Kirby's Fourth World

A hundred years ago this week, Jack Kirby was born; it is striking to observe the medium of superhero comics begin to approach its own century mark, something that Kirby and his contemporaries brought about in their early adulthood. In an earlier post, I discussed Kirby's first work at DC, taking over the existing Jimmy Olsen title. Here, I break down Kirby's three original titles that presented his Fourth World.

Kirby's Fourth World work is a case study in extremes. Kirby came to DC from Marvel with a gigantic reputation and a new vision to match. DC practically could not debut his new work fast enough; he was first given control of the poorly selling Jimmy Olsen title. Kirby's ideas expanded in the three new titles he was allowed to launch: Forever People, New Gods, and Mister Miracle. In the span of his first few months (and issues), he introduced numerous characters who have been, individually and collectively, among the most enduring in DC's history. This is a remarkable achievement, and one that virtually no other creator has approached or matched.

And yet, this splendid body of work failed to thrive. The original work itself is not widely read / republished proportional to its creative power, and in its own time was not embraced. None of Kirby's three original titles caught on and two were cancelled before reaching their twelfth issue – an ignominious sign that would normally be interpreted as failure. There is some controversy regarding the reasons for this, whether it was outright disappointing sales, unrealistic expectations, or something else, but amid the brilliance and creativity there is a scattered, unhinged nature to the work itself that asks a lot of the reader's attention. Kirby's original Fourth World work has many qualities of a cult work – adored by a few devotees, but not loved or even liked very much by the masses.

The central fact of the Fourth World is an almost perfect division into two parts, one good and one evil. Two worlds exist opposite one another in both physical space and morality. The good world, New Genesis, is named after a beginning and the first book of the Bible. The evil world, Apokolips, is named after the last book of the Bible (alongside the more popular name in English, "Revelation," are alternate names involving the word "Apocalypse"). Those books, in turn, are not the beginning and end in terms of mere page order, but in terms of a narration of the human race itself, describing its origin and its annihilation. These names alone say a great deal about the Fourth World – the strict binary division, generous inspiration from classical and Judeo-Christian culture, and religious overtones.

Kirby's three new titles, while centered on different characters, also offered different kinds of dynamics. The Forever People acted as one unit, very much like Kirby's jovial, wonderous Hairies from Jimmy Olsen, and though they had distinctive names and appearance, they didn't have much characterization to distinguish one from the other. Fittingly, they were capable of unifying physically into one, nigh-unbeatable hero (though the metaphysical explanation was that they simply switched places with the Infinity Man rather than became him). This was a fitting tribute to the Youth Movement of the time, with a group of individuals becoming more powerful when they acted together. The Forever People's time on Earth memorably began with a guest-starring role by Superman in which his yearning to know other super-people was so evocative that the story earned a place in The Greatest Superman Stories Ever Told.

New Gods centered on Orion, who went to Earth and formed a small squadron of ordinary people to aid him in his battle against the forces of Apokolips. Subtle hints from the beginning led up to a dramatic and brilliant revelation in flashback that a secret pact between Izaya and Darkseid had them exchange their young sons so that neither of them could tolerate what would otherwise be an all-encompassing destructive war between them.

Among Kirby's Fourth World titles, Mister Miracle was the only one to last more than 11 issues, but it too was short-lived, ending after issue #18. Scott Free, the son of Highfather and raised by Darkseid in the trade with Orion, lives a heroic life on Earth, alternately performing as an escape artist and fighting for his life against various plots launched from his home world of Apokolips. Along the way, he befriends Oberon and begins a romance with Big Barda. Maybe this title outlived the others because Mister Miracle more closely resembled a conventional DC superhero. Maybe it's because he really was the greatest escape artist.

Not long after Kirby's titles were canceled, his Fourth World creations resurfaced in other writers' work, in memorable Justice League and Legion of Super-Heroes stories, a revival series penned by Gerry Conway, a key role in Crisis on Infinite Earths, and many times thereafter, including various animated features, Cosmic Odyssey, the post-Byrne Superman titles, Grant Morrison's mid-2000s work including Seven Soldiers and Final Crisis, the New 52, and soon enough in the upcoming Justice League movie.

Despite the conceptual symmetry, the Fourth World's good and evil beings have endured in different ways. Kirby's three titles were all named for good characters – the Forever People, New Gods, and Mister Miracle – but the most compelling creation of this work is Darkseid, the central evil character. Generally speaking, Darkseid looms large in each title, sending different underlings in various plotlines to menace good people on Earth who are associated with the good New Gods. The overall effect is a stalemate, with the good characters winning almost all of the battles, which serves to neutralize one evil plan after another. In this regard, Fourth World stories are not unlike prototypical superhero comics.

The Fourth World came to belong to DC for contractual reasons, but it easily could have been Marvel's or even some other company's had one business relationship or another turned out differently. Creatively, the Fourth World wasn't very well tailored to fit into the DC Universe. The neo-mythological realm of the New Gods didn't span a Multiverse so much as it endlessly involved plots on Earth (which usually means the United States). Like the deities of Greek, Roman, and Norse mythology, the New Gods have a privileged relationship with Earth and it is little explained why, in a DC universe with countless civilized worlds, the New Gods are so transfixed with Earth as opposed to Rann, Thanagar, Oa, Daxam, etc. But obsessed with Earth they are. Darkseid has agents at work on Earth, searching for the Anti-Life Equation, but also doing evil for its own sake. Numerous members of the New Gods migrate to Earth and still others are shamelessly obsessed with its culture – cowboy movies, Prussian militarism, the Italian Renaissance, and more. Pragmatically speaking, the characters are obviously intrigued by these things because Kirby was intrigued by them, and they don't cite Thanagarian culture because it never existed. Later writers build on Kirby's slight hints that Earth is a particularly important planet as when Grant Morrison developed the plot line by which the Fourth World came to an end and the Fifth World began on Earth – a suitable backstory explaining their obsession with that one planet out of billions. And so, the New Gods – good and evil ones alike – readily obsess over terrestrial culture and the narrative is richer for it.

Kirby created a new mythology, with the various royal families and their followers engaged in a neverending war akin to similar epics in Greek, Roman, and Norse mythologies as well as the Bible, and akin in other respects to historical struggles between royal families. Darkseid and his following is explicitly patterned on Hitler and the Nazis. Kirby also choose names that pun so bluntly that one must wonder why characters in the story don't give pause frequently to point out the heavy-handed reference to inspirations such as "dark side" and apocalypse, Isaiah and Genesis, the Marquis de Sade, and unapologetic references to figures of speech and Earth culture such as the constellation Orion, the distinctly British phrase "scot-free," the Greek letter omega, and perhaps the biggest groaner of a pun of all – an evil team of underwater beings called the Deep Six. The "Fourth World" is an evocative phrase, inspiring curiosity as to what went before, not only the old gods before this generation but – apparently – two other generations before that; Kirby chose the name by extending the then-common term "Third World" to suggest that his inventions transcend reality in uncanny ways.

However much Kirby provided a big vision that spanned his four titles, the most apparent motif in his work is his wild inventiveness. Virtually every issue contains at least one new character who is weird and worth revisiting. The Fourth World concept allows Kirby to pile up great heaps of science fiction, technology, myth, magic, and mystery in his new characters. He is equally inventive in creating vehicles, disembodied concepts like the Anti-Life Equation and Omega Effect, making almost every issue entertaining to the point of disorienting the reader with a lack of certainty regarding what might happen next.

As an example of this, one Kirby trait is to end an issue with a cliffhanger, usually in the form of expository dialogue by a character in the story or expository text in a caption. But not all cliffhangers are equal. The typical cliffhanger in the 1966 Batman television series showed Batman and Robin in some elaborate death trap, from which they inevitably escaped at the beginning of the next episode. This plot device is notoriously formulaic, and is found even in many of the better comics and other forms of serial storytelling. Kirby's cliffhangers were different, often creating a threat whose true nature was unknown and even unguessable. Darkseid himself was created as such a cliffhanger, which hints at the magnitude and richness of Kirby's inventiveness.

What does Orion face? It has destroyed a god–and threatens the entire Earth! Don't miss SPAWN

What kind of world is it–that spawns gods of evil and lesser beings with horribly hostile hang-ups!!!?? You've seen some of its nasty products!! Now, come along with Scott Free and Big Barda!!–And take a fearful glimpse of– THE APOKOLIPS TRAP!!

It is Desaad's own little domain on Earth–A pilot project of purgatory–where torment is conputer–death is controlled–and escape impossible! Don't miss–Kingdom of the DAMNED!

Besides promising, and delivering, unguessable surprises, cliffhangers show another distinctive Kirby trait: unbridled, and shamelessly promotional hyperbole. Religious overtones and vocabulary of death and destriction permeate the text. Throughout the text of his stories, hyperbole is piled on top of hyperbole, and if I were to offer a fond parody, it would go something like:

To even attempt to imagine surviving the futility of meeting someone who would dare merely to contemplate speaking the name of Darkseid is sheer folly!

Of course, these words have to be backed up action, and Kirby no less than any comic creator offers scenes and entire issues packed with almost incomprehensible kinetic smorgasbords of punches, ray gun blasts, explosions, tumbles, and all sort of superpowers emanating from the hands, eyes, and minds of his characters. The human characters were no less bold, as one issue was devoted to the reckless heroism of normal human cop Dan "Terrible" Turpin going up against malefactors from Apokolips.

This disorienting quality is probably what made his work a cult classic – readers used to the more typically formulaic stories in other superhero titles probably found less of the strident heroism and more need to follow plot details than they were used to, and it would take an older reader to appreciate some of the cultural subtext, while the black-and-white morality of the concept offered less subtlety that such readers might enjoy. The Fourth World was for a particular kind of reader and those readers seemed not to be very numerous.

My comic-reading life began just months after Kirby's titles ceased publication. A few years later, I picked up the revival of New Gods scripted by Gerry Conway and found it memorably unsuited to my tastes. I wasn't aware then of what I see now, that this was the result of a new creative team trying to fill in for a master of his craft. Conway was a very good writer; he produced some of the best parts of the JLA Satellite Era, but DC's star superheroes have been the subjects of good stories from countless different writers. Kirby's work was different, and what makes it stand out is his distinctive style, not the greateness of his characters and his inventions. Many years later, as Final Crisis loomed, I went back and read Kirby's original Fourth World works for the first time, to understand better the villains at the heart of that story. Rarely have I felt so appreciative of the quality and originality of older material, and I now regard it a bit audacious for later writers to use Kirby's characters, because the difference between his handling of them and theirs is so readily apparent. And so, on the hundredth anniversary of Kirby's birth, I bid the great King Kirby a "thank you" from back down here on Earth. 

Retro Review: Jack Kirby's Jimmy Olsen

In 1970, Jack Kirby was already one of comicdom's most accomplished creators. To an uncommon degree, he moved from company to company during this phase, working for several different publishers and syndicators of content, sometimes in freelance, sometimes under contract. He – also to an uncommon degree – worked as a part of prominent pairs, working with Joe Simon in the Forties and Fifties, then Dick and Dave Wood, and teaming up with Stan Lee to spectacular success in the Sixties. Working with those various partners, Kirby co-created the likes of Captain America, the Hulk, Thor, Iron Man, Magneto, the Silver Surfer, Galactus, Black Panther, and teams of staggering prominence – the Newsboy Legion, the Challengers of the Unknown, the Fantastic Four, The Avengers, and X-Men. By Kirby's account, which Lee disputed, Spider-Man was also a Kirby-and-Simon creation, and therein one sees the central tension in Jack Kirby's career. As an artist who frequently teamed up with writers, Kirby was often edged out of the principal credit – and the financial gains – for many of the characters he created, or helped created. Kirby possessed a remarkable imagination, to say nothing of his skills in bringing passion to artwork, but ended several creative and business relationships on bad terms. This brought him, in 1970, to DC (the heir of comic companies he had already left on bad terms, years in the past) for a new chance at a fresh start.

One of the most mind-bending incongruities of Kirby's work for DC in the Seventies is that the master creator with such impeccable credentials began his new career working on such a minor title. While Kirby planned work on multiple new series featuring mythical ideas that he had begun to explore while working on Thor, he was first given writing and pencil duties on Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen. It is hard to imagine a title and a character more obviously subordinate to another character – a powerless young man with no superpowers, dubbed the mere "pal" of Superman. Inarguably, Kirby used the small title to introduce some very big ideas, making early-Seventies Jimmy Olsen prominent in big-concept comics history, far out of proportion to its small concept origin.

Kirby's Jimmy Olsen brought together several aspects that might seem incongruous, but were a perfect fit for the circumstance. If there's one thing that distinguished Jimmy Olsen from DC's most prominent characters, it was his youth. Kirby took over the title the year after Woodstock, at the height of student protests against the Vietnam War, when language and fashion developed around a counterculture that defined its era. Jimmy Olsen, far more than, say, a Batman title, was the perfect venue for incorporating those ideas. Kirby makes the youth culture that was prominent in the Woodstock Era an important element in his story, and that is the one area in which Jimmy Olsen has unquestioned superiority over Superman.

Kirby injected youth into his title by introducing two different groups of youngsters (furthermore, young men). One from his own past, the Newsboy Legion, was the a creation of Kirby and Simon in the prewar years, and was therefore a property of DC that he was free to use again. In order to use them as newsboys despite the intervening decades, he introduces a team of newsboys who are the sons of the originals, each of them virtually a doppleganger for his father. The younger generation of newsboys promptly adopt Olsen as their leader – old enough to earn their respect, but not so old as to lose it. Kirby also shows the older Newsboys, now men, as supporting characters, and a clone of the Guardian to fill in for the deceased superhero who operated with the original Newsboys.

The other group of youths in this story is the Hairies, who are a mashup of so many disparate influences that a lengthy essay could profitably discuss the Hairies alone. The Hairies, for the visual trait that earned them their name, visually resemble hippies and other counterculture figures of their time, as this facet of one's appearance became the title of the concurrent and massively successful Broadway musical Hair. Appearance is only a superficial characteristic of the Hairies; they are otherwise distinguished by their origin as creations of the DNA Project, a biotech initiative run by the older generation of Newsboys. The Hairies, products of human cloning and genetic engineering, are superior to ordinary people in spirit and in intellect, and left the DNA Project to live in homes and vehicles produced by the superior technology that they themselves created.

Olsen's relative youth lead both the Newsboys and the Hairies to recognize him as a leader; in this way, there is a perfect harmony between the title character, Kirby's plot, and the Woodstock era. Kirby, the master writer, thereby made his assignment on a minor title starring a minor character a brilliant one, with Olsen's youth, Kirby's ideas, and the current culture all coming together in a uniquely appropriate way.

That said, Kirby's ideas are so far-reaching that virtually anything would intersect with them in some way or another. In current parlance, Kirby's work in Jimmy Olsen is a mash-up – of so many different cultural and technological perspectives that it is simultaneously disorienting, all-encompassing, and wonderful. Virtually every scene begins by plunging the reader in some fresh, exciting domain, soon adding qualities or perspectives from other domains. There are secret government organizations, secret armies, strange aliens, famous celebrities from real life, strange religions, adherents of countercultures, monsters and villains, mysterious cryptozoological species, futuristic technologies, miraculous vehicles, and dose after dose of biological engineering. Kirby mashes up these different fantastic story elements in multiple different ways in each issue. It's always exciting, entertaining, unpredictable, and perhaps in some way educational.

At times, it is apt to make many readers find it too unpredictable, too erratic, too kooky. In one very strange feature, Kirby includes a text essay in issue #135 that rambles almost disturbingly about the Hairies, and it is hard to say in what voice Kirby is speaking. The Hairies are not real, but he writes in the first person as though they might be real, or as hypothetical entities who might come into existence one day. He describes their science fiction underpinning as the result of DNA engineering, but emphasizes their moral and cultural qualities, as idealists who live in perfect harmony. He writes of them with unadulterated admiration as though they embody an ideal society that, in Kirby's view, should exist in a perfect world, but he goes on to say that mankind should feel threatened by the Hairies because they're better than we are, and that it is inevitable than mankind seek to kill the Hairies, exterminating them. At the end of the essay, Kirby concludes "I felt great, writing that! It made me feel that all's right with the world, that my place in it was secure. It made me feel like a man!!!" This emotional ramble would sincerely make me worry about Kirby's sanity if that concern were still relevant. Perhaps he was a masterful creator who enjoyed getting swept up in the emotion of his creations. This essay makes him appear, perhaps, to be swept up to an unhealthy extent. The quality of what is in Kirby's stories makes it intriguing to consider every recorded aspect of the man and his thoughts, perhaps clues as to how work of this quality is formed.

The wild worlds that Kirby created hosts a cast of heroes led by Jimmy Olsen. As Olsen triumphs against bizarre alien conspiracies led by Darkseid and shines as a man of action, he becomes a top-rate hero in the DCU, more relatable than most, as a young man with no superpowers, no super powers (usually), and no super origin. He simply rises to the occasion time after time. When he encounters an amazing vehicle, he soon starts piloting it. When he learns of an enemy base, he infiltrates it. When he is transformed into a hideous monster  – twice! – he ends up being un-transformed back to his normal self. The series is the epitome of a "normal" man going up against cosmic forces, coping with them just as well – at times better – than his superpowered pal Superman. And it is strange to contemplate that DC's most iconic cosmic villain, Darkseid, was introduced in a title headlined by that common young man, Jimmy Olsen.

Thus DC lore inherits the improbable and disproportionate quirk that the master creator Kirby and his most amazing creations began at an arbitrary midpoint in a title named for a non-superpowered sidekick. The combination was probably too odd to survive, and lasted less than a year and a half before Kirby focused on titles of his own concoction. Soon, both the Jimmy Olsen title and Kirby's most productive work at DC were at an end, but the legacy endures in the Fourth World creations of Darkseid and Apokolips. Kirby's work in Jimmy Olsen stands as a historic turning point in comic history, and those issues remain worth reading as a record of how great storytelling in comics is done.

Retro Review: Seven Soldiers

Superman presents a certain kind of challenge that minor superheroes do not. That sentence describes an observation made by both the writer and the villains of Grant Morrison's Seven Soldiers. A writer can change the small facts of the Man of Steel's life, place Superman in any of countless scenarios, put many words in his mouth, but the character must stay true to certain established truths, and there are limits to what a new story can get away with. A minor character, on the other hand, may be molded and manipulated to a far greater extent. That is what motivated Morrison to give the starring roles in his series to characters who had appeared in DC Comics before, but whose prominence ranged from second-tier (Zatanna) down to several tiers below that. Accordingly, Morrison was able to redefine the characters substantially, changing two of them from men to women, mutilating and killing another one, and so on.

The villains in the story, the murderous, gleefully corrupt Sheeda from Earth's future also decide not to include the leading figures of the Justice League in their plan. In a prequel printed in JLA Classified #1-3, the Sheeda attempt a frontal assault on the year 2005 and it does not go well. Neh-Buh-Loh, one of the Sheeda's warriors, stands atop a tall building and dares Earth to send its "world's finest" champions to fall at his feet, whereupon Superman flies out of the sky and effortlessly punches out Neh-Buh-Loh twice, unfazed by the villain's best blow. In response, the Sheeda retreat, with Neh-Buh-Loh warning "I have seen enough… I have tested my prey… When next my people come, it will be as whispers of death, unseen… goodbye, Superman…" This is, indeed, similar to the way Morrison kept the DC's heavy hitters out of his lineup, and it is more than that: Planned less than three years after the September 11 attacks, Seven Soldiers is the story of how a despicable enemy bent on the destruction of our civilization decides to strike by surprise in New York, wreaking havoc on the island of Manhattan. Sound familiar?

Seven Soldiers is thus a parable for our times, utilizing seven… actually, quite a bit more than seven… of DC's minor characters. The sprawling story is set in the DCU, uses DCU conventions, began with a prequel involving the DC's biggest stars, and has a menace that threatens the DC Universe, but with its focus on minor characters, was able to take risks that a series starring flagship characters could not. Morrison used that freedom with virtuoso skill, and crafted, in Seven Soldiers, one of the finest works that DC has ever published.

The structure is without an obvious peer. Morrison told the story in 30 issues consisting of single issues (Seven Soldiers #0 and #1) that bookend seven miniseries of four issues each. A reader may like one of these miniseries and dislike another, or like five and dislike two… but is likely to admire most of them and love some. Any of these miniseries can be read or re-read alone, but they are intertwined, and they work together to tell the story of one existential threat to the world.

Seven Soldiers and its various prequels present seven teams of seven: The original Seven Soldiers (1941), a Silver Age revival including Spider instead of Green Arrow, the Ultramarine Corps and the JLA in Morrison's JLA Confidential story, a lineup that fights and dies in Seven Soldiers #0, the Newsboy Army seen in flashbacks, and the lineup that defeats the Sheeda in Seven Soldiers #1. A shadowy group called the Time Tailors make an eighth group of seven – or group of eight – the number in these groups is also sometimes six, which is bad luck and portends defeat.

The fundamental inspiration for this series goes back to Mort Weisinger's introduction of the Seven Soldiers of Victory in Leading Comics #1, in 1941, when the seven heroes from five solo features joined forces to fight a master criminal named The Hand. A 1972 story in JLA #100-102 scripted by Len Wein revived the Seven Soldiers in a new battle against their first enemy, who, aided by a cosmic threat named the Nebula Man, made himself into a powerful force named the Iron Hand. Morrison pays homage to the original team by basing several members of his two lineups of Seven Soldiers upon the originals or their legacies. To complete the lineups, he uses or invents characters whose origins, in almost all cases, can be traced to other Golden Age characters or Jack Kirby inventions:

Seven Soldiers of Victory, 1941

Crimson Avenger

Shining Knight

The Vigilante

Green Arrow and Speedy

Star Spangled Kid and Stripesy

Seven Soldiers #0 team (Golden Age inspirations)

Vigilante (himself)

Gimmix (Star Spangled Kid's stepniece)

The Whip (The Whip's granddaughter)

I, Spyder (Spider's son)

Boy Blue (imitator)

Dyno-Mite Dan (imitator)

Bulleteer (imitator, not by choice)

Seven Soldiers #1 team (Golden Age inspirations)

Shining Knight (retcon of original Shining Knight, now a woman)

Guardian (retcon of original)

Zatanna (daughter of Zatara)

Klarion (retcon of original)

Mister Miracle (successor to the original)

Bulleteer (imitator, not by choice)

Frankenstein (DC character adapted from the novel)

One immediately notices an overlap in the starring lineups – as Zatanna says, "it's like there's mystery string holding everything together." Greg "Vigilante" Saunders is a member of the original and SS #0 lineups, while Bulleteer is a member of the SS #0 lineup (though absent) and the SS #1 lineup. But there are also overlaps in the supporting casts. Many of these come from a group of child crimefighters called the Newsboy Army (patterned closely on Jack Kirby's Newsboy Legion). Their heyday was decades ago, but many of them survive and surface throughout Seven Soldiers, having aged enough that their reappearances as adults make the reveals of their identity surprising. Another form of string holding things together are cameos that the cast of one miniseries make in the others. This includes the stars, the bystanders, and especially the villains.

Morrison's villains, as in several of his other works, arrive via a time loop: From Earth's future, the Sheeda prey on their world's own past, targeting the best and most prosperous eras, using evil magic and science and mind control powers – tiny fairies who ride mosquitoes like winged horses, and attach to a good person's spine in order to turn them bad. We see them topple Camelot and make small raids on other times leading up to a full assault on 2005 and the era of superheroes. They use a giant spider as bait to attract one lineup of Seven Soldier to Miracle Mesa, Arizona, and then wipe out the group that Vigilante had recruited for the purpose. Aware that they cannot defeat the Justice League, the Sheeda plan a sneak attack on New York, and are on guard watching out for any group of seven heroes who might organize to stop them. Along the way, in the seven miniseries, we see how seven heroes – some of them old, some new, and many of them very unlikely – take their places in the battle to come.

Shining Knight is Ystina, a young woman posing as a male knight named Justin, who sees her Camelot in the final stages of its fall to the Sheeda. She enters their time machine, Castle Revolving, and in her escape, inadvertently ends up in modern-day Los Angeles. Don Vincenzo, a mob boss, who is one of the Newsboy Army grown up (and turned bad) ends up with Ystina's winged horse, Vanguard. At the end of her miniseries, she is in combat with the Sheeda queen, Gloriana Tenebrae, who does not fear Ystina because she is only one, and prophecy says that seven will defeat the Sheeda.

Jake Jordan is a "big, tough" former police officer who is haunted by a deadly mistake that he made on the job. He applies for a job as a hero/journalist (a la Clark Kent?) with the Manhattan Guardian newspaper, whose boss happens to be another of the Newsboy Army grown up (or, to be precise – grown old, but not "up"). Donning a costume and shield as the Manhattan Guardian, he soon finds himself fighting pirates who live in the tunnels under the New York subway system, and ends his miniseries protecting his boss from the Sheeda.

Zatanna is by far the most famous of the characters in this series. A former member of the Justice League, she is psychologically broken and lacks the confidence to use her spellcasting power. We see in flashbacks that she has killed several people close to her in a mystic miscalculation, and the guilt of her role in Identity Crisis is also haunting her. She acquires a young sidekick named Misty, who is as mysterious as her name indicates, and who proves to be, unwillingly, heir to the Sheeda throne. Zatanna is being stalked by a magical villain named Zor, a Golden Age villain powerful enough to challenge the Spectre ("he brags that he brought the wrath of God to its white and wobbly knees," a feat he achieved in More Fun Comics #55 way back in 1940). Zatanna overcomes Zor with cleverness and boldness, so she and Misty can prepare for their key roles in fighting the Sheeda.

Perhaps Morrison's greatest invention in Seven Soldiers is Limbo Town, the world of Klarion the Witch Boy, where an isolated, underground community displaying puritanical severity (and fashion) follows black magic instead of Christianity. They are the Lost Colony of Jamestown, whose mysterious word "Croatoan" scrawled on a tree is the name of their new god. In the centuries since their disappearance, they have lived and bred underground after an early generation was raped by the Sheeda king, Melmoth. In a stroke of brilliance, Morrison concocts an army of zombie laborers who are the revived ancestors of Limbo Town residents, called "grundies," and possessing the general traits of longtime DC villain Solomon Grundy. Klarion, the quintessential small-town boy dreaming of a larger world, escapes upwards from Limbo Town to the subways of New York, where he almost meets the Guardian, and then spends some time in the surface world, known as Blue Rafters to his people, attracting the attention of his ancestor Melmoth, and setting the stage for Klarion to join the battle against the Sheeda.

Mister Miracle, like the Guardian, is a Jack Kirby character whom Morrison recast with an African American man instead of a white man. Shilo Norman was a youth serving as a minor character in Kirby's original stories, but in Seven Soldiers has grown up to adopt the identity, not as a superhero, but as a super celebrity escape artist. We see him at the top of his fame and renown, making his greatest escape ever from a miniature black hole, before things start to go wrong. We learn, and then he learns, that the people around him are the living embodiments of Darkseid and his cronies, living on Earth in human bodies. Darkseid tries to break Shilo Norman, but finds it more difficult than he imagined, and Shilo is still intact, a few lifetimes in alternate timelines later, and ready to fight Darkseid and his allies, the Sheeda.

Of all the Seven Soldiers, none is less enthusiastic about being a superhero than Alix Harrower. At the age of 27, Alix found out the hard way that her husband was living – at least in his own mind – a double, or perhaps triple, life. His attempt to give himself superpowers cost him all three of those lives, and gave Alix a super-hard metallic coating that she didn't want and couldn't undo. Thus, her husband's dream of imitating the Golden Age's Bulletman and Bulletgirl left her an unhappy widow who had no choice, medically, financially, or spiritually, but to begin a new existence as Bulleteer. As her miniseries ends, she is driving with her husband's psychotic cyber-girlfriend, ostensibly to a hospital, but unbeknownst to her, right into the middle of the battle with the Sheeda.

Frankenstein – or rather, Frankenstein's monster – is a cultural icon greatly predating superheroes. Morrison's version of Frankenstein, however, is a gun-toting badass who has been fighting crime for over a century, and is soon recruited by S.H.A.D.E. to fight as a government operative. On Mars, Frankenstein learns that he is immortal because his blood contains the essence of Lord Melmoth, which makes him the third major character in the story to owe his life to that villain. Less than grateful to Melmoth, Frankenstein leaves him to be eaten by monsters and excreted, still sentient, as their dung. Then, sent by S.H.A.D.E. one billion years into the future, he attacks the Sheeda capital and goes into the series finale mid-battle with Gloriana Tenebrae.

Seven Soldiers borrows several elements from Wein's JLA #100-102, including the fact that someone among the heroes must die at the end – a promo line echoed at the end of each miniseries' issue #4. In Wein's story, Crimson Avenger's sidekick Wing had died in the past and Red Tornado dies in the present. In Morrison's epic, it's Mister Miracle who dies, being summarily executed by Boss Dark Side after giving his life to rescue the ancient superhero Aurakles – a clever fusion on Morrison's part of the cosmic being Oracle from Wein's story (Oracle being highly reminiscent of Marvel Comics' The Watcher) and Greek mythology's Hercules. Fortunately, being the greatest escape artist ever, Shilo Norman escapes from the grave just as readily as he did from the black hole, and he's alive again in Final Crisis; it fits his showman shtick that we have no idea how he performed either of those impossible escapes.

In the battle of Manhattan, every member of the Seven Soldiers plus an ally or two plays his or her part, even though they never meet together as a group of seven in one place and one time, which is what allows them to avoid being detected as a threat by the Sheeda. And this is the essential, ironic, and heroic triumph of the story: Just as the Sheeda can attack our civilization so effectively because they launch a sneak attack and thereby avoid the Justice League, so the Seven Soldiers can attack the Sheeda so effectively, because the Seven Soldiers launch a sneak counterattack against them! In the years soon after September 11, this is nice spiritual salve for having, ourselves, suffered a sneak attack.

The finale is beautiful, chaotic choreography. Some of the Seven Soldiers have weapons drawn, Zatanna casts a spell to unite their actions, many spring into action though they have little idea what they are doing, and finally, Bulleteer is a weapon, and the Sheeda are overthrown, saving the DCU from them, for now. Darkseid skulks away to launch the threat in Final Crisis, which preserves the essential dynamic that runs through Seven Soldiers – nothing is ever really over, and a mystery string unites one team and one battle and one enemy to the next. The Seven Soldiers move on, the Sheeda move on (now led by Klarion), and the stage is set for the next big story. Morrison gave his Mister Miracle and Frankenstein significant supporting roles in Final Crisis, and Zatanna retains her stature as a fan favorite, but otherwise, the Seven Soldiers have remained obscure.

The story has a higher level, seen at its beginning and end as well as in the Zatanna and Guardian miniseries. As a means of explaining the mystery string that ties everything together, Morrison shows us a group of seven Time Tailors, the Unknown Men of Slaughter Swamp. These are comic book writers, and putting the writers themselves into the story is something Morrison has done in Animal Man and elsewhere. Though they all look alike – somewhat like Morrison himself – they represent all the writers over the years, certainly including Len Wein, Jerry Siegel, Mort Weisinger, and all the rest who number far more than seven. Morrison shows the Time Tailors doing what writers usually do – using their godlike powers to change characters, often to the characters' dismay. They make I, Spyder more interesting for this story, but doom him to an unpleasant fate. They ruin the Newsboy Army, giving them adult vices and killing most of them off. Zatanna manages to pop out of the story to interact with them directly, which helps her orient correctly for her place in the final battle, and they reward her by disposing cruelly of Zor in the final issue – as it is explained that Zor's vast powers are because he is really one of them, a Time Tailor who exists in the story itself.

Seven Soldiers is a triumph because Morrison capitalizes on its characters' statures as characters that are interesting within the DCU, but are obscure enough that he could do just about whatever he wanted with them. He ties Golden Age stories together with current-day big-time events and works his post-modernist magic into a sprawling 30-issue epic that flies in many different directions before all coming together at the end. Most of these characters are unlikely to headline again on a front cover anytime soon, if ever, and seen in that respect, Seven Soldiers is an epic and a mini-universe that had a definite beginning, middle, and end and is now over and done with. It showed that a respectably large audience will pay attention to obscure characters if their story is handled with care, even if that is not a potential that has not been realized again in the decade since Seven Soldiers ended.