Grant Morrison’s SEVEN SOLDIERS OF VICTORY: VOLUME TWO is a tricky beast, telling the middle of four of the seven heroes’ individual stories. (For those who came in late: Read our review of the first volume here so we don’t have to rehash.)

The story of Klarion the Witchboy gets better, now that he’s brought into our world (at least I think it’s our world, even if his uncanny resemblance to SNL’s Chris Kattan (see Exhibit A) continues to creep me out. There doesn’t appear to be much story for Shining Knight, but each page of his is a wonder to look at, even when it gets into horrific gore. Girl magician Zatanna’s tale grows absolutely stale, but luckily her deal will be wrapped up in VOLUME THREE. As with VOLUME ONE, the best pages belong to The Guardian, the newspaper hero, but even his narrative hits a bit of an inactive roadblock.

It all alternates from great to baffling, and that’s the problem. If the stories really do thread together to form a whole – from this point, all I can gather is that it has something to do with giant spiders and a talking baby – Morrison might have done us all a favor by letting us in just a little bit as to what the hell is going on. You can only withhold the cake for so long without throwing us some crumbs. This should have been released as one big book rather than four separate trades; I can only assume the wait between the monthly issues was equally as frustrating. –Rod Lott

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