This is the first of the new DC 52 releases I read this week. I'm not familiar with the characters but I liked what Paul Cornell did with Captain Britain a few years back, so I thought I'd give it a show. Cornell lost me last week with Storm Watch. However he's won me over with the first issue of Demon Knights.
This is a fun fantasy comic. The art is gorgeous and fits perfectly with the feel of the book.
The story seems a bit disjointed. It's easy to get the gist of the story but at times feels, like there's a page missing. However, it still moves along and it's easy to catch up.
The main characters are Jason Blood/Etrigan and Madame Xanadu. They were together for the fall of Camelot some 90 years earlier and have been traveling companions since. There's some interesting character elements in this. Jason Blood and Xanadu are lovers but not all is what it seems. Etrigan doesn't really give a crap about much as it seems. There's also appearances by some other characters such as Vandal Savage and Shining Knight.
There's some creepy stuff too. The antagonist of the book, the hordes of the questing queen, bond a demon to a baby to get insight into what they're after. So you've got a creepy baby. Unfortunately the host is too week for the demon and explodes. The art itself is not graphic or gory but it's disturbing nonetheless.
The story reads quick but is fun and I can see the potential this has.
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The Magnificient Seven in a dark ages fantase setting, starring some familiar C and D listers is a great avenue to take superhero stories down. This issue set things up without intrusive old-fashioned info-dump dialogue.
There's humour and intrigue in how the characters relate to each other. Notice how Mme X doesn't want Etrigan to appear and then takes a different tack when he does show up. I think we'll be strung along for a while guessing where she reall stands.
I'm seeing a huge Secret Six influence here, in how just about all the characters are so ambiguous in their alignment.
I was glad to see the Shining Knight appear. A series set in the past like this can gain much from the DCnU reboot, as the 'future' meetings between these characters that we've alread read won't reference the history we are about to see unfold. Still I'm wondering how the ystin we see here fits in with the Seven Soldiers version. She jumped straight from distant pre-history to the 21st Century. Hopefull, she will be shown to have time-travelled back after the events of 7S. ystin's cross-dressing was handled very sensibly in 7S, so I can't say I like how Cornell is handling it here. For one thing, the character is very young to be used in such a sexualised manner.
Still, this is the long-awaited test of how the 7S characters might be used b other writers and they will have to be able to work flexibly if they are to have that extended life.
They've had to radically alter Vandal Savage to make him fit here. He's always been lawful evil (in D&D parlance) in the previous versions, but here he's presented as chaotic neutral. I'm not sure I like that take on him.
Other than that, I'm interested enough to stick around for a while.
Figserello said:
I noticed that about Savage too. Someone with such a long life might indeed fluctuate in his 'alignment', and this does give Cornell some flexibility as we have to figure out the strength of his loyalty to the team.
To expand a little on 'Sir Ystin' and her cross-dressing - Aside from the creators adopting the whole 'staring and sniggering' approach to those who don't conform to society's norms, the character is very young to be used in such a sexualised manner (or was the last time we saw her). If Cornell has aged her (which he probably hasn't), then he's thrown out a lot of her possible personal arc as she grew and matured.
I did like the line from an English (ie Anglo-Saxon heh heh!) writer that the Celts are weird and to just smile and wave at them to be safe...
What I hope this series manages to get across in passing is how tough and miserable much of life in Post-Roman Europe must have been. I don't want the series to be about that, but it'll just come across as a wishy washy Hallmark Channel version of the Dark Ages if we don't see some of this. This is being sold as 'Game of Thrones' for comics readers, and from what I hear of that series of books/TV show, it's not the Hallmark/Disney version of pre-industrial society.
That's one of the criteria I'll be using to decide if I'll stick with this series or not. At the moment I think I'm on board for the next issue.
If they make us feel affection for him in this time, but also show he'll revert to how he's been traditionally shown, it will add a nuance to his character similar to what James Robinson did with Solomon Grundy in Starman.
Savage is a very strong concept, that I'm not sure has ever been used to his full potential. He is the evil that men do, going back to our first beginnings.
I noticed recently that he turns up in a lot of big event crossovers, albeit in minor roles.
I'm conflicted myself about how far this reboot should be in effect. On the one hand I'd love to see the creators freed from the shackles of all that continuity - (Rucka has cast Vandal as the original Cain, for instance, which made for a good story that one time, but restricts how the character can be handled going forward).
On the other hand, for Morrison's Seven Soldiers characters at least, and probably with loads of other exceptions, I want to see great conceptions of good characters honored and developed, rather than just cast aside.
This 7S clause makes me a bit of a hypocrite, I know, but to be fair those characters only got that one brief flash of life and had so much potential for more adventures that weren't realised. As the reboot takes shape more fully there's going to be a lot of moaning about certain characters being rebooted from scratch, but in most cases, those characters will have had unbearably long and convoluted backstories, and their arcs would long ago have been completed and reversed several times. Those iterations of the characters had their time in the sun. I'm looking forward to the Seven Soldiers characters getting theirs, assuming it will be Morrisons iterations of these characters.
This Sir Ystin is quite different, just going by first impressions. :-(
I recognize that I could be completely wrong, but I've gotten the impression that Morrison (as opposed to someone like Alan Moore) doesn't give a fig what's done with his work-for-hire creations once he's told the tale he created them for.
Figserello said:
In this case I couldn't give a fig (eh?) for Morrison's wishes. They were good characters and they had such a short flash of life, that I'd like to see more of them. Part of what Morrison did, ok perhaps merely as an intellectual exercise for himself, was to write most of those 4-part minis as set-ups and 'story bibles' for ongoing series, and for the characters to enrich the DCU going forward.
In terms of representation and character variety and range of stories, the Seven Soldiers did enrich the DCU and showed that there were alternatives to the narrow range of stories that modern superhero stories tend to tell. I'd say the DCU can't afford to let them lie fallow. It desperately needs to extend its range, representation etc, so why reinvent the wheel when Morrison has made such a good start with these characters?
Different strokes, and all that.
Well, the DCU desperately needs some characters with entertaining modern premises at any rate...
As I said above, if they are truly good characters for use in a shared universe, they will have to stand up to being interpreted differently by different creators. I did like Morrison's 7S, but for the characters to survive I'l have to deal with them being handled differently. Whether Morrison's interations of these characters will have a life beyond 'the tale he created them for' is about to be so tested...
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