I like the character of the Manhattan Guardian, and wish DC had maintained him (rather than ignoring him and falling back on the clone), but this was my least favorite of all the series. He took the idea of a kid gang and tried to amp up the weirdness but it never seemed to work for me.

Honestly, I wish the series had been about Mal Wadron and his relationship with a present-day gang of plucky newsboys.

Zatanna #2 “A Book in the Beginning” (August 2005)



The Story: The face of Zatanna’s stalker Gwydion the Shapeless One is seen in the rain from the sky, the fish in the sea, the mist, the rocks on the shore, the water in San Francisco Bay. She and her apprentice Misty Kilgore take refuge in the magic shop of Cassandra Craft. Gwydion leers at Misty from the letters in a book, then forms a doppelganger of Cassandra’s cat Prowley (a pun on Aleister Crowley). Zatanna banishes Gwydion into a mirror, smashes the mirror, and imprisons Gwydion in a jar. The Phantom Stranger shows up too late to help, but at least he has ominous words and groceries.



My Two Cents: As I promised, Zatanna is starting to get her mojo back. It's still not clear what Gwydion is.

The Phantom Stranger’s supernatural adventures began in 1952, while Cassandra Craft was an intermittent participant starting in 1972.



Cassandra’s magic shop has a tiny Sheeda warrior in a jar, and a shelf of books on Qabbalah, one of Morrison’s favorite mystical inspirations, as seen prominently in Arkham Asylum and The Nameless. Jason Blood visited a similar head shop in Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing #25 (1984) which sold occult items, bongs, and underground commix.





Cassandra sells fake Dyna-mite rings. Yet Dyna-Mite Dan really did have powers. So either he had the real rings, or else the power was really within him all along. I suspect Morrison is insinuating the latter since human potentiality is one of his favorite themes.



A mysterious man with a top hat visited Cassandra, asking about Zatanna and about Zatara’s books. Was this Zatara, or Ali-Ka-Zoom, or someone else? Time will tell. He left Zatanna a magic top hat made by “Eternal Gentleman Outfitters.”



More will be told about the "strange gang of hero kids" including Ali-Ka-Zoom next issue and in Guardian #4.

“Books change you” motif: Gwydion leaps from the pages of Zatanna’s autobiography into the cat’s ear in the form of letters, becoming a malevolent cat. The text in Zatanna’s book is actually from the medieval Welsh poem Cad Coddeu, “The Battle of the Trees,” in which Gwydion enchants a forest to fight for him, just as we see Gwydion marshalling all the elements of nature in this issue. This same poem contains the tale of the flower-maiden Blodeuwedd, which Morrison cited as the inspiration for Tomorrow Woman in JLA #5. A fun Wikipedia fact: The lyrics to John Williams’ piece “Duel of the Fates” in the film “The Phantom Menace” come from Cad Coddeu, but translated into Sanskrit for extra obscurity.



Fishbowl motif: Gwydion is imprisoned in a jar, a tiny man in a tiny world with a tiny tree. He’s a new character, but apparently there were other “Shapeless Ones” in Golden Age comics, and it’s a bit amusing to hear Zatanna and Cassandra discussing the Golden Age (using that term) as a historical period. Ali-Ka-Zoom, “the Merlin of the ghetto,” is a new character, and we’re told that Gwydion was another name for the Merlin of Arthurian legend.




Misty’s magic powers include backwards spells but also a mystic six sided die, so there’s that cube motif again. She clearly is more than she seems.

Klarion #2 “Badde” (August 2005)



The Story: Klarion flees up the tunnel away from Limbo Town, chased by the Horigal, who is run down by No-Beard’s subway car as previously shown in Guardian #2. “Horigal, bloody Horigal” sounds like a pun on a Britishism like “Horrible, bloody horrible.”



He meets Ebeneezer Badde, a Limbo Town native who now lives in the NYC subway tunnels, still dressed in his 16th century garb but toting modern weaponry. Badde rides on a saddled giant alligator, confirming rumors of such creatures that we heard in Guardian #1. He also makes his living as a human trafficker, by capturing and selling members of the street urchin collective The Leviathan to deviants from the surface world, again a rumor we first heard in Guardian #2.

Klarion insists on seeing his god Croatoan, so Badde takes him to the radioactive chamber where All-Beard and No-Beard fought over the six-sided die they called the Foundation Stone, a.k.a. Croatoan. They must have left the die behind, because later we see that Klarion has claimed it for himself.



Badde tries to sell Klarion at an underground market in exchange for liquor and pornography, but a sudden attack of Leviathan carries him away into the darkness. Leviathan show Klarion the way to the “blue rafters” of the surface world, where he immediately falls in with the pimp-like Mister Melmoth (complete with ruffed shirt, purple jacket, and cane), the very one whose agents were attempting to buy Klarion in the under-market.





My Two Cents: Klarion, the goth-boy and teen Morrison stand-in, is hilariously enthusiastic about the “wonders” of the subway tunnels, greeting each new horror with an irrepressibly naïve glee. Klarion also expresses Morrison’s philosophy that we make deities out of our heroes to inspire us to rise to their ideal.



Apart from Ebenezer Badde sounding like a good name for a Puritan who’s a bad dude, it’s also a pun on the 1992 song “Ebeneezer Goode” by British band The Shamen. Would Grant Morrison pass up an opportunity to make an allusion to shamanism? Never! Also, the song repeats his name as “…ezer Goode, …ezer Goode, …ezer Goode,” which could easily be heard as “E’s (Ecstasy pills) are good.” Would Grant Morrison pass up an opportunity to promote recreational drugs? Again, no way! Here are some of the lyrics, lest you think this interpretation is a stretch:




The Leviathan are a gang of child who live underground and share a single mind. This is the same “Midwich Cuckoos” idea which Morrison used in New X-Men for the Stepford Cuckoos. They also actualize Morrison’s notions of organisms in which humans serve as individual cells.



The Leviathan-children find Guardian’s helmet, which he left in payment for the handcar which he requisitioned from the subway track in issue #2 of his own series.



Most people today think of “Vanity Fair” as a fashion magazine. But it was originally a fair (market) of wickedness (vanity) representing the temptations of the world in John Bunyan’s 1678 novel “Pilgrim’s Progress.” It was also the title of 1848 novel (subtitled “A novel without a hero”) by William Makepeace Thackeray satirizing British society.



By the way, I love the cover of this issue. Each issue #2 of the Seven Soldiers series consists of a headshot, you’ll notice as we go along. This one is my favorite of the bunch.

Guardian #3 “Siege at Century Hollow” (September 2005)



The Story: Century Hollow is a dome on Ellis Island containing 100 robots which dramatize the disparities in the world. But there’s trouble in paradise, in the form of marital woes between the two founders, Jorge and Hannah Control. Jorge programs the robots to go amuck, threatening a tourist group, so The Guardian and his Newsboy Army parachute in to rescue them. When the dust settles, and Jorge is in custody, he insinuates that Hannah is one of his robot creations, but everyone ignores him.

 

Guardian’s relationship is falling apart in the wake of his father-in-law’s brutal murder by the subway pirates in issue #1. His girlfriend Carla can’t cope with the pressures of his new job, and he’s unwilling to abandon a career which has rewarded him with money, fame, and self-esteem. Maybe giving her an engagement ring will help? Nope, they argue, and it falls to a rainy street. To cheer him up, his boss Stargard promises to tell him the secret history of the Seven Soldiers… next issue!



My Two Cents: Morrison continues to pull out new variations on “worlds within worlds.” This time it’s a Westworld-style tourist attraction run amuck, with the citizens of the “lower world” (Century Hollow) having been programmed by their Creator to kill visitors, just as comic book writers have their own reasons for the mayhem they cause characters to commit and endure.  When Stargard says "It sounds crazy," this is a double entendre as to whether the inequities in the world are crazy, or whether this particular dramatization is crazy.



A television mentions the approach of “Hurricane Gloria.” Hurricane Gloriana, more like! Other than that, this is a self-contained story with little connection to the larger narrative of the Sheeda.



Seven Soldiers Theme: The creation outlives the creator. Jorge gets carted off to prison, leaving his “wife” Hannah, secretly one of his robot creations, in charge of the world he built. Their surname “Control” speaks to their role in this mini-world.

The thought experiment about "What if there were 100 people in the world?" dates to a 1992 publication by the Retired Peace Corps Volunteers of Madison Wisconsin which went like this:

Klarion #3 “The Deviant Ones” (October 2005)



The Story: Klarion has fallen in with Mister Melmoth’s kid protégés, the Deviants. They sneak into the museum of Golden Age heroes and steal a giant drill-tank which Melmoth intends to use to burrow a tunnel to Limbo Town. The eldest Deviant, Billy Beezer, ages up to join Team Red, which goes on missions through the Erdel Gate to mine gold in the Red Place at the behest of Melmoth. Klarion warns the Deviants not to stay with Melmoth, and after a moment’s hesitation, he descends the burrow hole to defend Limbo Town against the giant drill's imminent incursion.



My Two Cents: This is quite a straightforward issue with few allusions. In an exposition dump, the reader is told about the lost Roanoke colony. We already knew about it and Croatoan; weren’t we smart? But we didn’t know that the colony was kidnapped and interbred with its Sheeda kidnappers to create the witch-tribe that lives in Limbo Town. I continue to detect a note of autobiography in Klarion’s tale, as he roams the city streets with a pack of Deviant Ones scarcely less clueless than himself. Now we know about the Pumpkin Cab seen in Guardian #1. These two series intertwine more closely than the stories of Zatanna (in San Francisco) and Shining Knight (in Los Angeles).



The Erdel Gate is named after Professor Mark Erdel, who built a transporter beam which brought J’onn J’onzz from Mars in Detective Comics #225 (1955). There’s a definite Pinocchio vibe as Pleasure Island gives way to the work gang, digging up gold from “The Red Place,” i.e. Mars. A future issue will take us there.



Klarion’s gang may map to the Archies. There’s a boy wearing a crown (Jughead), a blonde (Betty) and a black haired girl (Veronica), and a burly kid with an “M” necklace. (Moose?) There’s another kid with crazy colored hair, and a very large boy. Not sure who they would be. Is Klarion the “Archie” in the gang? Or perhaps his ginger cat? Or maybe I’m just trying too hard.

The drill-tank is a reference to ... um ... an actual Golden Age hero whose name I'm blanking on at the moment. But it isn't someone Morrison made up.

Back in his Warrior days, Morrison wrote a couple chapters of the Liberators, a series which ties into Big Ben as well as the never-published Projectors. The latter two series concerned human children who were being mutated in order to serve as cannon fodder in an alien war; I wonder if Morrison is reusing some of his ideas here?



Ha, I never thought of that!

Underground drilling machines are an old staple of sci-fi and proto-sci-fi. Burrough's David Innes used one to travel to Pellucidar, the Edisonades of the late 19th Century had similar devices; Flash Gordon uses one to attack Ming's palace, to rescue Dale Arden, early in the strip (after meeting up with Prince Barin). Later, Cave Carson operates one.

Quality Comics The Red Torpedo had a special vessel, though it was not a drilling machine...