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Break free: underst anding, reimagining

and reclaiming st ories in Grant
Morrison’ s Seven Soldiers of Victory
Val Nolana
a
Depart ment of English, Nat ional Universit y of Ireland, Galway,
Ireland
Published online: 15 Sep 2014.

To cite this article: Val Nolan (2014): Break f ree: underst anding, reimagining and reclaiming
st ories in Grant Morrison’ s Seven Sol diers of Vict ory, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, DOI: 10. 1080/
21504857. 2014. 960094

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 Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2014
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21504857.2014.960094

Break free: understanding, reimagining and reclaiming stories in

Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers of Victory
Val Nolan*

Department of English, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland

(Received 3 October 2011; accepted 27 August 2014)

This article investigates Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers of Victory (2005–06. New
York: DC Comics) as a metafictional treatise on the writing and reading of comic
books in general and the superhero genre in particular. It examines how Seven
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Soldiers functions as Morrison’s commentary on the way contemporary culture tells

stories, the
way we interpret, reject and ultimately reclaim our role in narratives, ranging from the
intimate to the ‘end of the world drama’. In the process, a paradigm for interpreting
this landmark series is suggested, one whereby each component speaks to an aspect of
the comic-book reading/writing experience: Zatanna, the mainstream comic reader;
Bulleteer, the new reader; Frankenstein, the process of reimagining; Shining Knight, a
reimagined end product; Klarion, the juvenile reader resistant to adult notions of
seriousness; the Guardian, the adult reader recapturing their imagination; and Mister
Miracle, the link between Seven Soldiers and Morrison’s wider superhero writings.
Keywords: Grant Morrison; Seven Soldiers of Victory; Jack Kirby; reimagining;
Frankenstein; Mister Miracle; Zatanna

An unprecedented use of the comic-book medium, Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers of

Victory (2005–06) combines science fiction, fantasy, mystery and horror to demonstrate
comics as the natural inheritors of folkloric and mythological storytelling forms.
Nevertheless, casual readers can struggle with how deeply this Eisner-winning series is
embedded in fan culture.1 Further issues of accessibility arise with Morrison’s
deliberately obscure references to the continuity of DC Comics’ properties that have
been reimagined many times since their creation. For his part, Morrison sees Seven
Soldiers as a return to ‘characters with no baggage, who could be plunged into life-and-
death situations with no guarantee that they would recover or even survive’ (2006, vol. 1,
5).2 A response to the restrictions of big franchises, something he experienced during his
time on DC’s Justice League of America (JLA; 1996–2000) and especially Marvel’s New
X-Men (2001–04), the
30 issues of Seven Soldiers provide an extended metafictional treatise on the writing and
reading of comic books in general and the superhero genre in particular. 3 Indeed, the
series functions as Morrison’s commentary not just on the comics medium, but also on
the way contemporary culture tells stories, the way we interpret, reject and ultimately
reclaim our role in narratives ranging from the intimate all the way to the ‘end of the
world drama’
(Morrison 2006, vol. 1, 12).
The series takes the form of seven four-issue limited series and two bookend issues.
All written by Morrison, the seven mini-series comprise: Zatanna, with art by Ryan
Sook; Bulleteer, with art by Yanick Paquette; Frankenstein, with art by Doug Mahnke;
Shining

*Email: valnolan82@gmail.com
© 2014 Taylor & Francis
 2 V.
Knight, with art by Simone Bianchi; Klarion the Witch Boy, with art by Frazer Irving;
Manhattan Guardian, with art by Cameron Stewart; and Mister Miracle, with art by
Pascal Ferry. Art for the bookends, Seven Soldiers #0 and #1, was provided by the
‘frighteningly versatile’ J.H. Williams III (Singer 2012, 223). The series was constructed
to reflect a ‘modular approach’ says Morrison; ‘you can read any of the books as singles
or as 4-part series’ however all issues contribute to the overall story, and, to an extent,
readers are expected to negotiate the text in a psychogeographical fashion, to assemble
and reassemble the narrative in a multitude of playful and inventive ways (Brady 2004b;
Faust 2011, ch. 4). As with much of Morrison’s writing, Seven Soldiers encourages
comics fans to seek ‘a greater collective understanding of the structures of abstract
power within the fictional universe’ and ‘to process the content in a critical way and
play with the ideas in continuity’ (Bavlnka 2011, 76, 72). Such structural complexity, as
well as the focus on neglected characters from ‘the underbelly of the DC universe’, is
Morrison’s rebuttal to ‘the current vogue in superhero comics, post-Hush’ for ‘the
“definitive” take, which tends to manifest itself as creators playing it safe by cherry-
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picking and re-packaging all the best and most popular elements of an already successful
feature’ (Morrison 2011, 388; Brady 2004a).4
Described by Morrison as ‘an ode to the King’– legendary comics creator Jack Kirby
– the project represented ‘an attempt to get back to a place where I could try out some new
ideas’, having found that

you can’t do much to change Superman and Batman or any of the big name icon characters.
But the Seven Soldiers heroes are all ones I felt were really strong and adaptable and no one
had given them a lot of thought since they’d been created. (Epstein 2005)

In his words,

the Seven Soldiers are a group of mostly new and inexperienced ‘heroes’ who must somehow
band together to save the world from an extinction level threat at the hands of some new, old
villains from an entire culture dedicated to rape and pillage. (Brady 2004a)

Though the result is, as Douglas Wolk (2007, 280) puts it, ‘deeply immersed in con-
tinuity’ and ‘full of little allusions to obscure old comics’, these are often ‘transparent
allusions, designed not to be noticed at all by readers who wouldn’t catch them’. One
‘big adventure using lots of little ones’, the series follows seven independent storylines,
which occasionally, if obliquely, intersect before finally dovetailing in the climactic
battle of
Seven Soldiers #1 (Brady 2004a). Uniting all the books is a threat antithetical to the
Morrisonian philosophy of success and progress through teamwork: the Sheeda, blue-
skinned masters of science and magic from the far future, and Morrison’s elaborate
reimagining of the Gaelic fairy folk, the Sídhe.5 Responsible for the ruin of Neanderthal
civilisation as well as the fall of Camelot, the Sheeda ‘turn up in the folk tales of every
culture as fairies or little people’ (Morrison 2006, vol. 4, 161). Everybody knows ‘poems
and stories and nursery rhymes about them, but it’s been so long since they were here it’s
all just race memory. Nobody figured they were real’ (161).
Morrison’s use of the Sheeda serves as a nod towards the ubiquity of storytelling, the
theme of the series as a whole and something that is flagged on the first page of Seven
Soldiers #0: ‘This another one of your creepy local legends?’ asks supporting character I,
Spyder; ‘Local, yeah’, replies the boatman. ‘Something like that’ (2006, vol. 1, 9). Each
of the characters in #0 furthers this metafictional concern in their own way, with I,
Spyder
 Journal of Graphic Novels and 3
serving as an acknowledgment of the comic-book medium. The artificiality and two-
dimensionality of drawn figures is emphasised when Spyder encounters the technology
of the Time Tailors, the Seven Unknown Men – each visually reminiscent of Morrison –
and
the ultimate storytellers who ‘plot the rise and fall of nations and of human lives’.
Undergoing their initiation, the pigmentation of Spyder’s skin is washed away and the
visual effect is one of the inks being erased from his illustration, suggesting what
Morrison has elsewhere described as ‘the shamanic process’: the experience whereby
one appears ‘to be taken out of reality into a higher dimension, the body is stripped and
destroyed and then you are put back with extra knowledge which then leads to weird
synchronicities and unusual experiences’ (Metzger 2002). Thus I, Spyder is remade by the
Tailors, rewritten to suit their purposes much as Morrison takes his cast of ‘neglected,
third-string, C-list’ DC properties and fashions them into a ‘strong commercial feature
with franchise development potential’ (2006, vol. 1, 6).
In addition to Spyder’s encounter, issue #0 introduces Shelly Gaynor, a journalist who
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has revived the Golden Age superhero identity of her grandfather: The Whip. Gaynor is
engaged in a study of what it is to be a superhero and her comments about having ‘taken
this whole morally ambiguous urban vigilante thing about as far as I can’ (Morrison 2006,
vol. 1, 19) resonate with Morrison’s own feelings on what he has termed ‘the “Dark Age”
of super heroes, when optimism couldn’t cut the mustard and costumed characters were
unmasked as people with flaws and problems just like the rest of us’ (1996). The Whip,
like Morrison, rejects this; ‘now I want to visit other planets and dimensions and fight
rogue gods,’ she says. This ‘appetite for the outlandish exploits of science fiction super-
men with extraordinary abilities’ (vol. 1, 19) is what Morrison (1996) himself praises as
the best of comics writing, a ‘forward-looking, inspirational sensibility’ and a ‘veritable
Mardi Gras of colourful costumes, bizarre powers and breathtakingly imaginative adven-
tures’. His evocation of older narrative styles is underlined by ‘Big Time Country’, the
second part of issue #0, in which Gaynor travels to the American south-west to meet Greg
Saunders, aka the Vigilante, a classic hero published by DC since the 1940s. From a
ranch filled with trophies and souvenirs, Saunders captures the nostalgia for a simpler
age of super-heroics, a perspective that contrasts against the super team he has
assembled to
assist in his final adventure, a group that has been widely and often insightfully discussed
online as Morrison’s attempt to personify the various styles of comic-book narrative that
superseded the Golden Age.6
Furthermore, Seven Soldiers #0 serves as an excellent example not only of
Morrison’s multilayered referential writing style but also of the manner in which the
series erases the distinction between history, folklore, literature and comics. Consider the
prologue, ‘True Thomas’. On the surface, True Thomas is the ‘tenth-rate second
generation costumed *%! @-up’ Thomas Ludlow Dalt, secret identity of I, Spyder and
the prologue’s immediate protagonist. Simultaneously, True Thomas can also be read as
a nod to Dalt’s father (again Thomas Ludlow), the first to go by the name of the Spider
and a Golden Age character who – after DC’s continuity re-aligning Crisis on Infinite
Earths in 1985 – became a member of the pre-Morrison Seven Soldiers, and so the true
(or at least truer) Thomas. True Thomas is also the protagonist of the thirteenth-century
Scottish ballad ‘Thomas the Rhymer’ (the ‘old ballad’ referenced by the boatman), and that
song’s supernatural subject matter – Thomas’s dealings with the queen of the fairy folk –
foreshadows I, Spyder’s own encounter with Gloriana Tenebrae, Queen of the Sheeda
and the villainess of the
series as a whole. In turn, the song is based on Thomas Learmonth, a thirteenth-century
Scottish nobleman and the author of reputedly prophetic verses, allowing Morrison to
hint at the theme of prophecy (the defeat of the Sheeda by a team of seven soldiers) that
runs
 4 V.

through the entire narrative and so brings his densely packed use of ‘True Thomas’ full
circle in a manner that highlights the central themes of Seven Soldiers: understanding,
reimagining and reclaiming stories.

Understanding stories
Of the seven protagonists, it is the magician Zatanna and the reluctant superheroine
Bulleteer who most contribute to Morrison’s analysis of how stories are told and how
comic-book narratives are received. Zatanna, as the most mainstream of the protagonists,
proves a sensible choice to probe comics readership. One of the more recognisable
magical characters in both the DC universe and in DC’s Vertigo imprint, this former
member of the Justice League was featured prominently in Brad Meltzer’s 2004 bestsel-
ling limited series Identity Crisis, in which she participated in the controversial mind-
wiping of several villains and heroes, notably Doctor Light and Batman: ‘I was a really
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bad superhero’, she says here, ‘I did lots of stuff superheroes shouldn’t do and what’s
worse is, I got caught’ (Morrison 2006, vol. 2, 97, 147). Morrison’s broken-down, unsure
Zatanna follows on from these events and gives voice to his concerns about the
‘relentless
tide of unsmiling, uptight mental cases in trench coats’, the heroes of the Dark Age who
have tended towards ‘deranged psychos, mother-fixated perverts and cold-eyed killers,
barely distinguishable from the villains they so callously dispatched’ (vol. 1, 19; 1996).
Zatanna #1 takes the form of a story told by the ‘spellaholic’ protagonist to her
‘workshop for heroes with low self-esteem’ (Morrison 2006, vol. 1, 97, 100). Zatanna
recounts how, troubled by dreams of ‘little people from under the hill’ – the Irish
mythological incarnation of the Sídhe – she assembled a group of powerful magicians
for a journey ‘beyond the unknown’ in the hope of discovering the Liber Zatare, her late
father’s four magical books and powerful weapons, to help defeat the oncoming dangers
(102). Throughout Zatanna, letters, words and books recur to emphasise how this
component of Seven Soldiers is all about reading. Zatanna’s powers are predicated on
her manipulation of language, though having lost the ability to speak backwards she has
lately lost her magic (102). She herself is the author of a book, Hex Appeal: The Modern
Girl’s Guide to Magic (103, 117) and, travelling to a realm where ‘all human thought is
remembered’, she discovers a tree of knowledge from which grow ‘all the books that
were ever written in anyone’s head’ (110). Naturally her quest for knowledge backfires
horribly and, in attempting to retrieve her father’s books, Zatanna is cast out of the
magical realms
by a flaming demon of her own misguided invocation – Gwydion, derived by Morrison
from the trickster figure of Welsh mythology – who incinerates her companions and
heralds the coming of the apocalypse.
The result of a drunken spell cast after, of course, a book launch, Gwydion is
Zatanna’s attempt to conjure her perfect man, or perhaps her perfect reader. Initially she
is disappointed to discover that this seems to be ‘a mindless elemental midget with the
power to assume any form I tell him to’ (Morrison 1996, vol. 1, 214); however, Gwydion
is actually ‘the Merlin’, a highly attentive being of ‘living language’ and one of the ‘seven
imperishable treasures’ of Aurakles, the first superhero. Gwydion was granted to Aurakles
by Jack Kirby’s New Gods and, along with other divine gifts, would find his way to the
present day via the Morrisonian Camelot. When Gwydion finally catches up with
Zatanna, his ‘living language’ has infiltrated the text of Hex Appeal itself, a copy
adorned with a forgery of her signature, because on the magic circuit, just like at any
large comic- book convention, ‘you learn to simplify when people are waiting in line’
(203).
 Journal of Graphic Novels and 5
Equally, the introduction of Zatanna’s sidekick Misty, who is ‘learning to be a super-
hero’, allows Morrison to interrogate the archetypical representation of comics heroes.
‘The whole superhero thing is more than just wearing a cape and getting famous’,
Zatanna tells the girl, a pointed, metafictional barb aimed squarely at those who believe
the genre
is merely Superman and Batman (Morrison 1996, vol. 1, 194). Her comment is perhaps
the most succinct distillation of Morrison’s intent with regard to Seven Soldiers, though
later Zatanna elaborates on exactly the kind of selfless, generous characteristics that
attract readers to superheroes:

I didn’t tell her that there wasn’t much to being a superhero. It was all about finding yourself
in a position where you’re the only one around who can save the day. Do you freak out and
walk away? Or do you grit your teeth and walk into hell if that’s what it takes? If risking
your life could save the lives of everyone else, what would you do? (194)

It is this sentiment that motivates her final magical battle with the renegade Time Tailor
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who introduced ‘a deadly plague’– the ‘Sheeda strain’– into the world. At the climax of
this fight, Zatanna literally reaches out from the panel and the page, out through the
fourth wall to touch the reader, a Morrison motif that recalls his work on Animal Man, in
which
the titular Buddy Baker encounters and converses with Morrison himself. In Zatanna’s
case, the mechanisms of the universe are revealed as letters and ink and scissors, even a
caption box which she is able to hold in her hands and which reveals her inner mono-
logue. A splash page illustrates her perspective, looking up from what appears to be the
inside of a typewriter and, beyond, the Morrisonian faces of the seven Time Tailors
(echoing King Mob from The Invisibles). ‘There were eyes,’ she recalls, ‘tens of thou-
sands of eyes in different times and places all converging on me’ (194). It is a sudden,
visceral awareness of the fact that she is being read, both as a character in a comic and,
in- universe, as the living incarnation of her father’s four lost books. It leads her to a new
awareness of her role in the larger, ongoing story of her world; an understanding that
superheroics, that magic, that comic books are ‘all about doing the impossible’ (vol. 4,
201). As such she is ready for her role in the final battle against the Sheeda in Seven
Soldiers #1: unleashing the power of the Merlin she is able actively, authorially, to direct
the narrative with the spell ‘Ekawa esrevinu! Ekirts sreidlos neves!’ (Universe awake!
Seven soldiers strike!) and thus usher the ultimate defeat of the Sheeda (201).
Sharing Zatanna’s initial confusion and insecurity, Morrison’s reimagined Bulleteer –
a reluctant Alix Harrower accidentally infected with impervious metallic ‘smartskin’ – is
based on the character Bulletgirl, created by Bill Barker for Fawcett Comics in 1940 (the
Fawcett stable having been acquired by DC in 1972). While Bulleteer delivers the killing
blow against Gloriana Tenebrae in Seven Soldiers #1, her own series is composed mainly
of the stories of others (her husband Lance, the Vigilante’s Seven Soldiers, Sally Sonic,
etc.). Where Zatanna represents the reading of comic-book stories, Morrison’s Bulleteer is
designed to emulate the experience of encountering comic books for the first time. Her
bewilderment at the complex world she finds herself in is analogous to how novice
readers are often put off by the years of backstory and overwhelming interconnectivity
exhibited by fictional universes such as that of DC. 7 Couched in Alix’s reaction to her
newly superpowered state, the four issues of Bulleteer parallel the immersion of a new
reader into the complex mosaic of the comic-book experience, with issue #1 recounting
‘How the Bulleteer Began’, a typically comic-book origin story of a botched science
experiment coupled with the tragic death of a loved one. Lance Harrower, Alix’s
husband, is a researcher secretly fixated with the online pornography of ‘eternal
superteens’. Lance
 6 V.
dies while testing his metallo-organic smartskin on himself, but, in the process, he also
infects his wife. Prior to this transformation, Alix is closer to being an everywoman
figure than any of the other Seven Soldiers. An attractive schoolteacher, she leads the
kind of life that comic-book frivolities in no way impinge upon. To her, superpowers
are merely
‘stupid powers’ (Morrison 2006, vol. 4, 135), and what comic-book fan has not heard
such a dismissal from a non-reader before? Her eventual identification with superhero
society arises from a place of loneliness and isolation, having lost her job and discovered
Lance’s internet affair with immortal porn star Sally Sonic. Recruited to assist in the
investigation of what happened to the Vigilante, Bulleteer learns the origin of Neh-Buh-
Loh, or the Nebula Man, a sentient universe, final adversary of the original Seven
Soldiers, and current servant of the Sheeda (making appearances in Zatanna,
Frankenstein and Shining Knight, as well as JLA Classified).8 It is Alix’s first exposure
to the intricacies of comic-book history, to ‘supervillains, werewolves, time travel,
vampires, ghosts, coincidence, plot and counterplot: I felt like Alice through the looking
glass’, she says (vol. 3). ‘It’s all one big picture’, FBI Agent Helligan, a ‘metahuman
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specialist’ – read comic-book fan – tells her, a comment that describes not only Seven
Soldiers of Victory but cross-character DC continuity in general.
Increasingly comfortable with her Bulleteer identity, Alix commits further to this new
world in issue #3 by visiting a superhero convention – for all intents and purposes a
comic-book convention complete with discussion panels, awards ceremony and an exhi-
bitors’ floor – where she encounters a broad cross-section of superhero hangers-on, from
fanboys to forgotten heroes to grown-up sidekicks. At its best this serves as a communal
celebration of contemporary storytelling forms; at its worst ‘a nostalgia freakshow that
never ends’. While issue #3 furthers the overall series plot (Alix is being hunted by I,
Spyder – resurrected as a zombified Sheeda slave – who in turn is being hunted by the
ghost of the Vigilante), it also serves as a paean to the ‘brilliant but often overlooked
minor characters in the DC Universe’ and how easily such low-profile protagonists can
become lost in the company’s 70+-year publishing history (Morrison 2006, vol. 1, 5).
Morrison’s mouthpiece here is Mind Grabber Kid, a character who once shared an
adventure with the Justice League in the mainline continuity and has grown up to become
the middle-aged, alcoholic Mind Grabber Man, desperate for a team-up or a hook-up, and
aching for a destiny in order to feel special again. Through Mind Grabber Man, Alix also
meets Susan Barr, the original Bulletgirl now reduced to making her living at the signing
tables of the convention circuit, though she once fought Nazis in the Golden Age. Barr
berates Alix for ‘cashing in on someone else’s good name’ and for a revealing costume
emphasised by the highly sexualised, “cheesecake” artwork of the mini-series, a constant
objectification of both sexes which is shared by the imagery and by the narrative (a
recurring question of this mini-series being the fate of women in the superhero commu-
nity, destined to fill only the roles of ‘sweethearts and supervixens’; vol. 4, 66).
It is precisely this collision of sex and comic books that the final issue of Bulleteer,
‘Bad Girls’, seeks to resolve. Here, Alix discovers that her new lodger is not the shy,
innocent art student she appeared to be but is in fact the immortal Sally Sonic. Now with
a ‘deadly arch villain of [her] very own’, Alix’s transformation into superhero is thus
complete. First using a refrigerator, and later an engine block as a weapon, Bulleteer
and Sonic duke it out on the streets of New York in an archetypical finale to match her
traditional origin story.9 Their battle is intercut with the final story told in the Bulleteer
mini-series, that of Sonic’s corruption, her transformation from naive teenage superher-
oine into an unhinged provocateur at the hands of sexual predator Vitaman in World War
II England. It is essentially a Golden Age story tinged with the cynicism of a modern,
 Journal of Graphic Novels and 7
self-consciously mature readership which cannot quite accept the innocence of that era’s
comics writing without a requisite dose of narcotics abuse and sexual perversion.
Nonetheless, Morrison’s inclusion of Sonic’s tale in at least semi-Golden Age form
acknowledges not only the changing manner in which comics narrative is constructed
and consumed, but also the roots of the genre that have led to Seven Soldiers in the first
place.
Seeing in Sonic the detrimental effects of allowing others’ control over one’s self
ultimately motivates Alix into exercising authority over her own story, albeit in a
fundamentally different manner from Zatanna; Bulleteer, now understanding her role in
the larger context, realises that the only way to live her life is consciously to sever herself
from the larger narrative. ‘You and your destiny are on your own,’ she tells the ghost of
the Vigilante. ‘World, save yourself’ (Morrison 2006, vol. 4, 150). The irony, of course, is
that in trying to attend to her own story, Bulleteer does save the world. Revealed by the
Time Tailors in Seven Soldiers #1 to be a direct descendent of the world’s first superhero,
‘the spear thrown by Aurakles, 42,000 years before’, Alix is prophesied to defeat the
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Sheeda once and for all. She does so by driving into the middle of their invasion, losing
control of her car and running down the badly wounded Gloriana Tenebrae, killing the
Queen of the Sheeda, who has been knocked to Earth by the actions of Shining Knight
(210). Her ‘special destiny’ complete, and at last understanding how her story fits into that
of the wider DC universe, Alix is finally free.

Reimagining stories
With the mini-series Frankenstein and Shining Knight, Morrison begins to rewrite the
literary and mythological forerunners of the comic-book format. Taking two of the most
familiar stories in popular culture, those of Frankenstein’s Monster and the Knights of
the Round Table, he uses them as ciphers for the kind of ‘reimagining’ upon which Seven
Soldiers is predicated. ‘I wound up with two notebooks full of notes, drawings and
costume revamps,’ Morrison says of the initial stages of the undertaking (2006, vol. 1,
5). ‘In every case, this meant reimagining the character from the ground up, with an
emphasis on fresh new ideas, unusual angles, new “costumes,” new situations, new
supporting casts and wild new adventures’ (6).
Re-energised by a burst of electricity in 2005, Morrison’s Milton-quoting Frankenstein
rises from the grave in the ultimate metaphor for the resurrection of forgotten comics
characters (in this case the Len Wein character Spawn of Frankenstein, which appeared
in 1970s issues of DC’s Phantom Stranger). A man made out of pieces of other men,
Frankenstein represents the process of reimagining a character. Throughout the title,
Morrison experiments with radically different genres and settings, from the suburban
United States, to Tibet and Mars, all the way to the distant future. The result is a series of
sympathetic parodies ranging from Stephen King’s Carrie (Uglyhead’s assault on a high-
school prom in Frankenstein #1), Edgar Rice Burroughs (the pulpy Martian milieu of
issue #2), and Marvel’s S.H.I.E.L.D. (here S.H.A.D.E., the Super Human Advance
Defence Executive, described, in a further genre-bending wink at the reader, as
‘Superman meets James Bond’; Morrison 2006, vol. 4, 93). Frankenstein, who has
taken his creator’s name, is able to ‘regenerate’ – or, if you prefer, reimagine – himself
by adding on pieces of dead men (93). In fact, Frankenstein is reimagined many times in
the course of Morrison’s mini-series. He is a centuries-old force for good and a tireless
loner pursuing vengeance, a hopeless romantic and, in the end, an out-and-out action
hero
– an agent of S.H.A.D.E. with an internet connection in his head. What cannot be
 8 V.
rewritten, however, is Frankenstein’s moral code, his dedication to alleviating in others
the suffering and misery that he feels within himself. ‘I have vowed to protect humankind
from evils’, he says, and, of all Morrison’s protagonists here, Frankenstein is the least
averse to superheroics (167).
With this series, Morrison illustrates how a reimagining of a classic story, when
accomplished with style and integrity, can appeal to a contemporary audience. It is not
without meaning that issue #1 features the destruction of a high school, an assault on the
site most associated with the fossilisation of literature. The ‘Die, Frankenstein, Die!’ with
which the series opens is not just the rage of a moustachioed antagonist but an acknowl-
edgment of the lifeless manner in which texts are too often presented in the classroom.
Frankenstein’s adversary Melmoth may be immortal but he is also stagnant; his under-
standing is unchanging and as such he personifies the wrong way of reading classic
stories. They are not the ‘dead flesh’ on which his maggots have been raised – the high-
school students themselves becoming his maggots over the course of the issue #1 – but
instead are lively narratives full of ‘monsters and wonders’ (Morrison 2006, vol. 4, 94).
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Morrison underlines this with the closing splash page of issue #1, a dramatic image of his
hero striding back into the world and declaring ‘Frankenstein Lives!’ The maggots in the
school have been eliminated; the others he will deal with one story at a time.
Of course, Melmoth too is a reimagining. The exiled King of the Sheeda, father of
Zatanna’s sidekick Misty and a recurring villain in Klarion the Witch Boy, proves to be a
fitting adversary for Frankenstein insofar as he too possesses a literary pedigree, deriving
his name and unnaturally long lifespan from Melmoth the Wanderer, protagonist of a
Gothic novel that Irish author Charles Robert Maturin published two years after Mary
Shelly’s Modern Prometheus first appeared.10 Ironically, it is Frankenstein who does the
wandering here, the defining image of the series being its protagonist on the move across
a range of epic backdrops, trekking through the snowy Himalayas, riding across the
‘mournful sandscapes of the red planet’ or silhouetted as he walks away from an atomic
blast. ‘I swam to America’, he recalls in issue #3, and, right until the end, he refuses all
offers of transport with a stoic ‘I’ll walk.’ Frankenstein, though a character known
worldwide, cannot easily find a home in any of the genres through which he travels.
Yet his constant motion serves another crucial purpose within the larger metafictional
enterprise of Seven Soldiers; the thematic unity of the mini-series lies in that single
striking page of the monster walking off into the distance. Frankenstein must keep
walking, must keep being reimagined and renewed, otherwise the entropic effect of
unimaginative criticism on stories such as his cannot be arrested. It is exactly this kind
of imaginative heat-death to which Neh-Buh-Loh succumbs in his final battle with
Frankenstein. As they fight, the Sheeda’s cosmic huntsman issues a ‘confession’:
Moved by the beauty of Melmoth’s daughter, he could not kill her on Gloriana’s orders.
‘There is a flaw in me that keeps me small’, he says (Morrison 2006, vol. 4, 155). As the
point-man for the Harrowing of Earth, Neh-Buh-Loh is of a piece with the critical stance
that holds comic books to be a trivial indulgence or, as John M. Trushell puts it, a
‘paraliterary ghetto’ (2004 162). He is ashamed that he ever had anything to do with
harmony, ‘symmetry and beauty’; he is the scholar who was drawn to literature by the
possibilities of imagination and now finds himself, quite literally, sucking the life out of
the mythologies he once loved. Neh-Buh-Loh may not be able to square them with what
he has become as an adult, but, equally, he ‘cannot forget’ (Morrison 2006, vol. 4, 157–
157). As Frankenstein bluntly puts it, ‘Supermen from this universe invaded you long
ago’ (159).11 They are part of him now, and to deny their existence brings him nothing
but remorse.
 Journal of Graphic Novels and 9
Frankenstein is the kind of reimagining that stands in opposition to lifeless
storytelling and the type of criticism that regards comic-book narratives as inferior to
‘grown-up’ forms of writing (though, as the 3-billion-year-old Neh-Buh-Loh
demonstrates, age is not necessarily equitable with maturity). The mini-series encourages
readers, especially younger readers, to think differently about, in this instance, a
character with a literary pedigree of almost 200 years. ‘I write for the intelligent 14
year old,’ Morrison says,
‘because that’s how old I was when I really got into comic books in a big way’ (Epstein
2005). It is therefore no surprise to find that Frankenstein returns to that readership again
and again. The character’s angst over rejection by the Bride (as in, of Frankenstein) is a
fresh spin on the character’s one defining romantic relationship, one that is emotionally
intelligible to a teenage readership. Travelling to Mars, where, naturally enough,
Melmoth is seen delivering what amounts to a lecture on his own literary history
(‘Sounds like fairy tales to you, I’ll bet’), Frankenstein must free an army of children
from both the figurative and literal enslavement of his adversary, the ‘author’ of so much
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misery (Morrison 2006, vol. 4, 17, 28). Melmoth, for his part, attempts to escape by
using that most potent of weapons in the Seven Soldiers arsenal: a story, a reimagining,
no less, of Frankenstein’s own origin. ‘It wasn’t the lightening that gave your dead flesh
life!’ Melmoth reveals. ‘It was my blood!’ (24). They, like the best and worst of critics,
share a common heritage, but it is Frankenstein who wins out and all of Melmoth’s efforts
are reduced to the dung of a flesh-eating Martian horse, or, should one prefer,
demonstrated to be nothing more than
shit.
Yet, if Frankenstein’s ‘many adventures’ approximate the reimagination process,
Shining Knight provides an exemplar of a reimagined end-product, a radical rewriting
of both a member of the Golden Age Seven Soldiers and a classic literary archetype, ‘the
last survivor of Arthur’s broken table’ (178). This time the focus is on the 16-year-old Sir
Justin (later revealed to be Justina), a knight from ‘the first Arthurian epoch, 10,000 years
ago, somewhere in the 81st century BC’, who crashes through time on his flying steed
Vanguard only to land in modern-day Los Angeles (vol. 2, 39). ‘Mythology, mythology,’
mutters supporting character Don Vincenzo, a to-the-point summation of Morrison’s
concern in the pages of Shining Knight, drawing heavily on Welsh and Irish folklore in
an effort to rewrite an over-exposed Celtic hero saga while preserving the core values of
loyalty, justice and persistence which it espouses (124). In 2005, Justin finds that legend
has become corrupted. ‘Words can mean anything and everything,’ says Gloriana, ‘that is
why they have no proper shape here. What once was truth is now pliable, untrustworthy,
and slippery’ (48). This is an age in which ‘heroes will betray one another’ (109). It
pales
against the final stand of Camelot, depicted as a time ‘when the lowest shall be called to
highest service’ (126). In fact, much is made by the characters here of the comparison
between contemporary LA and the Morrisonian Camelot, a world-spanning empire of
‘optimum humans’ who split the atom and to whom ‘even the microscopic races owed
allegiance’ (45). In the true history of the world revealed by the Time Tailor in Seven
Soldiers #1, Camelot is the successor to the Neanderthal civilisation sparked by the
intervention of the New Gods, and it eventually takes possession of the four cities
founded by the ancient Irish heroes and conquerors, the Tuatha Dé Danann (vol. 4, 180).
Despite its arcane and occult knowledge, Camelot too eventually falls to a Sheeda
Harrowing, the enemy countering the swords and lances of the knightly age with not just
the countless warriors and directed energy weapons of so much generic fantasy or
science fiction, but also Oan power batteries and rings familiar to readers of Green
Lantern.
The Sheeda’s usurpation of Green Lantern power is Morrison’s demonstration of a
further perversion, that of will and imagination (the means by which members of the
 1 V.
Lantern Corp. manipulate the energy at their disposal) and is entirely consistent with
their modus operandi. They have already enslaved I, Spyder, and, as Justin discovers,
they have also destroyed the will and imagination of Galahad the ‘perfect knight’,
reducing him to a bestial state, a being who can no longer think for himself (Morrison
2006, vol. 2, 107). At this point, Shining Knight dovetails thematically with Frankenstein
and the reader is again
presented with a story that once inspired but which now has become distorted. ‘We
hunger to set the corrupt against the virtuous for our entertainment,’ says Gloriana, and there
is a reason the far-future Sheeda domain is known as ‘Summer’s End’ (55). It is the end
of freedom, yes, but it also the death – in fact the dearth – of imagination. To survive,
the Sheeda are forced to pillage the accomplishments of their own past, and while
initially this may seem like Morrison’s damning indictment of the reimagining process, it
is a critique focused firmly on a particular kind of reimagining. The Sheeda’s raiding of
history results not, like Frankenstein, in constant renewal and invention, but in soulless
regurgitations of
past glories, the kind of storytelling despised by Morrison and which results in characters
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such as the zombified Galahad ‘debasing himself for the amusement of our court’ (107).
This monstrous resurrection is so far from his true essence that he does not even
recognise Justin as a representative of Camelot and of all that is righteous and inspiring
in its tales. Morrison’s take on Justin as Arthurian hero is therefore as much an act of
remembrance as
anything else; he has reconceived the character as he once might have been, without any
of the attendant cultural baggage that has accrued around the figure of the knight. It is
after all significant that – as with Frankenstein – Justin is a character out of time. Both are
powerful and recognisable fictional archetypes indicative of the past, and both are
revived by Morrison in the twenty-first century as ambassadors of an age when stories of
heroes were held up as something worth aspiring to. Like Frankenstein, this young knight
asserts that ‘Camelot lives!’ (52).
Justin’s victory over Galahad, literally slicing his head open, presents a visceral image
for the triumph of a youthful, untainted imagination, which has not been hobbled by adult
notions of what can and cannot be accomplished. Justin holds firm to the belief that there
‘is not one soldier in all of Avalon whose heart is less than pure’ (58). It is a childish
notion but one that is characteristic of the Morrisonian universe, a place where over-
confidence pales before a true belief that ordinary people can do impossible things. ‘This
is #&@$% mythology calling,’ declares Don Vincenzo, his youthful love of spectacle and
adventure resurrected by an encounter with Justin’s steed. Together they ride forth and
recreate Camelot’s doomed last stand against the Sheeda as Gloriana’s hordes assault the
Mafioso’s compound. The fairy queen seeks Vincenzo’s most prized possession: the
Cauldron of Rebirth, one of the seven treasures of Aurakles and an object originally
fought over by Gloriana and Justina ten thousand years and three issues earlier. That
Morrison’s Shining Knight continuously circles around this artefact is no accident for
what is at stake within its pages is nothing less than the power of resurrection itself, a
potent
metaphor for the reimagining of characters, a concept Morrison takes to its logical
extreme in the reclamation of comic-book stories advocated by the remaining
components of Seven Soldiers: Klarion the Witch Boy, The Guardian, and Mister
Miracle.

Reclaiming stories
A trio of Morrison stand-ins who share a common dissatisfaction with established
narratives, Klarion, Guardian and Mister Miracle build thematically from Frankenstein
and Shining Knight to construct a scathing critique of the anti-comics seriousness stereo-
 Journal of Graphic Novels and 1
typically associated with maturity. Together they represent Morrison’s effort to reclaim
the
 1 V.
youthful delight in reading comics. ‘Let me see the weird stuff’, he says, rejecting staid,
ubiquitous interpretations of that most universal story of all: growing up (Lamar 2009).
The most obvious embodiment of this is Klarion the Witch Boy, a teen in a world where
coming-of-age is analogous to the revelation that belief in god – belief in the larger
narratives of monsters and wonders of any kind – is a pointless exercise of immature
indulgence. Worse, after Klarion makes his escape to what he thinks is a better world, the
real world, he finds that the corresponding transition to adulthood involves being sent to
‘the red place’: Mars, a dead world of thin air and hard labour. The Guardian too is trying
to escape from his own story and reclaim something of the man he was before the brutal
realities of adulthood took their toll. Jake Jordan is an ex-police officer who shot dead a
boy in the mistaken belief that the teenager murdered his partner. Caught in a cycle of
depression, Jordan escapes into a life of costumed superheroics as the in-house hero of an
outlandish tabloid newspaper ‘where the readers are the reporters’ (Morrison 2006, vol.
1, 87). Typifying Morrison’s rebuke of the po-faced comics seeking to add seriousness
and maturity to the format, Jordan embraces the absurdity that for so long was the bread-
and-
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butter of the DC Universe. As Guardian he battles subway pirates and base-jumps into
hordes of runaway androids, he fights alongside a golem and he gets the girl. He
becomes ‘a working-man again’ by surrounding himself with the teenagers and pre-
pubescents of
the publication’s so-called Newsboy Army. Mister Miracle, meanwhile, is Morrison’s
most literal personification of escape as a means of reclaiming one’s purpose. The
‘world’s greatest escape artist’, Shilo Norman is a 23-year-old struggling with ‘the
typical problems we associate with a rapid rise to fame and riches on the back of an
unquantifi- able “talent”’ (Morrison 2006, vol. 3); however, he also possesses a living
computer called ‘Motherboxxx’, a funky, George Clinton overhaul of New Gods
technology tonally in keeping with the art of Mister Miracle and a device he describes as
‘just a childhood thing, a toy … somebody made for me’ (Morrison 2006, vol. 3).12
That somebody is legendary comics innovator and Morrisonian hero Jack Kirby, with
these three titles all based upon characters originally created by the ‘King’.13 Morrison,
born in 1960, claims he began reading comics in a serious way during the mid-1970s,
shortly after Kirby’s creation of Mister Miracle and the New Gods (1971), Klarion
(1973), and the re-introduction of his Guardian character in the pages of Superman’s
Pal Jimmy
Olson (1971). Their use here, combined with the relentless focus on childhood and
imagination, makes it difficult not to read Seven Soldiers as Morrison’s attempt to
provide the comic-book audience of today with the same thrills he experienced reading
Kirby titles as a teenager. In fact, as a finite comics narrative of separate but interlocking
titles collected into trade paperbacks, what Seven Soldiers most resembles is Kirby’s
Fourth
World saga (1970–73), his magnum opus and his most influential work for DC.
Morrison’s Klarion, a combination of a conventional rebellious youth narrative with a
Puritan aesthetic, comes from a place called Limbo Town, a hidden community of ‘Witch
Folk’ buried deep underground. Here, everything is predicated on a philosophy of control:
the ‘Book of Shadows’, a repressive code of laws administered by priest-caste known as
‘Submissionaries’, who resist modern inventions such as steam engines and democratic
governance.14 The Submissionaries fear the Sheeda, but above all else they fear
knowledge of a place called ‘Blue Rafters’, the clear sky from beneath which their
ancestors came and towards which Klarion’s father fled long ago. When it comes, the
intrusion of the outside world into Limbo Town takes the most mundane form possible:
an old Kit Kat wrapper, ‘a miraculous, imperishable covering’, which is evidence of ‘a
land above’ (Morrison 2006, vol. 3). It is Klarion’s first proof that everything he has been
told is a lie. Croatoan, their god, does not exist, or is at best a New Gods apparatus called
Fatherbox, which takes the form of
 Journal of Graphic Novels and 1

one of a pair of dice, one half of the technology mistaken for magic by Zatanna’s
sidekick Misty. Recurring throughout Klarion and Guardian as the mysterious
foundation stone of New York City, this device is worshiped by the Witch Folk and
sought as a treasure by the subway pirates. It is no throwaway McGuffin but a prize
that ‘makes a man master of
destiny’, that most elusive state of being – of understanding, self-worth and fulfilment –
towards which Klarion, Jordan, and Norman all aspire (Morrison 2006, vol. 1, 177).
Read in this light, Klarion, along with The Guardian and Mister Miracle, emerges as
one of the more personal elements of Morrison’s Seven Soldiers. Whereas Frankenstein
and Shining Knight prompt discussion of the general trends hobbling imaginative story-
telling, Klarion the Witch Boy is the author’s argument for the primacy of imagination
with specific reference to a younger audience, readers who can experience almost any-
thing from a format of inherently empowering possibilities which ought not to be
discarded in the transition to adulthood. ‘I would like to be many things before I die’,
Klarion says, and while in the course of his mini-series the Witch Boy becomes a Witch
Man, he does so not through acceptance of adult responsibility in the community – the
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‘job for life’ of Limbo Town Submissionary. Instead, the intensely Morrisonian character
of Klarion achieves self-actualisation though outright rejection of societal pigeon-holing.
‘Today’, he says, ‘today I shall be a soldier…’ (Morrison 2006, vol. 3), but he reserves the
right to be something else tomorrow (and of course tomorrow, depicted in Seven Soldiers
#1, this soldier becomes a traitor). It is a quest not simply for destiny but for
individuality.
Suffocated in Limbo Town, Klarion escapes to New York City, though there he finds
himself constrained by another situation in which he is expected to grow up and fulfil a
preconceived role at odds with his avowed intention to ‘stay a boy forever’ (vol. 2, 20).
In New York, he encounters Mister Melmoth, who serves a similar role to the one he
fulfilled
in Frankenstein; however, his perspective on stories here is more insidious again and he
attempts to co-opt the universal narrative of growing-up itself. The king of the Sheeda is
not so much a jaded figure as he is a relentlessly mercantile one, a personification of a
soulless, corporate interest in comics which Morrison has termed ‘the interest in the
farmer for the turnip’, the ‘people who are just here to harvest us’ (Barbelith 2002).
Melmoth’s actions display no concept of stories as something to be enjoyed or of child-
hood as a time of innocence. Recruiting Klarion into ‘The Deviants’, the ‘kids gang’ that
he mentors, Melmoth distorts the childhood wonder of the comic-book experience when
he sends these children to carry out a theft from the Museum of Superheroes, literal
repository of Golden and Silver Age memories. He has corrupted these youths by
misappropriating their imaginative ingenuity for his criminal gain and, when he is done
with them, when they are grown up, he presides over their initiation into adulthood, a
one- way ticket to the hard labour of his Martian gold mines.
Counterpointing this is the first mission of the Manhattan Guardian. Kirby’s original
Guardian, a Captain America analogue, first appeared in 1941 but gradually faded from
prominence until reintroduced as a clone in 1971; and so, on one level, the Guardian is
Morrison’s proxy for a readership that once enjoyed comics and has now returned after a
long absence. That said, a more satisfying integration with the metafictional structure of
Seven Soldiers is found when The Guardian is read as commentary on comic-book
writing. With Jordan hired by newspaper editor Ed Stargard as a ‘living masthead’ to
increase circulation, The Guardian furthers Morrison’s reclamation of his medium from
‘serious’ or ‘adult’ perceptions of the format by focusing on an equally popular but poorly
regarded kind of publication: a tabloid newspaper. Jordan’s job is not just to be a
superhero but is to acquire stories for his newspaper in character, a fun twist on the
Clark/Superman dichotomy and an acknowledgment of the lax journalistic standards of
 1 V.
tabloid newspapers; Jake does not just put himself into his stories, often he is the story (at
which point, one cannot help but recall Morrison’s own penchant for inserting himself
into his stories). Furthermore, the seemingly all-knowing, disembodied head of Stargard
communicates with Jordan from computer screens – panels, if you will – and bears an
undeniable resemblance to none other than Jack Kirby.
‘We’re telling stories about human dignity’, Stargard says. ‘Stories about how human
beings make culture and meaning for ourselves, even down there in the garbage’
(Morrison 2006, vol. 1, 189). With the grand themes of ‘guilt and greed, of retribution,
judgment and damnation’ all apparent in the form, this is Morrison’s impassioned pitch
for the validity of comic books (190). The implication here is clear: while everyday lives
ought to be heightened by exposure to mythological tales they are also worthy of being
mythologised themselves. Like Klarion and Mister Miracle, Guardian is defined by the
intrusion of such mythological elements – heightened or fantastical developments – into
the mundane. Yet Jake Jordan is unique insofar as his adventures make the leap to in-
universe mythology, the Guardian newspaper being a means of recording and
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disseminat-
ing his personal superheroics to a wide readership, which makes sense, for how does one
distinguish the news from the superhero comic in a superhero world? Words serve Jordan
as they do Morrison the writer, as links between the domestic and the deranged.
Throughout the mini-series, headlines are glimpsed that relate directly to the events of
the plot: ‘Ghost Pirates of the Spanish Main Line’, ‘Bedlam on Broadway!’ These
Kirbyian markers appear on newspapers within the comic, itself named for the hero
named after the newspaper. Confused? You are supposed to be; the effect of Morrison ’s
referential game is to blur the distinction between Jordan’s fictional adventures and the
reader’s reality. ‘I’ve been trying to make superhero comics which draw attention to that
aspect of participation and collusion between character, creator, and reader’, says
Morrison, a goal which reaches its metatextual zenith in Seven Soldiers #1, in which he
uses pages from the Guardian – complete with editorial and a crossword puzzle – to tell
Jordan’s segments of the story (Thill 2009). ‘We don’t just report crime,’ reads the
newspaper’s banner, ‘we fight it!’ (Morrison 2006, vol. 4, 189). You are not just reading
this comic, Morrison seems to be saying, you’re living it. Mythology, in the broad sense
of inspirational narratives up to and including comic books, is shown to be a democratic,
continually expanding body of stories open to all. It is not an objective but a subjective
and personal undertaking, both for readers and for writers. Morrison emphasises this by
invoking another in-universe writer, Shelly Gaynor – the Whip – who is quoted by
Stargard in his editorial:

In the fury of bright crayola colors, broken bones, and sound effects that can burst your ear
drums if you let them, the themes may seem unfamiliar but trust me, those are human
stories, writ large, dressed in capes and riding magic carpets to other universes, and if life
with the Super-Cowboys taught me anything it taught me this… When you use your X-ray
vision to
really, really LOOK… every day is mythology. (191)

Transcending their immediate context, Gaynor’s words coalesce with Morrison’s philo-
sophy of superheroics: anybody can be a superhero, and while the various crises of the
DC universe are more usually dealt with by the Justice League, Teen Titans or any
number of superpowered teams, the Sheeda invasion is met largely by a grassroots
resistance of ordinary people reclaiming their heroic potential and marshalled by the
embodiment of the popular media (and a decidedly unpowered hero), Jake Jordan. As
Guardian, he organises resistance around the Superhero Museum on Broadway, where
the
 Journal of Graphic Novels and 1
human community draws strength from the idea of the superhero, a perennial concern of
Morrison’s and a cornerstone of Seven Soldiers in particular.
Connecting the relatively self-contained use of this theme in Seven Soldiers to the
larger tapestry of work Morrison has produced for DC Comics is the series Mister
Miracle, at once an intimate reflection and an epic tale of Kirby’s New Gods which
looks back to Morrison’s work on JLA in the late 1990s and, forward, to his Final Crisis
crossover event in 2008 (described by Morrison as a ‘story about stories’; Brady 2009).
Not only that, but Morrison has taken the larger-than-life Kirbyian Fourth World saga
and distilled it into the personal conflict of one character. Where Kirby’s Miracle had to
make a literal escape from Darkseid’s homeworld of Apokolips, Morrison’s Shilo
Norman is trapped in a psychological version of the same; witness the transformation of
his nemesis into ‘Boss Dark Side’ and the portrayal of the anti-life equation, a heretofore
metaphorical suppression of free will, which Morrison reveals as an actual mathematical
proof (‘lone- liness + alienation + fear + despair + self-worth ÷ mockery…’ etc.; 2006,
vol. 4, 45). While both these advancements of the New Gods mythology foreshadow
the Apokolips
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on Earth of Final Crisis, they also serve as an intense personal crisis for Norman, a
character struggling to realise his destiny as the one man for whom life is something ‘to
direct and manipulate’ (123).
Norman’s nature ‘is to defy restriction’, a role arguably shared with the best of
intelligent, articulate comics writers. As Mister Miracle he has escaped from the second
dimension (perhaps the comic-book page), the centre of the earth, and, in Mister Miracle
#1, from inside a miniature black hole … or has he? It is revealed in issue #4 that
Norman has been trapped inside the black hole, a manifestation of his true imprisonment
within a
shallow celebrity life. Beyond its event horizon, Norman undergoes a series of tests by
the New God Metron that take the form of a dream life in which he witnesses his friends
succumb to the Anti-Life Equation. Subjected to Darkseid’s ‘Omega Sanction’, Norman
experiences a further series of oppressive incarnations, ‘an endless succession of synthetic
lives’, and rejects them all in favour of reclaiming the positive aspects of his existence
and truly living. In the end, he proves his worth as the handpicked hero of the New Gods,
‘master of the life equation’, and, not for the last time, overturns a fundamental physical
constraint of the universe – the black hole information paradox – when he brings out more
information from the singularity then he entered with. Thus prepared, Miracle defeats
death itself, and, after being shot in the head by Boss Dark Side, he escapes from his own
grave in the psychedelic whirlwind that comprises the final splash page of Seven Soldiers
#1. While it would be unwise to overly labour any comparison between Miracle and
Morrison himself, it must be noted that here artist J.H. Williams III depicts the ‘God-
Sight’ Miracle manifests after his abduction by Metron in terms that are reminiscent of
Morrison’s own self-described ‘alien abduction experience’ in Kathmandu in 1995:
‘They took me out of my body and then to what seemed to be the fifth dimension because
I could see the entirety of space and time as a dynamic object’, as ‘an information space
that I could say was maybe kinda bluish, extending out infinitely’ (Metzger 2002). ‘Was it
really the smartest idea to tell the newspapers you’d had been contacted by aliens?’
Shilo’s friends ask after his initial encounter with Metron (Morrison 2006, vol. 4, 136).
Perhaps not, but one can easily imagine the same question being levelled at Morrison.
While Mister Miracle is the least connected with the overarching story of the Sheeda
invasion, it is the most thematically potent of Morrison’s seven titles. Nonetheless, it
shares with Klarion and The Guardian a tight focus on the most valuable, most positive
aspects of the Morrisonian philosophy. In reclaiming their childhoods, their
imaginations,
and their very lives, Klarion, Jordan, and Norman reclaim their stories. They have rejected
 1 V.

outright the proposition that only ‘adult’, ‘serious’ or ‘mature’ narratives have literary
worth and so underscore the urgent message at the heart of Seven Soldiers as a whole.
Together they are a powerful, positive triptych that focuses the themes apparent through-
out the rest of Seven Soldiers: where Klarion evokes the wonder of childhood and The
Guardian argues for the redemptive power of reviving that imagination in adulthood,
Mister Miracle is Morrison’s sly nod to the reader stepping from Seven Soldiers into the
wider realm of DC comics, a universe greater than anything they might have convention-
ally acknowledged. ‘Be free,’ Mister Miracle urges, ‘free all of us’ (Morrison 2006,
vol. 4, 124).

Conclusion
‘Things as they are have never really been enough for me’, Morrison says, and Seven
Soldiers of Victory betrays his impatience with the limitations of the contemporary
comics scene (Brady 2004a). Furthering his individual form of postmodernism through
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the multilayered, puzzle-box nature of the project, Morrison’s Seven Soldiers pursues
see-
mingly contradictory aims of, on the one hand, evading what Beverley Southgate (2000,
160) terms ‘the chains of a single story or chronology’ and, on the other, establishing ‘the
entirety of DC’s comics as a single story’ (Blavlnka 2011, 74). Conceived in every way
to be the antithesis of the market into which they were published, Morrison’s seven mini-
series are a practice-based reflection on ‘comics genealogy’, a work that acknowledges
the
contemporary debt to storytelling’s ‘antiquity and centrality’ in human culture (Freedman
2011, 33). Throughout the series, Morrison’s concern is with the restoration of aesthetics
and entertainment as equal partners, with the resulting synergy a means of demonstrating
comic-book narratives to be spaces of wild, mythic possibilities. Seven Soldiers is
designed to ‘expose the very roots of what the “hero” story is and why it has motivated
humankind through our entire history, to tell as “primal” a superhero story as we possibly
can’ (Philips 2008). The series touches on

hip hop psychedelia, full-on fantasy adventure in modern day Los Angeles, a gritty, hard
luck heroine book, a rollercoaster techno-thriller, a sci-fi western, vampire knights from hell
riding giant spiders and more fresh new superheroes than anyone has a right to expect.
(Brady 2004a)

This variety of subjects and styles suggests a Morrisonian alternative to the assertion
made by Ben Saunders that the comic-book marketplace is irrevocably divided ‘between
genre works (dominated but not limited by superhero stories) and what we might call
“literary non-fiction”’ (2009, 292). What is more, as an ‘all-out onslaught on the very
basics of the superhero genre and indeed the idea of “story” itself’, Seven Soldiers
assails the reader with an incontrovertible argument for comic books as ‘a body of
contemporary mythology’ (Philips 2008; Reynolds 1992, 7). By presenting ‘a labyrinth
of text and images permeated with metaphysical concepts and popular representations of
archetypes, both ancient and modern’, Seven Soldiers knits the history of DC super-
heroics into the tapestry of folkloric and mythological narratives stretching from
Neanderthal times through Camelot to the present day (Faust 2011, 2). In the process,
it comments on DC’s continuity-heavy, company-wide events such as Crisis on Infinite
Earths, Infinite Crisis, and so on, the intertextual continuity of Morrison’s finite series,
offering the reader a working model of an impossible thing, ‘an ideal DC or Marvel
metatext’ (Reynolds 1992, 43). In a marketplace of endless, superfluous tie-ins,
 Journal of Graphic Novels and 1
Morrison’s Seven Soldiers stands as an ‘event’ in which each component issue is
integral. The Sheeda Harrowing of Earth is a crisis, yes, but it is not a Crisis and
there is no Superman, Batman or Wonder Woman to save the day. As Father Time tells
Frankenstein: ‘The only superheroes left in town are the ugly ones’ (Morrison 2006,
vol. 4, 161).

Notes
1. Best Finite/Limited Series, 2006.
2. All references here are to Morrison’s (2006) four-volume, trade paperback edition of the
Seven Soldiers of Victory series. Note: Volume 3 was issued without page numbers.
3. The original Seven Soldiers team was created by DC editor Mort Weisinger in 1941; though,
beyond a handful of call-backs and references, Morrison’s Seven Soldiers exists as an entirely
separate entity.
4. Hush was a 2002–03 storyline written by Jeph Loeb and drawn by Jim Lee which ran through
DC’s monthly Batman series. This highly successful arc incorporated a large number of guest
Downloaded by [Val Nolan] at 12:22 17 September 2014

appearances by established Batman villains.

5. Often speaking in Ogham, an Irish alphabet of the Early Medieval period, the Sheeda first
appeared in Morrison’s JLA Classified #1–3 (2005) and represent the most obvious of the
many Irish, Scottish and Welsh mythological touches that he has folded into his saga.
6. See ‘Who Are the Six Soldiers?’ at http://goodcomics.blogspot.com/2005/02/who-are-six-
soldiers.html (February 28, 2005); see also the discussion at http://www.barbelith.com/topic/
19871/from/175#post424556 (February 28, 2005). One series of blog posts has even transi-
tioned into a short e-book: Hickey (2011).
7. The potential for long-running comic titles to collapse ‘under the weight of their own
accumulated continuity’ and thus frighten off new readers is often cited by publishers – the
Big Two in particular – as the rationale behind company-wide relaunches. As Randy Duncan
and Matthew Smith (2009, 79) put it: ‘The desire to return to less complicated continuities
has become not only a creator-driven but also an editorially dictated direction’. The most
promi- nent instance of this is Marvel’s Ultimate line, which ‘attempted to be much hipper
and much more accessible to a new generation of readers, and it met with considerable
success’ (79). A more recent example is DC’s line-wide ‘New 52’ relaunch, for which
Morrison was tapped to writer Action Comics. Again and again, ‘publishers have certainly
attempted to give new readers an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a character’s
revitalized adventures by either rebooting or revisiting their origins time and again in recent
years’ (79).
8. This final confrontation occurred in Justice League of America #100–102 (1972) in a three-
part story titled ‘The Unknown Soldier of Victory’, ‘The Hand That Shook the World’, and
‘And One of Us Must Die’. The issues were scripted by Len Wein, with art by Dick Dillin
and Joe Giella.
9. Women in Refrigerators’ was coined by writer Gail Simone to describe the use of the death
or injury of a female comic-book character as a plot device in a story starring a male
protagonist.
It originates in a 1994 Green Lantern plotline in which Kyle Rayner discovers that his
girlfriend has been killed by the villain Major Force and stuffed inside his refrigerator. The
issue was the subject of much online discussion (see http://www.unheardtaunts.com/wir/,
accessed December 17, 2010).
10. Modern Prometheus’ being the subtitle of Shelly’s Frankenstein.
11. The ‘Supermen’ Frankenstein refers to are the International Ultramarine Corp., who were
miniaturised and injected into Neh-Buh-Loh’s infant form during Morrison’s run on JLA
Classified.
12. George Clinton (b. 1941) is regarded as one of the foremost innovators of funk music. He
was the principle talent behind the bands Parliament and Funkadelic during the 1970s and
early 1980s, before later launching a successful solo career.
13. Morrison discussed Kirby extensively in his non-fiction volume Supergods, in which he
describes him as ‘the most influential superhero artist of them all’ (2011, 38).
14. Thematically, this philosophy of control is closely related to the appearance of the ‘anti-life equation’,
that metaphorical suppression of free will which appears so prominently in Mister Miracle.
 1 V.
Notes on contributor
Val Nolan lectures on contemporary literature and creative writing at the National University of
Ireland, Galway. Recent publications include ‘Flann, fantasy, and science fiction: O’Brien’s
surprising synthesis’ in the Flann O’Brien Centenary Issue of Review of Contemporary Fiction
(2011), along with ‘If it was just th’ol book…: a history of the John McGahern banning
controversy’ in Irish Studies Review (2011), ‘The aesthetics of space and time in the fiction of
John Banville and Neil Jordan’ in Nordic Irish Studies (2010), and a contribution to the
‘Futures’ page of the science journal Nature. He is a regular literary critic for The Irish
Examiner and at present is completing a monograph on representations of Irish history in the
fiction of Neil Jordan.

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