I’m a huge Morrisson fan, but I don’t habitually read any non-Vertigo DC Comics. I understand that he’s about to start some sort of big crossover involving many miniseries, but I can’t find any real information on it online.
Can anyone lay out the basic gist of it? Are these pre-existing DC characters?
That’d be Seven Soldiers
And, yes, there’s pre-existing characters:
(I’m familiar with everyone there but Bulleteer and Frankenstein (that is to say, any take on Frankenstein DC’s done).)
I like Morrison’s work, and Zatanna, Klarion, and Mister Miracle are all characters I have some fondness for.
Er…finishing my thought…
‘So I’m liking the sound of this.’ Although Morrison pre-apologised for how he’s going to use Klarion, apparently.
Here’s an interview he gives with Newsarama about it and his current arc on JLA: Classified. This is another Newsarama piece that has more info about the characters and artists. Finally, here is a page from a nice Morrison interview from PopImage in which he talks about the structure of the project (although it appears to have changed some since then).
The basic rundown – it’s 30 issues total. Two bookends plus 28 issues broken into seven four-issue miniseries, each featuring a separate character. The idea is that each of the minis can be read separately to tell a satisfying story but that they can be combined into an even greater whole. Contrary to Morrison’s belief, this has been tried with some regularity over the years (e.g., the Superman relaunch of about five years ago, not to mention CrossGen’s entire output), but it’s never been a total success. Personally, since I’m planning to buy them all anyway, it’s not much skin off my nose whether he succeeds or not in his modular approach.
The original Seven Soldiers of Victory (aka The Law’s Legionnaires) were the feature of DC’s Golden Age Leading Comics. The history is complicated, but back then DC was actually two companies, National and All-American. National published books featuring Superman, Batman, Spectre, Starman and others, AA had Green Lantern, Flash, Wonder Woman, Hawkman, Atom, etc. AA published All-Star Comics featuring the Justice Society of America. The JSA was made up of two characters from each of National and AA’s anthology titled, the idea being that fans of, say, Dr. Fate and Spectre from More-Fun Comics would follow them to All-Star, be intrigued by Starman (Adventure Comics), Hawkman (Flash Comics), or Johnny Thunder (All-American Comics), and then pick up the monthly anthologies featuring those characters as well. National’s Action Comics and Detective Comics didn’t contribute characters because they had Superman and Batman and didn’t need the bump.
All-Star was a huge hit, and the National side wanted a similar project, so it created Leading Comics. Leading starred the Seven Soldiers of Victory, which included Green Arrow and Speedy (from More-Fun), the Shining Knight (Adventure), Vigilante (Action), the Star-Spangled Kid and Stripsey (Star-Spangled Comics), and the Crimson Avenger and Wing (Detective). Yes, that’s eight members, but Wing was considered honorary and didn’t count.
Hmm. I hit something and it posted before I finished.
Anyway, Leading Comics didn’t last, in part because it had mostly the second- and third-stringers that All-Star had passed over. It folded after 14 issues. Later, National pulled its characters from All-Star which then had to fill the ranks of the JSA with All-American characters only. In 1945 IIRC the companies merged. The 7SOV, however, were lost until they were revived in the '70’s as part of one of the annual JLA/JSA team-ups. The first volume of their Archive series comes out in a month or so.
–Cliffy
Frankenstein (as used in this series) is the character from “Spawn of Frankenstein,” a supporting character from the 70s SWAMP THING series. This was briefly given a backup series in one of the other horror books, but was scuttled during the mid-780s “DC Implosion.”
Also, Mr. Miracle isn’t going to be Scott Free, but his onetime protege Shilo Norman.
I guess Shining Knight is still Sir Justin, but in a very different costume.
I’m looking forward to this. Not so much because I’m a Morrison fan, but because I love obscure characters (in fact, I’m kind of bummed that Zatanna is part of it because she’s no obscure enough, darnit!).
I’m also probably too psyched to see Shilo as Mr. Miracle again. I don’t even remember the last time he appeared anywhere. I just hope Morrison doesn’t turn him into something completely different from what he was.