Title : Siege at Century Hollow
Writer : Grant Morrison
Artist : Cameron Stewart
Colorist : Moose Baumann
Letterer : Pat Brosseau
Editor : Peter Tomasi
The Seven Soldiers narrative continues, as Jake is called to an emergency at a theme park populated by robots.
The first few pages take the tired old e-mail that went through the statistics of ‘if the world was only populated by 100 people’ and attempt to run with it into a cogent story idea.
Grant Morrisons puts forward the idea of a theme park populated by robots that is run on the basis of ‘if the world was only inhabited by 100 people’. In a shock development, things go pear-shaped, and all of a sudden I’m picturing Yul Brynner from ‘Westworld’ intoning ‘Draw. Draw. Draw’. If you don’t remember that movie, then you’re too young. Heh.
At any rate, their is a quasi-terrorist-shootout situation, occasionally interspersed with Jake’s memories of a conversation / confrontation with the woman closest to his heart.
I’m spending some time summarising the plot here, because I’m in several minds about this review. On one hand, Morrison certainly has ideas to spare. However, the execution is a little muddled, and more so than in the other three ‘Seven Soldiers’ minis that have surfaced thus far. After a mind-blowingly bizarre tale of pirates on the New York subway, this story seems almost self-contained in its weirdness. It further doesn’t seem to link particularly well to the rest of the series, while the cliff-hanger is certainly fascinating, but also frustrating.
The character dealt with in the cliff-hanger was hardly fleshed out in detail previously, and this revelation is interesting on an intellectual rather than emotional level.
The art is perfectly fine on this issue, although I do miss Simone Bianchi from the Shining Knight mini.
This is perhaps the most wildly inventive of the Seven Soldiers, but confusing ain’t always good.
