http://www.the-trades.com/column.php?columnid=3522

ThugIt, you can relax now.

Oh thank god! I really hoped that DC would have enough sense not to do it, but after Knightfall I lost faith in their commonsense.

Who are The Seven Soldiers?

The Seven Unknown Men of Slaughter Swamp have created two sets of Seven Soldiers to stave off an attack from the forces of the "Sheeda", and interdimensional threat that intends to wipe out civilisation in a "harrowing". The first group was defeated (and supposedly killed) by the Sheeda, so the Unknown Men appointed the second set of soldiers without their knowledge and without any of them ever meeting. They are all fighting the Sheeda threat in their own ways, from a different side of things (some aren't even aware they are doing it).

The failed Soldiers:

Vigilante I
The Wip II
I, Spyder (Spider II's brother)
Boy Blue
Gimmix
Dyno-mite Dan
An Unknown Member who refused to join the group

The current Soldiers:

Zatanna- former JLAer disgraced by her involvement in events revealed in Identity Crisis, currently dealing with the loss of her powers after excessive use, and psychological strain.

Shinning Knight - Time lost Knight from the original Avalon dating back thousands of years (the Arthur cycle repeats itself through history - explaining how the Golden Age Shinning Knight can also exist, as he's from a later cycle)

Klarion the Witch Boy - runaway from "Limbo Town", the lost colony of Roanoke, skilled magician brought up in a bizarre Purtian community, trying to cope with life in the "surface world". Seemingly no connection to the original

Manhattan Guardian "Living Masthead" of the Guardian newspaper, hired to fight crime and make a story out of it at the same time. No relation to the earlier Guardian (the paper bought his trademark).

Mr. Miracle Shiloh Norman, an understudy of Mr. Miracle I, has decided to retake the name and embark on a commercial carreer as an escape artist.

Bulleteer Not much known yet, apparently caught in an accident that turns her skin metallic.

Frankenstein Frankenstein's monster, who keeps going by harvesting body parts to continously revitalise himself. Currently he has the arc-angel Michael's arm. Apparently, his story will take place on Mars.

Wow, I hadn't been reading Seven Soldiers, but those sound awesome!

Frankenstein sounds crazy. What are the names of the comics they've been in? Is it called "The Seven Soldiers"? When did the first seven's story happen and where was it published in?

Thanks for you input.

Each character has it's own 4 issue mini titled "Seven Soldiers:<Character name>" (e.g. Seven Soldiers: Mister Miracle). There are also two bookend pieces (Seven Soldiers #0 and Seven Soldiers Special #1) and the first three issues of JLA:Classified introduced a few of the villains for the series.

One issue of the mega series comes out roughly every two weeks (this week is a Shinning Knight issue). Shinning Knight, Klarion, Zatanna and Guardian are all getting to their fourth issue, while Mr. Miracle, Bulleteer and Frankenstein will start in the next few months.

Since they never meet, each mini can be read on it's own reasonably well, but there are several characters and events from one series that invariably leak over to another making reading the whole thing one large, coherent story. (back issues should be pretty easy to track down).

I'm enjoying it far more than the Infinite Crisis stuff so far. It's really fun and intriguing.

It is - go buy the mini's - now!

Seriously, anything I could say would sound like hype but in this case the Seven Soldiers goodies deserve it. I haven't been disappointed yet with a single bit of it (well, maybe the fate of the original Vigilante but that's no mark on the story quality).

It should be noted that Grant Morrison is the writer for all of the SevenSoldier books.

Im getting very concerned about DC's new restructure. Don't get me wrong Seven Soldiers is "OK" but not good enough to carry the company. I don't see DC dropping a lot of their flagship titles but if it were to happen I'd be hard pressed to restart again. Couldn't they get a hint from that debacle that Marvel did a few years back? A loss of/change of DC core characters will drop me off of reading/collecting comics, no matter how stellar the writers are. I like the status quo. I like the positive feeling I get from DC comics compared to other companies' despair and loss of hope feeling I get from their comics.

I know the guys you mentioned, but the 7 Soldiers of Victory as I remember them are:

Vigilante
Star Spangled Kid
Stripesy
Shining Knight
Crimson Avenger
Green Arrow
Speedy

- I was a little disappointed by the absence of the Crimson Avenger & Vigilante. It seems to me that they would have fit in nicely w/ what Morrison is doing w/ the new group.

While it's nice to see her in her own mini, I don't see the need to have Zatanna & Mr Miracle (not Scott Free?!) on this team.

"I decided to tie as much as I could into continuity as well, which turned into an insane kind of Geoff Johns/James Robinson strand running through the narrative, which fully integrates my seven soldiers into the history of all the previous characters and reveals an 'Identity Crisis' style secret at the heart of the Golden Age team. Most of that stuff is in Bulleteer issue 2."

From Morrison's interview about the project at the Pulse. Actually, the whole thing is pretty informative:

Pulse Seven Soldier's Interview