Seven Soldiers: A Short List

*What follows is a list of links to reviews I wrote concerning the expansive, Grant Morrison-written comics project Seven Soldiers. Every issue of the project is covered here, all 30 of them. For those who aren't familiar, Seven Soldiers was a DC-published array of seven miniseries, all of them four issues in length, plus a pair of one-shot comics serving as bookends. Put together, a large story is told, though each miniseries focuses on a single title character, who undergoes a personal journey of transformation without meeting any of the title characters from other miniseries.

It is perhaps necessary to explain the context surrounding the earliest of these reviews - Seven Soldiers was originally promoted as a 'modular' project, meaning that each of the miniseries could be read on their own, providing a satisfying experience apart from the larger saga. Indeed, Morrison himself mentioned in at least one interview that each issue could stand alone ("Each of the four issues are also self-contained reads because I wanted to try a completely modular story.") - this did not prove to be accurate. Issues lead into one another. Every miniseries ends on a cliffhanger, flowing into that final bookend. But the expectations I had regarding this project permeate my writing early on, and color my reactions.

I have not 'cleaned up' any of these posts. My reviews for each issue were written shortly after their initial release, when I did not know what was coming next in the project. Any predictions made about where the stories might go were made without knowledge as to what was actually going to happen, as future issues at the time remained just there - in the future. Often, there'll be additional material in these posts, random musings or links, reviews of contemporaneous comics releases, or even extended examinations of other Grant Morrison stories. You'll likely pick up on some changes made to my writing style over the passage of time. In sum, these pieces constitute not only individual comics reviews, but excerpts from my life, across the breadth of well over a year. I have thus arranged them in order of their writing, to preserve their status as points on a continuum. Not all of these comics came out on time, and I react to that too in my writing.

Many thanks to Jim Roeg, who indirectly put the idea of creating this index into my head, and gathered up an awful lot of the links for his own Seven Soldiers Syllabus - check it out for more reading, as well as the mighty Barbelith's Seven Soldiers Annotations!

And so:

Seven Soldiers #0

Shining Knight #1

Guardian #1

Zatanna #1

Klarion the Witch Boy #1

Shining Knight #2

Guardian #2

Zatanna #2

Klarion the Witch Boy #2

Shining Knight #3

Guardian #3

Zatanna #3

Klarion the Witch Boy #3

Shining Knight #4

Guardian #4

Mister Miracle #1

Klarion the Witch Boy #4

Bulleteer #1

Zatanna #4 and Frankenstein #1

Mister Miracle #2

Bulleteer #2

Frankenstein #2

Mister Miracle #3

Bulleteer #3

Frankenstein #3 and Mister Miracle #4

Bulleteer #4

Frankenstein #4

Seven Soldiers #1

Thanks for reading!