I've just finished reading the final trade in Grant Morrison's brilliant, infuriating, and mind-blowing interpretation of DC hero team 7 Soliders of Victory. The many-issue story (collected in four trades) tells the interleaved tales of seven bizarre, complicated saviors-of-the-world who don't know each other -- and who must overcome personal demons to fight a race of creatures called the Sheeda who want to consume and enslave humanity. Some of the soldiers are themselves otherworldly, such as Klarion the Witch Boy and the Arthurian knight Sir Ystina. Others are rather ordinary. The Bulleteer gained her impenetrable skin when her husband's fetish for superhero costumes went terribly wrong. Zatanna may have magic powers, but she's also a group therapy junkie with a crappy ex-boyfriend.
As I watched last night's episode of *Heroes *-- one of the season's best, despite the prominence of ever-more-boring supervillain Sylar -- I kept thinking of Morrison's 7 Soliders. I was reminded of it as I drifted in choppy shifts between each hero's story, and as I contemplated the strange way the heroes seem to work together despite not knowing each other, as well as the time-travel apocalypse subplot. More on the latest Heroes, plus SPOILERS, below the fold.
Though I would never claim that Heroes is as good as 7 Soldiers, I think the fact that I could fruitfully compare them means that *Heroes *is finally coming into its own as a good comic book story.
What appealed about last night's episode was the growing sense that the heroes are forming different kinds of alliances with each other. I like the teaming-up of Matt (psychic cop) with explosion boy and the woman who is the human wireless router. Also, the dynamic between Christopher Eccleson's invisible man and Peter was terrific -- for the first time, Peter became an interesting character. I'm sure we'll see more of the invisible guy, despite the fact that he stormed off, because Eccleston has signed to do several episodes.
Then there are the ambiguities in Claire's relationship with her father Bennet. These may drive her to ally with Peter and Invisible Guy, or at the very least to run away with Matt's posse. Don't expect all-out war with dad, though. Jack Coleman, who plays Bennet, told SciFi Wire:
Yeah, you know, one of those domestic issues where dad gets his mysterious mutant assistant to wipe mom's brain until she's in a coma?
Hiro, too, was much more satisfying in this episode than he's been for a while. The cutsey panda thing was getting to be too much, as Entertainment Weekly pointed out last week, and sending Hiro out on his own is a good solution. Like Peter, Hiro needs a serious infusion of backbone. I'm not sure if the soul patch and samurai sword are the best solution, but "dark Hiro" is sounding good after weeks of "cuddly Hiro."
I will reserve all my criticisms for the continuing Sylar plotline. Currently, Sylar is trying to seem menacing by pretending to be one of the heroes he's killed and tagging along with Mohinder on his hero-finding mission. Unfortunately we've seen scary serial killers for years in movies and TV and they're just boring. Are we supposed to be intrigued by the idea that he wants to murder people? Eating their brains is pretty cool, but the ratio of brain-eating to lame efforts at emoting is really small here. Sylar is so one-dimensional that he makes the worst possible foil to Mohinder, who already has the "I'm pretty but what else am I" problem. Basically, watching the two of them is gratifying only because they're both hot. But everybody on Heroes is hot -- this is television, ferchrissakes. So why do we care about them? Is the lust to kill an interesting motivation for anybody? What about the quest for an undefined form of power? Nope.
Sylar is no Magneto, whose power-mongering at least has a political purpose and interesting motives. Sylar's basically a warmed-over Hannibal Lecter. And have you seen the new Hannibal movie? Stinky as shit. Let's give this guy a personality transplant or get a better supervillain. In the meantime, I'm looking forward to the fallout from Isaac shooting Simone now that Peter has gotten more spooky.
