Grant Morrison's Seven Soldiers project is now well underway, with the third of the linked miniseries - Zatanna - launching this week.

The big concept for Seven Soldiers is that this incarnation of the Seven Soldiers of Victory isn't really a team at all.  It's seven linked miniseries about separate characters, each of which is supposed to be a self-contained story and yet still to contribute to some larger narrative.  Throw in the two bookend specials and you could justifiably complain that this is just a 30-part crossover. 

But thus far the "self-contained" promise has been upheld, and it's a 30-part crossover by one writer, featuring books which exist exclusively to tell this story.  If you can look past the stigma attached to crossovers, then the structure is probably the most radical thing about Seven Soldiers.  In any other medium, if you write a story that exists in seven parallel narratives simultaneously, they call it highly experimental.  Comics are unusual in making regular use of that device, and Seven Soldiers is even more unusual in using it as a deliberate creative choice rather than a stunt.

Since he apparently gets more creative freedom with the also-ran characters, and the Seven Soldiers banner is considered to be sellable in its own right, most of the characters here are way down the DC pecking order.  The Bulletteer?  Klarion the Witch Boy?  Zatanna is one of the more established characters in the project, hailing from the dizzy heights of the B-list.

Zatanna is one of those stage-magician characters who battles evil with somewhat open-ended powers and a remarkably silly Vegas costume.  For Morrison, she seems to be the accessible face of magic, who provides the reader with a gateway into the seriously weird world of the supernatural without leaving us totally lost. Mind you, he doesn't push his luck too far - when the story requires the characters to spend several pages wading through the sort of warped alternate realities where the panels fold in on themselves, Zatanna's too comfortable in the environment to perform the audience identification role, so Dr Thirteen is wheeled out instead. 

Actually, it's one of the better uses of professional sceptic Dr Thirteen, who normally looks like an idiot in the DC Universe because of his stubborn refusal to acknowledge the blindingly obvious fact that weird stuff happens over there.  For Morrison, magic is as much as anything an alternate way of looking at the world.  That allows Thirteen to become a character who clings rigidly to an equally valid worldview of his own, instead of just a fool who won't accept the obvious.  Crucially, he seems to be a genuine skeptic here, looking for a scientific explanation of how magic works, rather than instantly dismissing it all as trickery.

Ryan Sook's art has the sort of innocent charm that you need if you're going to try and get away with a magician in a Vegas costume who talks backwards.  By the same token, though, his other dimensions are beautiful pieces of work, just disorienting enough to make the point without losing sight of the storytelling.  It's a great-looking book, and worth picking up for the art alone.

I've very little idea how any of this stuff is meant to fit together, but I don't particularly mind.  It's great fun, and the sort of big event that I actually want to read.

Rating: A+

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