Seven Soldiers of Victory 1

Follows the adventures of The Shining Knight, Zatanna, The Guardian, Klarion the Witchboy, Mister Miracle, Bulleteer, and Frankenstein.

From School Library Journal

Grade 10 Up–Superhero comics have a long tradition of team-ups and origin stories, and Morrison pays tribute to both while simultaneously breaking exciting new ground. Selecting a group of lesser-known DC characters, all endowed with something that makes them super, but all debatable as heroes, he challenges himself to find an extraordinary set of circumstances in which these characters must pull together to become a team. This first volume of the collected comics focuses mostly on background information on the characters, with some overlap between their tales, hinting at future connections. Readers will enjoy the erratic and creative nature of the plots, including everything from a Western posse rounded up to defeat a giant spider to subway pirates terrifying New York City. The art is consistently strong and well framed, with excellent coloration and great lettering. However, the book as a whole is a bit overwhelming and confusing even for seasoned comics readers, and would probably have fairly limited appeal to teens. Course language, brief sex and nudity, and horrific violence will make this a dicey choice for most school libraries.–Dawn Rutherford, King County Library System, Bellevue, WA Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Noted for his imaginative approach to superheroes, Morrison was given the opportunity to rehabilitate second-string characters from throughout DC's long history. Greenlighted to totally transform his chosen protagonists, he rehabilitated marginal and altogether forgotten figures, characters "who had super powers but weren't necessarily super-heroes." The premiere volume--three more are scheduled--collects the initial stories of the first four soldiers belonging to a team that's not a team: the Shining Knight, from King Arthur's Round Table; the Guardian, an ex-cop become a newspaper's in-house crime-buster; Zatanna, a magician who's lost her powers; and rebellious Klarion the Witch Boy, an otherdimensional goth. The story of each is self-contained, but Morrison promises that the characters will soon discover they are all confronting a common enemy that threatens civilization. Seven Soldiers may not be as daring as Morrison's innovative Animal Man (see Deus ex Machina, 2003), which tested the very limits of the superhero genre, but fans of his work and of superheroes a bit out of the ordinary will enjoy the ambitious project. Gordon FlaggCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Reviews

News