It’s a pet peeve, one that you’ll get sick of hearing about before too long — but here you go: serialization of graphic novels is a headache for the serious-minded reviewer.

I’m not talking about comic book serialization prior to trade paperback publication. As you probably know, in most cases, publishers dole out new commercial-grade graphic novels as periodical comic books in monthly (if you’re lucky) installments, with a vague promise of a collection if and only if sales of the comics indicate that there might be some kind of demand. Fair enough, actually. But then the trade paperback collections, themselves, almost always fail to contain the entire work in one volume. Yargh. So you get yourself a second layer of serialization, albeit one that breaks the work up into larger chunks. Serialization on top of serialization. When is it time for a reviewer to actually, you know, review the thing? I mean, ethically? What if the first parts promise something the latter parts fail to deliver? When can a recommendation be made to the casual reader, who probably doesn’t want to take a chance on something that may not, finally, be worth his/her money, or, more importantly, time?

According to the frontmatter of Seven Soldiers of Victory: Volume One, the 30 comic books that constitute Grant Morrison’s reinvention of some of DC’s minor-league heroes will be collected in the form of four paperback volumes. At fifteen bucks each, that amounts to a sixty dollar committment from the reader (assuming he or she hasn’t also purchased the individual comic book issues), spread out over a little more than half a year. Knowing what I know about the difficulties of operating profitably in the comic book industry (which is not a lot, but a little), I can understand the economic motivations behind this publication strategy; glossy full-color books are expensive to print, especially if they’re not going to be bestsellers on a Harry Potter scale (a scale unimaginable in the graphic novel niche at the moment); and it’s got to be a lot easier to sell four volumes at twenty bucks a pop than it is to sell one at sixty. Consumer’s minds work that way. Mine does, anyway. As much as I gripe, I probably wouldn’t have bought it myself, at sixty bucks, even for the complete story in one pop. Sixty bucks for a comic book? Yikes. But my probable knee-jerk response as a consumer (or, in this case, as a probable non-consumer) is irrelevant. What am I supposed to do as a reviewer?

I could wait until all four volumes come out, and then write a review of the whole thing. I’ve thought about that — and not just for this work. I don’t have any actual, like, statistics to back this up or anything, but it seems to me that multiple-volume graphic novels outnumber single-volume graphic novels by a wide margin, especially on the commercial side of things, as opposed to those literary/alternative works that are published with little hope of commercial success. So this problem could come up every single week.

But waiting for the complete work may be exactly the wrong thing to do.

Last week’s review also covered a “Volume One” which comprised only a small portion of the whole work. In that case, I disliked the first installment so thoroughly that I couldn’t imagine paying for the other volumes in order to review them (and I myself pay for all the books I review here, as a matter of principle). So it seemed important to go ahead and get the review out of the way, if only to save some like-minded somebody else (my ideal reader, whose tastes more or less match mine) the twenty bucks and the disappointment.

That covers “Volume Ones” I don’t like. But what about “Volume Ones” that I do like? I’ve been told that, in some cases, if the first volume or two of a multiple-volume graphic novel doesn’t sell well, the future volumes may be cancelled. In cases where I like the first volume enough to anticipate the future collections for my own reading pleasure, I’d be doing myself (as somebody who wants to purchase future volumes), as well as any like-minded readers who have found my blog, a disservice by not trumpeting the qualities of the book as far and as widely as possible.

Not that I overestimate my own ability to, um, move units. This is just a new little blog, after all. But that’s neither here nor there. If a reviewer stops taking into consideration the simple utilitarian purpose of writing reviews (helping like-minded readers avoid stuff that’s no good; helping them find stuff that is), then he or she is just masturbating.

Which is what I’m doing right now. Whining about my, you know, reviewer’s dilemma. Let me get to the book itself.

Ahem. I liked it.

I liked it, among other things, because of its story structure.

It’s unusual to like a comic book because of its story structure, I guess, so I’ll dig a little deeper into that statement.

Imagine a story. We’ll call it “Story.” Story starts with Protagonist A. I don’t know Protagonist A yet, of course, so I don’t much care what happens at first. Protagonist A is just living his/her life. Ho hum. Then things happen to Protagonist A. Protagonist A gets into a situation that requires some sort of solution. Suspense builds. I start to care. Suspense continues to build as Protagonist A finds him/herself in more and more of a pickle. I start to care more and more. Etc. You know, the standard classic story-structure. The worse things get for Protagonist A, the more difficult or impossible the situation seems, the more I care about the outcome. Eventually, Protagonist A finds him/herself at a climax, a point where something life-changing, and maybe horrible, looms large, and so, yes, if the author has done his/her job, I care very, very much about what happens to Protagonist A at this particular moment. And so the chapter ends. And so I turn the page. And. Um. Wait. What? Here’s this other character, Protagonist B, not doing much of anything, la di da, living his/her life. Hold on — what about the, um, and the, er, and the other thing? Who is this Protagonist B person? WTF? I want to know how Protagonist A was going to get out of the — ah. I see. Okay. Yes, this Protagonist B character looks pretty interesting after all. I wonder how Protagonist B will handle this situation? And so on. The problems Protagonist B is facing get more complex and more difficult, etc, etc. Until the end of the chapter, where Protagonist B has reached his/her own crucible — at which point, burning to know what’s about to happen to Protagonist B, I find myself abruptly shuttled back to Protagonist A. Whom I’d almost forgotten by now. Oh yeah, I was supposed to be worried about this other thing happening over here. Or maybe, just maybe, I’m introduced to Protagonist C, living his/her life. La di da. Ho hum. Oh, wait … this Protagonist C person looks pretty interesting after all … and so on.

I have just described a classic — and clasically novelistic — story structure. Think of The Lord of the Rings — the Merry and Pippen storyline, the Gandalf/Aragorn storyline, the Sam/Frodo/Gollum storyline, all staggered chapter-by-chapter, with each chapter cutting on a cliffhanger. This frustrates and rewards the reader’s expectations simultaneously — a pretty good definition of suspense — and it does so structurally, organically, automatically. It also has the added benefit of creating a layer of meta-suspense on top of what’s actually happening to the characters: how in the world is the author going to pull all these pieces together? The less connected the characters seem, the more this meta-suspense comes into play. When the storylines do come together, the feeling you get as a reader is as palpably exciting as when a character manages to escape from a pickle in the story itself (in other words, the author has become the protagonist, at least on some subconcious level; the complex structure he or she has presented to you has become the very problem that he or she, as protagonist, must outwit).

When it works, it’s amazing. It’s one of my favorite story structures.

Don’t imagine, by the way, that only fantasy or action/adventure stories take advantage of this effect. The staggered-storylines structure (because that’s what I’m going to call it, though it probably has a more fancy established name among real critics) has long been a staple of so-called “higher” literature as well (The Hours by Michael Cunningham is an example of a recent literary book that makes good use of it).

So, anyway. I trust from my description that you recognize the structure I’m talking about, and that you’ve seen it in action before, and that (assuming you’re like-minded, which would be the only reason you’d be reading my reviews) you like it.

That’s the structure we have here, more or less, though the individual storylines were not actually presented in staggered form to comic book readers; they were originally presented as separate comic book series, “The Adventures of Protagonist A” following one storyline from beginning to end, and “The Adventures of Protagonist B” following the other. And so on. Each series, presumably, stood on its own as a complete work of fiction. Though I didn’t read the story this way originally, just knowing that it once existed in that form adds yet another layer of (and I’m looking forward to hearing certain cranky anti-critical commentators make fun of my use of this term) meta-suspense: how is the author going to reassemble the pieces of these four separate puzzles — already presented commercially as individual units of, um, art — so that they result in a fifth, larger, and different, final product? Because that is the claim that the author, Grant Morrison, makes in the forward.

As you probably guessed from the title, there are seven protagonists. Seven Soldiers starts with an introductory chapter, where we meet seven superheroes (well, six — one of them turns up missing from the very beginning) who band together for the first time to face an ancient menace — a simple superhero team origin, like we’ve seen dozens, maybe hundreds, of times before. That first chapter constitutes a nice bit of misdirection on Morrison’s part, though anybody who has read the front or back covers of the book (or any of the commercial hype for the book and/or the comic book miniseries it collects) will not be surprised: these were never our Seven Soldiers.

And then it begins.

Every artist represented in this volume (there are six) blew me away — each for a different reason. The artwork in the introductory chapter, by J. H. Williams III, seemed, to me, the most significantly accomplished of the lot. Keep in mind that I do not regularly read contemporary superhero stories, so I had no preconceptions about any of these artists. There’s something distinctly Silver Age about Williams’ storytelling techniques (and I mean “calm and collected and cool and almost formal Infantino and Oskner DC Silver Age,” not “crazy genius Kirby and Ditko Marvel Silver Age,” by the way), though the outer layer, the Photoshopped slickness, is (and probably has to be) thoroughly contemporary. In Williams’ case, the slickness refuses to obscure an outstanding and versatile line, among other things. There’s the scratchy Wrightson-like opening in a swamp. There’s the wide, western landscape that reminded me, more than anything, of an old Mickey Mouse adventure digest comic I had when I was a kid — except, you know, more realistic, and creepier. Maybe it was just the cartoony prickly pears everywhere. Or something. Williams’ storytelling and character-building skills are as strong as any I’ve seen in comics. These characters — ultimately dispensible — come alive from the first moment they appear. Surely Williams is considered one of the top stylists of contemporary mainstream comics, maybe even the top stylist. I was particularly impressed with the final battle sequence, in which a great deal of information about a large number of characters performing very complex manuevers was presented so calmly and well (and with such perfect graphic design) that I didn’t even notice that, hey, wow, that must have been a difficult sequence to pull off, until I’d read it three or four times.

Next we meet Shining Knight, whose Camelot is being destroyed by — you guessed it — the same ancient menace we met in the final pages of the introductory chapter. The artwork in this storyline, by Simone Bianchi, reminds me a lot of one of my childhood fan-favorites, Mike Grell — the Warlord-like costumes, the operatic blocking and pacing, and even the occasional overly-stiff pose. But it’s also better than, more than, Grell in a way that can’t simply be accounted for by the painterly coloring effects and tighter printing process. The full-page spread of “Castle Revolving,” a structure which seems to be equal parts medieval castle, spaceship, cockroach, and fish skeleton, stopped me cold — in a good way. An imagination is at work here which rivals the greatest architectural fantasists in comics (Kirby, say, or Moebius). Unfortunately, that spread represents the last moment before Shining Knight crashes, literally, into a more mundane and all-too-common-in-comics setting, so we don’t get to see that particular aspect of the artist’s imagination at play — at least for now.

The third chapter introduces the Manhattan Guardian, and a zany storyline that reminded me of something Kirby would have done in one of the many not-always-so-very-cosmic Fourth World filler stories — you know, like when the Forever People went to a rock concert or bought a motorcycle or something, and it got weird from there. Artist Cameron Stewart pulls off the extremely difficult task of evoking the action-packed energy of Kirby without ever actually imitating Kirby (or, at least, without imitating him any more than every superhero comic book published since the sixties imitates him in some way or another). Morrison’s world-building skills are at their most mainstream (and, in some ways, their best) here, where he provides us with a historically interesting superheroic legacy which could actually have existed in the DC Universe of the sixties or seventies — but did not — and yet which mirrors and references something that did exist, on the edges of DC continuity. That he simply throws it on the page, and declares that it always existed, is the kind of thing that makes the continuity-driven side of comic book reading fun (one imagines that twenty, thirty, forty years from now, the more nebbishy writers at DC will eventually have managed to retrofit all this new stuff into the mainstream of DC’s “universe” — the way that Kirby’s vast and weird concepts, like the New Gods and Kamandi, were eventually made to work with existing, presumably contradictory, properties, and even found themselves at the very center of the “universe’s” biggest storylines).

After the Manhattan Guardian gets himself in sufficient trouble to come to a climax (um … not like that), we switch to Zatanna, in a storyline that bears a tonal resemblance to contemporary female-targetted (but widely popular among both genders) television shows like Desperate Housewives, except, of course, with trippy interdimensional hopscotch games and lots and lots of black clothing and goth makeup. Inker Mick Gray displays a fluid, clean line, that, all by itself, can convey humor; penciller Ryan Sook has a special way with the eyes, drawing you directly into each character’s emotions that way, even the throwaway characters who only appear once — sometimes for comic effect, sometimes not. One of the most masterful moments of illustration in the entire book occurs in Sook’s and Gray’s pages. Imagine being told to draw waterbeads, on a rainy-night window, starting out randomly, but forming, perhaps blown by the wind, perhaps not, into a face. Imagine doing so with only two very small panels tucked over into the corner of a page. And imagine doing so in such a way that the water beads, even when they’re in the form of a face, still look perfectly reasonable and logical as water beads, which could have just accidentally gone into that configuration in the real world — an ambiguity which is necessary to the story. It’s an amazing accomplishment, quietly handled.

Next we meet Klarion, the Witch Boy, scion of a race of Puritan molemen who, apparantly, have been living separated from the rest of humanity since the disappearance of the Roanoke Island colony in 1590 (the deity of Morrison’s witchmen, Croatoan, is named after a mysterious piece of graffitti left by the disappeared colonists — whose creepy story, by the way, is historically real). Frazier Irving renders Klarion’s story in stark, almost woodcut-like lines, and uses color more obviously and effectively (meaning: to have a specific effect) than the other artists.

After Klarion’s introduction, the Shining Knight, Zatanna, and the Manhattan Guardian each get another chapter, to round out this first volume.

You will notice that we’ve only met four of the eponymous Seven Soldiers of Victory. Apparantly, these four figure more prominently in the earlier parts of the work, and the other three figure more prominently in the latter parts.

Another thing, which you wouldn’t have noticed just from reading this review, is that the storylines are nowhere close to coming together, yet. Klarion and the Shining Knight both know the name of the ancient menace the introductory-chapter-heroes faced (they are a race of scary fairies named Sheeda), but Zatanna’s story seems to be about something else entirely (until the very last panel — possibly). The Manhattan Guardian storyline, thoroughly urban, seems even farther removed from what must be (must be) the major thrust of the book.

Finding out how it all comes together, as described above, is a major part of the fun, for books with this kind of structure.

Whether it will all come together is another question. No reviewer wants to set a like-minded reader on the trail of an sixty-dollar, six-month committment without absolute certainty. If the work falls apart halfway, that’s a sure way to lose like-minded readers for future reviews.

On the other hand, I can tell you this, based on the evidence of the first volume: I, personally, will buy every volume, the minute it comes out. And I have every confidence that this will be a wise move on my part — and that it would be on yours, as well. If you’re the like-minded reader I’m trying to serve here.

I’ll probably skip reviewing the next three volumes individually, but I do plan to revisit Seven Soldiers of Victory once the entire story is available in trade paperback, with an uber-review of the whole thing.

Title: The 7 Soldiers of Victory, Volume One
Writer: Grant Morrison
Illustrators: J.H. Williams III, Simone Bianchi, Cameron Stewart, Ryan Sook, Frazer Irving, Mick Gray
Publisher: DC Comics
Cover price: $14.95

More Information on The 7 Soldiers of Victory, Volume One at Amazon

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