Sheeda might appear as gods to humans, or even superheroes, but Darkseid is the real deal. It does, looking back on it two decades later, give the whole thing the feel of just a warm-up. Countdown to Final Crisis, except written by Grant Morrison, as opposed to that miserable hodgepodge of a year-long, weekly series DC released.
Most of the Seven get some measure of hope or redemption. Justin (or Justina) survives, and learns from Ali Ka-Zoom she's likely to return to her time at some point to become a great ruler. Manhattan Guardian is the man on the street, the one the papers see rallying and protecting the people. He gets back together with his girlfriend. Zatanna is able to help her apprentice see that there are ways to stop the Sheeda Queen without becoming her. Mister Miracle freed Aurakles, and as for the bullet to the dome? Refer to the top of the page.
With the other three, it's harder to see. Bulleteer did her bit, with just about the least amount of active effort she could manage. Sally apparently died in the crash as well, but the brief glimpse we get of Bulleteer doesn't suggest she takes any solace from it. That panel, or some cop telling her she's free to go, and her reply, "Am I?", is a tiny one at the bottom of a page. The next panel, spread across two pages, of her and the Guardian staring at the flaming wreckage, is much larger. Even now, the life she wanted no part of gets more focus than the living she'll have to do after.
(Also, it just registered with me that her last name is "Harrower". The Sheeda refer to the pillages of the past as Harrowings, and she's the one who ultimately ends it.)
Klarion gets Misty's die away from her, giving him both of the six-sided probability engines, aka the Fatherbox. Or is only one of them that? I'm not clear what the 'Merlin sprite made of living language,' is, so maybe it's the other die. He takes the invasion ship (or commands Frankenstein, who is a Gurndy-Man after all) back to the future, which he seems quite pleased with. Not sure what happened to Frankenstein after that, though. Kind of gets lost in the shuffle.
Williams does a remarkable job shifting his art style to at least closely mimic the artists for each character's respective mini-series. Freddie Williams when drawing Mister Miracle's, Frazier Irving for Klarion, Sook for Zatanna, and so on. Enough so I had to stop and double-check those guys weren't actually listed in the credits. Curiously, Doug Mahnke's the one he struggles with the most. His Frankenstein just isn't the same imposing hulk, the lines are too thin and not nearly rough enough.
I can't really think of anything else to say, so let's bring Seven Soldiers of Spring to a close.
2 comments:
Re the Fatherbox: It's probably just a coincidence -- mainly because I don't see how it could be relevant -- but the most common result on two six sided dice is... seven.
Interesting. I'm not sure how to factor that in either, but it's a neat bit of info.
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