To be perfectly clear regarding my thoughts on the actual issue/series: I don’t think the comic is that confusing, and I think it’s possible to “decode” most of it and figure it out. But it’s not emotionally satisfying at all. Characters are given random motivations and meet with random fates; the story is too compressed to breathe; plot devices and dei ex machinis are desperately strewn across the comic because there’s just no space to tell the story any other way. The issue here isn’t one of comprehension but one of connection. I can work out the story but it leaves me utterly cold.

I wrote up a pretty extensive review on my blog, which breaks the issue down and defines its place in the overall saga: http://thoughtsonstuff.blogspot.com/2006/11/seven-soldiers-1.html

Therefore, the importance of the writer in this writer/artist collaboartion is less so than in many other writer artist collaborations.

Although I agree with your overall point; I think Seven Soldiers held and tied together very, very well.

With all due respect, Bri, based on your demonstrated love of the Morrison Kool-Aid, I can’t see you ever having doubted a Morrison claim.

It’s an especially big surprise that they read that way after I had read each mini-series on its own already, yet when read together, the way that he manages to tell complete 4-issue stories while telling a much larger story, it’s really quite surprising and remarkable.

The amount of planning must have been immense.

William’s strength is panel size, placement, how they fit together and look on the page.

Yes, Williams is a very good artist.

Character design is a far cry from laying out and penciling an entire comic. By your logic, Steve Ditko has drawn every Spider-man comic ever made.

It certainly precludes people from claiming Spider-Man to be Stan Lee’s brainchild.

Unlike here, where Seven Soldiers is Morrison’s brainchild.

With all due respect, Bri, based on your demonstrated love of the Morrison Kool-Aid, I can’t see you ever having doubted a Morrison claim. ;)

And Seven Soldiers was very uniquely Williams.

It was completely different than the design work done in the other Minis. Or anything else Morrison’s ever penned.

I’d be surprised if Morrison had much to do with the way the book is arranged in that regard, at least for the parts that weren’t a newspapaer or a Little Nemo comic.

Character design is a far cry from laying out and penciling an entire comic. By your logic, Steve Ditko has drawn every Spider-man comic ever made.

Same with any of the other mini-series. If you dug Ryan Sook’s artwork more than Morrison’s story, go right ahead.

But Morrison’s Seven Soldiers is just that.

We’re much closer to seeing how the artist sees the world than the writer. ESPECIALLY in the case of a guy like Morrison who lets the artist have fairly free-reign.

Morrison specifically did not give his artists fairly free reign on Seven Soldiers.

He wrote Seven Soldiers as about Alan Moore-esque as you can get.

Now I don’t know if he uses this approach on his other comics, but for Seven Soldiers, he wrote the same way Alan Moore normally does, which is extremely detailed full-script.

In fact, I think Williams did more design work on Promethea than he did on Seven Soldiers. Says Williams about Promethea – “And what’s amazing, I find, working with Alan, he will give me a description that’s three pages of text for one or two panels – it’s this amazingly long and detailed thing but then quite often, at the end, he’ll say, ‘But if you see it differently, go for it.’ So he’s very open. I’d say about 70 per cent [of the visual design work] is me, and 30 per cent is Alan.”

While here, Morrison drew the visual designs of each character himself!

Wow. Completely disagree.

We’re much closer to seeing how the artist sees the world than the writer. ESPECIALLY in the case of a guy like Morrison who lets the artist have fairly free-reign.

I never said that the story was Williams’s; I just said that far too much credit was being given to the writer at the artist’s expense. In the particular case of Seven Soldiers #1 the issue works best on a visual level, with Williams doing some absolutely stunning work. The plot itself is cluttered and rushed, and doesn’t leave much room for characterization or resolution. What makes the comic as charming as it is, however, is the elegance and flair with which Williams manages to pull off the story’s visual tricks (compare this issue to Kubert’s work on Batman so far, where we’re also seeing Morrison-written visual gags, but with far less effective execution). It obviously takes a writer and an artist (well, several artists; don’t get me started on inkers and colorists) to make a comic; it’s rather bizarre that something like auteur theory would come to settle on a medium as dominated by collaboration as comic books.

I hope some people continue on with some of the ideas. I wasn’t wild about Mister Miracle but I loved the hip hop take on the New Gods. And the connection between Klarion and the Grundys are interesting and I’d loved to see that explored. I would love to see Bulleteer and Shining Knight regular series.

And they’ve got to do an Absolute Edition.

Yeah, he didn’t even really try to bring the whole thing together in a cohesive whole.

Did… did you read the same comic I did? Because I thought it was great and beautiful and tied everything together.