Months after the various miniseries concluded, Grant Morrison finally wraps up his ambitious Seven Soldiers project with the concluding one-shot - confusingly, and misleading, labelled as issue #1.

As you probably know, the big idea with this book was to take seven DC characters, of varying degrees of obscurity, and revamp them in seven parallel miniseries.  The characters never actually meet as a team, but they're all separately fighting the Sheeda, a sort of fairy race invading Earth.

The miniseries are largely successful.  Bulleteer was a cute deconstruction of the superhero genre with a subculture of Z-list "heroes."  Klarion was a wonderful story about a puritan gothic underground society.  Zatanna was the most human, while Shining Knight and Guardian at least made convincing arguments for getting their own series.  And then, admittedly, there's the massively overrated Frankenstein and the frankly impenetrable Mister Miracle.  But it's a respectable hit to miss ratio, and Morrison impressively launched seven new titles that had their own separate identities and styles, while somehow tying them all into the same threat.

Well, this is the one-shot where he has to tie everything together and get to the big finish.  He's joined once again by J H Williams III, who also drew the opening one-shot.  Williams is staggeringly impressive here, not only in his normal style, but also shifting styles to produce often note-perfect imitations of the artists who worked on the individual miniseries, plus a few others to boot.  The sheer skill and range is jawdropping.  As we've seen before on Promethea, Williams clearly loves to sink his teeth into something truly challenging and formally innovative, and when given the chance, he can do things nobody else can match.

Now, having said that...

Grant Morrison is a writer who is (almost) always innovative and can generally be relied upon to stretch himself rather than go for the safe option.  He's a writer who takes risks, and obviously that's a good thing.  His comics are almost invariably interesting.  But that's not the same as being good.  Morrison's back catalogue is littered with interesting failures.

Many people like interesting failures, and would rather read an experiment that didn't quite work than an unambitious project that succeeded.  I'm generally among them.  Critics tend to jump at this sort of thing because it provides plenty of material to write about.  If you're interested in the craft of comics then you're going to enjoy comics that explore new techniques.

Seven Soldiers #1 is an interesting failure.  And it's a really difficult one to give a rating.  Because it's very, very interesting.  And at the same time, it's a total failure as a piece of storytelling.  In fact, even the central conceit doesn't really come off.  The idea is supposed to be that each of the seven contributes in some way to the defeat of the Sheeda, but frankly, this just doesn't work.  Zatanna's contribution is to cast a spell that does... uh.... something.  I guess.  I mean, it must do something, because that's the only thing she does, so it's got to fit in somewhere, right?  As for Mister Miracle, the relevance of his subplot to the core story is an utter mystery to me.

More to the point, it's horrifically rushed.  Nobody's story has time to breathe, and no character has an emotionally satisfying resolution.  The pacing is abysmal.  This should hardly be surprising.  The issue clocks in at 40 pages.  Morrison's first crack at the script reportedly came in at over twice that length (prompting DC to politely remind him of the assigned page count).  If that's the case, then this is a massively compressed version of the story, and boy, it reads like it.  It needed those extra sixty pages.  It needed them desperately.  A one-shot was not enough to resolve this series in a satisfying way; it needed another miniseries.

Now, this doesn't detract from the book's virtues - its ambition, its innovation, its amazing artwork.  But it lacks emotional connection, it lacks dramatic pace, and frankly, there doesn't seem to be any thematic content to match the display of formal pyrotechnics.  It's a comic which is easy to admire, but hard to actually like.

You'll hear a lot of people talking about this book, and Seven Soldiers as a whole, as a magnificent achievement.  Generally they talk about the intricate structure, the minutely detailed links between titles, and the degree of planning that must have been involved.  They talk about the formal daring and sweeping ambition of the project.  And yes, sure, it's got all those things.  It's a tremendous formal achievement.  But, whatever people claim, this final issue doesn't bring the characters together in a coherent way.  It doesn't tell an enjoyable story.

At one point in this issue the story stops for half a page while the Manhattan Guardian runs a cryptic crossword about the story.  That says it all, really.  That's what this series is like - it's an elaborate artifice for devoted readers to puzzle away at.  But it's all form and very little substance.  Or rather, the substance is all in the individual characters, conceived as pitches for solo titles.  Sure, it's an incredible piece of planning, but what was it actually about?  What are the themes of this story?  What was the point?  And how was this issue supposed to make it?  You can't justify this story as a work of genius simply on the formal elements alone, but that doesn't seem to be stopping people from trying.

Astounding artwork, ambition and innovation mean that it's a book worth reading if you're into the craft of comics.  But be under no illusions.  It doesn't work, certainly not as anything more than an elaborate puzzle.

Rating: B-

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