Seven Soldiers of Victory #1 “The Miser’s Coat” (2006)
The Story: It’s a series of vignettes, connected by plot or theme or nothing at all. Some of it is told in summary, making a summary of the summary difficult. I’ll try to gather each one into its own summary.
First, One of the Seven Unknown Men sews a fiction suit for his errant colleague
Zor. It’s the clothing of
Cyrus Gold, before he turned into Solomon Grundy. The Tailor wears a tie pin which is the DC comics logo, and he says that his story goes from the very beginning to the very end—of DC's tale of humanity, that is, not the universe. The Tailor tells Zor that without his facial hair, he looks just like Cyrus Gold, and also just like a Tailor, since he is one.
In a sequence drawn in the style of Jack Kirby, the New Gods appear to Neanderthals in the year 40,000BC, uplifting them, setting them on the road to technological advancement and founding the four mythical Celtic cities of Falias, Murias, Findias, and Gorias (see
Seven Soldiers #0 discussion), as well as the seven legendary treasures to which this series has alluded.
Aurakles (Oracle from
JLA #100), the first super-hero, arises. A futuristic caveman society sends a time machine to the year One Billion, where
Melmoth king of the Sheeda learns its secret. His wife
Gloriana travels back in time and ravages Neanderthal culture in the first Harrowing.
In the year 10,000BC, Arthur and Merlin find Excalibur in the ruins of Gorias in the Himalayas, then live out the Welsh fable in which Arthur leads four boats of soldiers into Faerie (Unwhen) to retrieve talismans of power, but only seven soldiers survive. I don’t know what art style this is part supposed to be in—Hal Foster? Anyway, it looks fabulous. Colored pencils?
Justina the Shining Knight emerges from the magic cauldron to do battle with Gloriana. A fierce struggle ensues, during which Gloriana (apparently now in modern day, not the year One Billion) throws Justina from the ship, where she is caught in midair by
Vanguard the Pegazeus.
I Spyder appears and surprises his erstwhile mistress by shooting her through the spine and mouth. Gloriana too falls from her craft to the streets of Manhattan, with no Pegazeus to intervene.
Mister Miracle frees Aurakles from Mister
Dark Side, who has purchased him as a gladiator slave. Dark Side shoots Mister Miracle in the head, and he’s eventually buried, but he escapes death and rises again. Shilo Norman is a Resurrection Man, I suppose you could say. The notion that our world is the Dark Side controlled by evil will get picked up in
Final Crisis.
In a sequence presented as pages from
The Guardian newspaper, the Sheeda attack New York. Jason’s girlfriend
Carla argues with her mother, who wants Carla to make up with Jason. Jason rides out of the pages of the newspaper in a “4-D sequence” to rescue Carla, who barely misses running over Zatanna.
Misty Kilgore (Princess Rhiannon of the Sheeda) announces her intention to battle her wicked stepmother Gloriana to claim the throne, presumably ending future Harrowings during her lifetime at least. But
Klarion bests Misty in a confrontation and runs off to the year One Billion, having taken her magic die to pair with the one he already has. Rolling two dice, he can get the seven (victory) that was impossible with one die alone. In fact, he can position the dice so that they add up to seven no matter which way you look at them. Together, the dice are the Fatherbox, the Darkseid-version of the Motherbox, one of the Seven Treasures of Aurakles. Klarion travels to the year One Billion to become king of the Sheeda in Gloriana’s absence. This sets Klarion up to travel back in time for his debut appearance in
The Demon #7, though the dice are not mentioned in that story. Meanwhile Misty/Rhiannon remains in modern times with Zatanna.
Frankenstein is plowing through droves of Sheeda in the year One Billion when Klarion arrives and uses his Hex Sign to control Frank (the Grundy, thus susceptible to this). What adventures await them?
Zatanna frees
Gwydion (Merlin) from his jar and casts a spell to achieve victory; we see panels from across the whole maxi-series, evidencing that she has learned the fifth-dimensional perspective from her visit to the land of the Seven Unknown Men.
Alix Harrower is driving
Sally Sonic to the hospital, but Sally recovers enough to initiate a fight in the car. As they struggle, the car careens, striking Gloriana dead just after falling from her spaceship after the fight with Justina and Spyder. Sally dies as well, but Alix survives.
In an epilogue,
Millions the dog inherits the criminal empires of both Don Vincenzo (
Kid Scarface) and Don Baldi (father of
Billy Beezer, who died on the moon as Melmoth’s slave).
Ali-Ka-Zoom helps get Justina set up to enroll in boarding school, anticipating that one day she will travel back to the year 10,000BC to help civilization recover from one of the Harrowings. Justina is being thrust into an even more conventional role than the one she had in Arthurian times: prep school student.
My Two Cents: This issue falls out pretty logically, tying up loose ends. Klarion’s fate was the main surprise, though it shouldn’t have been since his mini-series was an origin story rather than a continuation of his Bronze Age appearances. Once again Mister Miracle’s appearances act like they’re in a whole other story. Also, the depiction of the New Gods as trapped in the form of vagrants is at odds with their simultaneous appearance in
Infinite Crisis. Maybe the whole vagrant thing was just part of Shilo’s dream in the black hole, but this “Kingpin” version of Darkseid is clearly part of the “real world” of the DCU.
The Time Tailor finishes Cyrus Gold’s patchwork suit and describes it as “the work of many hands” which will not “ever fit properly.” This describes the way comic book continuity can never be perfect, considering how many different creators are involved.
This is not the only time that Morrison has envisioned the end of humanity; he also provided the ending used by Mark Millar in
Superman: Red Sun (2003), which I won’t spoil here. Either is something of a depressing end, and one at odds with what Morrison has envisioned elsewhere of a mankind that evolves into beings of pure thought and light, able to traverse dimensions with ease. Maybe the Sheeda are just the humans that refused to change and got stuck in a cannibalistic rut? If so, there’s no hint of that in this series.
The last issue of
Seven Soldiers is #1 because Morrison envisions the finale of this series as the set-up for the further adventures of all of his characters. To my knowledge, that didn’t happen. As usual with Morrison, other writers declined to follow up on the scenarios he set up, though some of these characters have seen more action since 2006 than they saw in the forty years prior. So where are they now?
Klarion got a six issue reboot miniseries by Ann Nocenti and has appeared in
Teen Titans and
Secret Six several times more recently. In 2019 he’s part of
Suicide Squad: Black and has appeared in various DC cartoons. A bratty character will always be useful.
Bulleteer has not done much. I guess she got the civilian life she wanted.
Shining Knight was busy in the
Demon Knights series in 2011-13.
Zatanna has been very busy, with over a hundred appearances in series like
Justice League, Justice League: Dark, and
Trinity. Not surprising, since she was the least neglected of the Seven Soldiers in the first place.
The Manhattan Guardian is essentially forgotten. Like Bulleteer, he was ambivalent about being a hero, but we never really got to see his story with Stargard wrap up.
Frankenstein has had lots to do as
Frankenstein: Agent of S.H.A.D.E. and as a regular in
Justice League: Dark, among dozens of other appearances.
I Spyder has slipped into the woodwork.
Shilo Norman, Mister Miracle has largely escaped notice but does play a role in Morrison's
Final Frisis..
The Time Tailors (Seven Unknown Men) were never seen again under that guise, but Grant Morrison’s trope of “the hands that write the story” appear in many other stories from him.
The Sheeda languished until recently (Dec 2018-Jan 2019 to be precise) when Dan DiDio and Grant Morrison brought out the whole Seven Soldiers concept for a brief hurrah in two issues of the dimension-hopping comic book (and eponymous hero)
Sideways.
