Seven Soldiers FAQ: A Beginner's Guide

From Barbelith

OK, this is where we start infodumping about the Seven Soldiers superhero team book, which started to hit the shelves in February, 2005.

There's a Barbelith messageboard thread about the series here, if you want to wade through the fanboy drool. (http://www.barbelith.com/topic/19871)

Table of contents

1 Who are these guys? 2 What order should the books be read in? 3 What's up with the "bookend" issues? 4 So where does the title come from, history-wise? 5 And then? 6 So what else should I know about the new series?

Who are these guys?

In the new configuration, the titular seven (numbers refer to each issue's anno's.) are:

The Bulleteer 1 2 3 4

Frankenstein 1 2 3 4

The Guardian 1 2 3 4

Klarion, the Witch-Boy 1 2 3 4

Mister Miracle 1 2 3 4

Shining Knight 1 2 3 4

Zatanna 1 2 3 4

You can read more about these guys in this "unnecessary" guide (http://goodcomics.blogspot.com/2005/02/unnecessary-guide-to-seven-soldiers.html). They're not the first heroes to be called Seven Soldiers, though.

What order should the books be read in?

The individual issues should be read in the order they were published, or, more accurately, according to the checklist that appears in the back of each issue.

Each of the seven miniseries can be read separately. For instance, you could read Zatanna 1-4 and come away with a complete Zatanna story that leads directly into Seven Soldiers 1, but in order to experience the story the way the author intended, the series should be read in the following order:

(Note: This is also the order in which the books will be collected, thus preserving the intended narrative structure.)

Volume 1

Seven Soldiers 0

Shining Knight 1

Guardian 1

Zatanna 1

Klarion the Witch-Boy 1

Shining Knight 2

Guardian 2

Zatanna 2

Volume 2

Klarion the Witch-Boy 2

Shining Knight 3

Guardian 3

Zatanna 3

Klarion the Witch-Boy 3

Shining Knight 4

Guardian 4

Volume 3

Mister Miracle 1

Zatanna 4

Klarion the Witch-Boy 4

Bulleteer 1

Frankenstein! 1

Mister Miracle 2

Bulleteer 2

Volume 4

Frankenstein! 2

Mister Miracle 3

Bulleteer 3

Frankenstein! 3

Mister Miracle 4

Bulleteer 4

Frankenstein! 4

Seven Soldiers 1

What's up with the "bookend" issues?

Seven Soldiers 0 is a prologue in which a revamped Whip, grand-daughter of the Golden Age character, is recruited by Vigilante to combat an alien menace, alongside Spyder, son(?) of the Golden Age character, and new heroes Gimmix, Boy Blue and Dyno-Mite Dan.

Notably, none of these characters are the titular heroes of the Seven Soldiers series, and there are only six of them. Who is the Seventh Soldier?

Although none of the Seven Soldiers realize they're all members of the same team, there are Points of Contact between the various issues which the bookends help to set up and elaborate.

And if you'd like to track events over the whole of the series, here's the Timeline.

So where does the title come from, history-wise?

In 1941, the DC property Leading Comics put out a second-string version of the Justice Society called Seven Soldiers of Victory, or 'Law's Legionnaires' (http://www.toonopedia.com/7soldrs.htm) (sometimes abbreviated as SSOV). As some comics scholars have pointed out (http://www.livejournal.com/users/calamityjon/665484.html), part of the shtick with these heroes was that they couldn't fly or shoot heat beams or anything. They were just soldiers, each really good at some particular flavor of fighting.

In that lineup, the Seven Soldiers were actually either five, eight or nine heroes, depending on how you count sidekicks:

The Crimson Avenger (sidekick Wing)

The Star-Spangled Kid (sidekick Stripesy)

Green Arrow (sidekick Speedy)

Vigilante (sometimes a solo artist, sometime sidekick Stuff, the Chinatown Kid)

The Shining Knight (a solo artist, unless you count his flying horse.)

You can get a good look at them all here (http://members.optusnet.com.au/grafito/7SoV/7who.htm), and read how this team of backup features came to be assembled here, at Diamond Galleries. (http://scoop.diamondgalleries.com/scoop_article.asp?ai=2416&si=126)

Note that Wing and Stuff might not have been counted because they were Asians. Confusing the matter more, not every hero was in every storyline (we think). In 1945, the team got pushed out of Leading Comics in favor of talking animals. During the 1970s, the Seven Soldiers popped up in occasional Justice League stories, and that was about it for a long while, aside from single-panel cameos.

Confusing the matter even more is the rewriting of history that took place after the Crisis on Infinite Earths in the 1980s. After that hoo-ha, Green Arrow and Speedy were no longer members of the original line-up, since they had never existed during that period of time (yeah, well...). Instead, Stuff was counted as a full member, and the new-old seventh slot was filled by the original I, Spider. (Wing was still just a chauffeur. Them's the breaks.)

So now, all references within any DC Comics to the "original Seven Soldiers" or "the old team" pertain to these guys, not Green Arrow. Subsequent pieces of Golden Age Soldiers fanfiction (http://www.geocities.com/goosegansler/ssov/ssov.htm) can therefore seem a bit confusing. (Note the reference in that piece, written in 2000, to Nebula Man as the arch-foe of the team.)

And then?

And *then* Mark Waid revived them in 2000 as part of the Silver Age series (http://members.tripod.com/~MitchellBrown/xover/dc_silverage.html).

In that short-lived configuration, the roster consisted of:

Batgirl

Metamorpho

Blackhawk (who, it must be pointed out, was leader of his *own* team, the Blackhawks)

Mento

Adam Strange

Deadman

and an all-new Shining Knight

They just show up in one issue to have a big fight on the planet Rann.

So what else should I know about the new series?

• Well, there's an interview with the editor over here, at newsarama (http://www.newsarama.com/Road_Dec_04/Soldier_Eight.htm) which is full of all kinds of tidbits.

Like, the new team aren't just soldiers, they're conscripts, battling forces they don't necessarily understand in a war they never asked to join.

• Here's another interview with bookend penciller J.H. Williams (http://newsarama.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=26641).

• Appetite-whetting discussion with the author (http://www.newsarama.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=21568)

• Grant Morrison's opening JLA:Classified arc, #1-3, serves, in part, as a prologue to the Seven Soldiers epic -- therein are found both wicked little folk, the Sheeda, and Neh-Buh-Loh, the 'Huntsman'.

• Also a full transcript of Thomas the Rhymer as quoted in Seven Soldiers 0 can be found here: Thomas the Rhymer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_the_Rhymer)

• And here's a projected chronological reading order.

• And here are two contrasting correspondences with the Kabbalah and Spiral Dynamics, suggesting an overall magical purpose for the series.

• If your appetite for annotations is more than Barbelith alone can satiate, you're in luck: dedicated fans elsewhere on the internet have been annotating away as well! You may want to check out:
  • Grant Morrison's Seven Soldiers: A Compilation of Connections (http://7soldiers.mightybroke.com/) (Fortified with extra helping of symbolism and literary reference! Plus, Pictures!)
  • Republic of Replicant's series summary (http://reprep.blogspot.com/2005/02/review-seven-soldiers-of-victory.html) (One-stop shopping for cover images and solicitation text to all 30 issues! Plus, Reviews!)
  • Lindsay Duff's annotations (http://www.comicbookresources.com/columns/index.cgi?column=litg&article=2252) (As featured in Lying in the Gutters!)
  • Jog The Blog's Reviews (http://joglikescomics.blogspot.com/2006/04/seven-soldiers-short-list.html) (Of all 30 Issues! In Order!)
  • 31 Days of 7 Soldiers (http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/category/31-days-of-7-soldiers/) (A detailed retrospective! An entire month's worth of reviews!)

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