Following up on yesterday’s feature review of Batman and the Monster Men by Matt Wagner.

The blogger who signs his work “Jeb D.” over at RackRaids.com liked the story more than I did (I liked the book, but pretty much only for the artwork). Here’s some of what had to say:

Wagner has an excellent grasp of story structure, and even though this series was originally released as four issues, the story unfolds in a nice three-act arc, reminiscent less of modern comics writing than a good action movie or mystery novel—and action and mystery are both elements that this story delivers big-time. It’s pretty rare for a comic to give us a sense that Batman’s truly in over his head—too many writers make him impossibly smug and ridiculously over-prepared. Wagner plays on Batman’s inexperience at this point in his career to make his eventual meeting with the Monster Men as gripping a fight as I’ve seen Batman get into in many years. …more

One of the Jones Boys didn’t like the book much. But it’s not Wagner’s fault. It’s Frank Miller’s. Apparently. See here:

Since [Miller's Batman: Year One], we’ve seen the early days of Robin, the early days of Batman and Robin, the early days of Commissioner Gordon, the early days of Catwoman, the early days of the Joker, the early days of Two-Face, and no doubt also the early days of Bat-Mite, Ace the Bat-Hound, the utility belt, and the aftershave Batman uses when he’s out on “patrol”.

And now, thanks to Matt Wagner, the early days story we’ve all been waiting for in Batman and the Monster Men, the early days of Hugo Strange.

Hugo who? …more

And … that’s all I found for Batman and the Monster Men reviews. I’ll bet there were more, and I just didn’t look hard enough. Surely.

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Like a movie director assigned the first film in a high-profile superhero revival franchise, Matt Wagner pretends to assume that you know nothing about Batman, which gives him a license to reinvent the character for his own purposes in Batman and the Monster Men, his (reasonably) recent graphic novel from DC Comics. Set one year after the costumed vigilante first appeared in Gotham (and therefore, presumably, a sequel of sorts to Miller and Mazzucchelli’s classic graphic novel Batman: Year One, though the connection has been left vague), this book stands pretty much alone. It does end on a note that promises a sequel, but that just makes it feel even more like a well-done Hollywood film treatment.

The original Batman stories have to be among the most amateurishly executed of any popular comics that came out of the late thirties and early forties, an era known to hardcore comics fans as the “golden age,” but not for any tendency toward visual sophistication or storytelling finesse: young, mostly untrained assistants cranked out the Batman feature under the “Bob Kane” byline in those days, for next to no pay, and zero recognition, and it shows. But even in the earliest, ugliest appearances of the character (when Kane — reputedly less skilled than many of his own assistants — may have actually drawn more of the pages than he did in later years), there was something just right about the crude visual style, a kind of thick, wavy-outlined, mostly-gray energy signal that drilled directly through the eyeballs and into the brains of our pre-adolescent grandfathers, forcing them to surrender their pocket change every month. Wagner picks up and magnifies and refines that signal, taking on, very consciously and deliberately, the clunkiness of the earliest Batman pages (the blunt, imprecise line, but not just that; the oddly “off” faces and bodies; the stiff poses; the goofball layouts; the heavy-figured, gravity-encumbered, muddy action sequences; etc.), imitating every one of Kane’s (or “Kane’s”) visual mannerisms perfectly, but transforming them at the same time, making them work and mean and move where Kane and his assistants could not, finally delivering something severely beautiful and new. The cartooning on display here is something that you just have to see — a bravura performance that only a true master of the action/adventure comic book form could pull off, or, for that matter, would even contemplate trying.

The story, about gangsters, a doting father, a mad scientist, and his monsters, also takes its cues from those Depression-era comics, but is not transformative in quite the same way, or, really, in any way. It’s predictable, boring stuff. An Alan Moore could have maybe created a silk purse out of the sow’s ear that was the source material (see Moore’s work on Tom Strong, for example, where he uses a different set of 1930’s pulp fiction conventions, for a different kind of character, making them vital and new, without actually “updating” them in any obvious way that you can put your finger on), but there aren’t a lot of Alan Moores out there, and it seems unfair to ask Wagner to be one, on top of everything else that he has proven himself to be.

I do recommend buying the book, and reading it slowly — but backwards, last page to first, so that you won’t be distracted by what passes for a story, and you can fully appreciate the magnitude of Wagner’s cartooning achievement here.

(The image in this post, a detail from Batman and the Monster Men by Matt Wagner, is copyright (c) 2007 DC Comics).

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The Challengers of the Unknown, as a franchise, dates back to February, 1957, debuting in Showcase Comics # 6 (the so-called “Silver Age” of comics is often said to have started just two issues prior, with the first appearance of the revamped version of DC’s superhero The Flash in Showcase Comics # 4). This original version of the team, in subsequent Showcase appearances, and then, later, in its own series, lasted until 1970 (at which point little Joey Manley came along as a comic book reader and completely ignored them, because they weren’t nearly colorful enough to hold his attention against, say, Wendy the Good Little Witch or Richie Rich and Jackie Jokers Digest). A revival in the late seventies quickly faded (not-quite-so-little Joey hated the stupid purple-and-gray costumes, if I recall correctly). The team has been revived and re-imagined a few more times since then, first by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale (The Challengers of the Unknown Vol. 2, 1991), then by Steven Grant (The Challengers of the Unknown, Vol. 3, 1997), and most recently by Darwyn Cooke in his outstanding DC: The New Frontier, 2004 — currently available in the form of two trade paperbacks. As often happens in the comic book world — where D-list characters are concerned, anyway — Howard Chaykin’s new version of the Challengers chucks all of that out the window (well, not completely — Chaykin “retcons” the old comic book stories as an elaborate hoax perpetrated by the new version’s primary villain, on characters who have the same names as the original Challengers; she had been obliged to embroil them in bizarre fantasy adventures to keep them out of her hair; it’s a nice little touch, for those who care about the history of these characters, but doesn’t get in the way, or explain itself overmuch, for those who don’t).

In this version, the Challengers have lived their lives until now as cold-blooded killing machines, political assassins whose identities and free will have long been compromised and controlled by the same secret organization of immortal billionaires who pulled the strings for Sirhan Sirhan, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Timothy McVeigh. They’re allowed by their overlords (well, their overlady) to live normal lives in the downtime between missions, unaware, themselves, of who and what they really are. And so on. In the first chapter, something goes wrong with the technology (surprise!) and the new Challengers are accidentally let off their leashes, dangerously in control of their own faculties, for the first time since they were turned into killing machines. And they’re mad as hell. Yeah, so, stop me if you’ve heard this one before. I’m not completely unforgiving of less-than-original setups in my action/adventure entertainments, but when it happens, I hope and expect that the author will bring something new and twisted to it, in the margins and the sidelines, at the very least. Chaykin doesn’t. It’s like he used a computer program to generate a generic action/adventure franchise with randomly-spaced blanks for the author to fill in. What’s worse, he doesn’t trust his reader to follow his very basic, very overdone storyline. He approaches it as though it were the most complex and difficult-to-understand thing in the world. Ninety percent of the dialogue is exposition — I am not exaggerating — most of which is repeated, numerous times, from the mouths of different characters, just in case we didn’t catch the setup the first four or five times we heard it. (Another 9% of the dialogue is liberal agitprop — I’m as loud a liberal activist as the next guy, and it even annoyed me).

But that’s ultimately neither here nor there. Even if the setup were original, and even if the exposition wasn’t so prominent, or so clunky, or so repetitive, the plot would have killed this book anyway. It has bigger holes than any action/adventure plot I’ve ever seen (and, yes, I’ve seen all the Star Trek movies). I won’t go into them all, because a). it’s not worth the time, and b). you might want to read the book anyway, and pointing out plotholes necessarily means spoiling the plot points they represent. Here’s the big one: the villain’s secret, evil plan (which she spells out for them in minute, damaging detail, after capturing them, but before they inevitably escape) is, well, anticlimactic and weirdly counterproductive. I suppose it couldn’t help being that way, since, at the start of the book, she already rules the world (the more traditional goal of the supervillain), and has done so for decades. There’s not really much left for her to scheme about. But if you look at what she says she wants to do — take herself and her organization into outer space, leaving earth and its inferior mix of “mud races” behind — it seems to me that the Challengers should leave her alone and let her go. “And don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out!” Why force her to stick around (which means that she will keep ruling the world with an iron fist)? I dunno — except that thwarting evil plans is what the heroes are supposed to do, in stories like this, I guess, even if the evil plan hasn’t been thought out very well, and is counterproductive to the villain’s own, um, villainy.

This book is crap.

But it is beautiful crap, when looked at only on a page-by-page, panel-by-panel basis.

That makes it (for me, anyway) worse.

Howard Chaykin is a master storyteller and an illustrator of the highest order, whose lines may be wobbly, and whose draftsmanship may seem unwieldy when individual figures are contemplated in isolation, but who knows how to lay out a page, establish an evocative setting, introduce an “actor” with a couple of quick, uniquely human and distinct facial expressions or gestures, and (in the meantime, with his left hand tied behind his back) cut seven different, tangentially-related scenes together in alternating beats, using powerful graphic design and even more powerful chutzpah to hold it all together. Watching him do his thing takes your breath away. When it comes to technique, Chaykin makes the work of run-of-the-mill action/adventure comic book creators look like those slow-footed oil paintings by elephants. But all the storytelling mastery in the world cannot salvage a deeply unworthwhile story, which is what Challengers of the Unknown : Stolen Moments, Borrowed Time ultimately turns out to be.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not slamming it because it’s a genre story (spy thriller, in this case). When they’re well-done, when the creators take the time, and/or have the emotional investment in the work, the respect for themselves, the characters, and the reader, to connect all the familiar dots in new and interesting ways, I like genre stories quite a bit (see my feature review of Deep Sleeper). I even have a particular soft spot for the spy thriller: The Bourne Identity (from which Chaykin’s version of the Challengers steals a central conceit) is one of my favorite movies of all time; Queen & Country, one of my favorite current comic book series. The problem is that Chaykin seems to be bored — he’s given us nothing new, despite its shiny, interestingly-crinkled wrapper, and he hasn’t even paid enough attention to his trite storyline to make sure that it at least, on its own terms, makes sense. If he wasn’t so good on a surface, technical level, if I hadn’t been hooked by his mad page design and scene-moving skills up to the point when the Challengers are captured by the primary villain, and she starts to spout exposition while posing (which is when I started to realize how old-fashioned and stupid it all was, and had been, all along), I’d probably be more forgiving.

But he was, and I was, and I’m not. It actually makes me angry, that this man, who has more raw talent, and more serious entertainment industry storytelling experience, than just about any of his peers (or, for that matter, than anybody who has ever worked in comics, period), has chosen to throw his energies away on garbage like this.

Do I have to say it? Not recommended.

Title: Challengers of the Unknown : Stolen Moments, Borrowed Time
Creator: Howard Chaykin
Publisher: DC Comics
Cover Price: $16.99

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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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