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Grant Morrison: Master & Commander Introduction Aside from Grant's Vertigo mini-series he will also be involved with some unnamed DC Universe projects. One of those recently leaked is the upcoming Seven Soldiers series. Here, we elaborate a little on just who the Seven Soldiers are. You've mentioned that, in addition to your creator-owned work for DC, you'll also be tackling a number of DCU characters. Is DC pushing for more revivals of old properties or are you more drawn towards some of the company's mainstays? After finishing New X-Men and fleeing from the tight confines of the Xavier school and its heated emotions, I had a mindfucking headstorm of new ideas last August and pitched DC a massive project called SEVEN SOLDIERS intended to re-build the 'superhero' concept from the ground up once again, for my own amusement and that of my readers. Why not? What the fuck else are we to do with 'the superhero concept' these days? I realised that there wasn't much I could do to radically alter any of the existing DC 'icons', using my new techniques, so I turned to the back catalogue and was allowed to 're-invent' several obscure super-non-entities, in an attempt to prove that all characters have in them the spark of franchise greatness - even if its only the name. I'm splicing up a few NEW and memetically-modified genre cuttings here and stretching the notion of what a 'superhero' comic can be into some more diverse areas, I hope. It's been great fun. I've developed a 'modular' storytelling technique for the new work, which I think is quite new. This is a large and ambitious project, as you'll see when it's announced. And I'm very grateful that DC is so open to new ideas and so willing to take a chance on what are essentially ALL-NEW characters using all-old names. I've already written about half of it but I don't think it'll be out until early 2005. Keep an eye on news for details etc Of course, I do also have big plans for some DC 'mainstays' before and after that but that's all I can say while the marketing departments prep their summer ad campaigns. When you say you're trying to stretch the idea of what a superhero comic can be into more diverse areas are you referring to other genres or niches? Such as a romance or mystery title which just happens to feature these characters? Or some higher storytelling technique or purpose? It's a little bit like that, so no need to apologise – the universe of the SEVEN SOLDIERS is a dense and intricate tapestry of stories woven by the lives of a group of ground-level super people – the sort of characters who can’t get into the JLA, who can’t get gigs in the Fifth Dimension and can only dream of one day saving the world. This is the DC Universe seen from the grass roots and the bottom up, from a strata of existence far below the glamorous world of lunar hideouts, secret headquarters and global press junkets. Men and women with weird powers but generally no strong motivation or qualifications to fight crime or help people – the way most of us would be in their situation. The Seven Soldiers characters all begin as entertainers, refugees from bizarre cultures or working joes trying to make a buck using the unusual abilities fate has landed them with. They all wind up going through life-changing or life-ending experiences, of course, which bring them and us to some of the limits of what we mean by a ‘superhero’. When I had all the raw pitch material laid out for SEVEN SOLDIERS, my nose for conceptual glue drew me to DCs short-lived but fascinating 'Weird Adventure' phase of the early 70s – those gothic romance books with girls running in long dresses, bearing flickering lanterns across haunted moors, Kirby’s disturbing ‘Spirit World’ and ‘In The Days of The Mob’ books, Alex Nino’s pirate strips, Fleischer’s ‘Death Wish’ iteration of the Spectre, ‘Black Orchid’, ‘Jonah Hex’, ‘The Vigilante’, ‘Doctor 13’ and all those odd little stories of mad swamis, ghost-breakers, haunted mesas, doomed adventurers and creepy mansions – which, although it was a wave I mostly hated at the time, now seemed ripe for reconsideration and re-appraisal. I saw a chance to pitch a new aesthetic off the back of the strange feelings I got from this discarded bric-a-brac, so yes, there’s a definite attempt to take the SEVEN SOLDIERS material and infuse it with some of that bizarre diversity, re-seeding some old and worn-out genre pastures with memetically-modified corn in the GM style. Hard-hitting modernist epic super-drama ensues with pirates of a very unusual kind, psychological sci-fi, ‘Lord of The Rings’ fantasy in modern day Los Angeles, Puritan goth horror, a talking bloody horse and just about everything else I could think of. A big new range of super- flavours that has something for everyone, all-new kinds of thrills and not an old-style ‘superhero’ in the bunch. Could you tell us more about this 'modular' storytelling technique? If I were to guess I might veer towards lots of cuts, or maybe instances reverberating from one title to the next? Each issue is stand alone, each mini-series can be read complete and the whole thing assembles like a jigsaw into one huge epic with multipie, criss-crossing storylines, ranging across a swathe of genres and human emotions. Imagine it all floating before you with a gigantic ensemble cast of superhumans, monsters, villains and ordinary folk and an extinction level threat to the wrold The high concept for the Seven Soldiers team themselves is a killer, as they say in the Force. There’ll be more details from DC shortly I believe. Of the seven characters chosen to be the soldiers, had you gone into the project knowing exactly who you wanted or was it a matter of looking through the DC catalogue to see who fit the project? It grew organically. I had this rough idea in my notebook a couple of years ago – Dan Raspler asked me what I’d do with the JLA if I came back and I had no idea at all, which kind of nagged at the back of my mind until it came out as drawings and notes. My original intention was to do a team comic called JL8 which would be a Justice League book with no big icon characters at all. I figured, however, that if the Authority could work instantly with a bunch of new characters, wouldn't it be possible to take a bunch of old characters, polish them up,‘re-imagine’ their origins, powers, look and motivations and pass them off as if they were new guys too. Additionally, as a way of giving the JL8 roster a hidden backbone of familiarity, I based the whole thing on the classic membership of the Avengers and went looking for obscure DC character analogues to loosely fit the bill - Mister Miracle as Thor, the Demon as the Hulk, the Guardian as Captain America, the Enchantress as the Scarlet Witch, the Spider as Hawkeye and so on...as the project developed and changed beyond recognition from all this, a bunch of characters dropped out (my version of the Demon which I loved, was knocked back for being too far removed from Kirby’s original. It was a good high concept and I’ll rework the draft scripts somewhere else I expect. Then there was MANHUNTER – which blended DC’s Manhunter concept with J’onn J’onnz, Manhunter from Mars to pleasing effect – which has now been replaced by the much more more powerful and amusing FRANKENSTEIN comic, derived in name only from Mike Kaluta’s ‘Spawn of Frankenstein’ series) and others were drafted in to occupy the more complex roles of SEVEN SOLDIERS – an altogether more ambitious attempt to do fast, large scale narrative adventures. Big Western manga. The only characters in the upcoming SEVEN SOLDIERS series left over from that original JL8 concept are The Guardian, Mister Miracle and the Spider, who’s there but in a smaller and very different role. There’s a monstrous regiment of players in this series – apart from the main seven, I resurrected and completely recreated another ten DC archive franchises plus a squad of new guys and some of the best and scariest villains I’ve ever come up with, I think. I’m very excited about this. It’s 30 issues – including two double-sized bookends – which is almost three years of comics stories squeezed down into a one year-long microwave blast of pure adrenalin and intelligence. Hopefully it should provide a very diverse, unusual and absorbing read. One character you've chosen, Mister Miracle has actually been slated for a Wildstorm Superhero revival for some time now, will their series affect your title? Or vice versa? No idea. I haven't heard anything about this so it certainly hasn't impacted the scripts I've already submitted. My Mister Miracle isn't the Scott free character and the whole approach to the New Gods elements of the story is very different. Introduction
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