John Woo, Garth Ennis Team Up – Bloodiest, Gunniest Comic Ever To Result?

To quickly sum up, John Woo came up with the concept for a comic, called 7 Brothers, and Garth Ennis got tagged to write it. What exactly does that mean for Woo’s involvement? Well, as Ennis has said, “I got a two-paragraph outline of the original Chinese legend and the broad strokes of the characters, and after that it was up to me.” Amusingly, it speaks volumes that the actual press release from Virgin Comics has one of Woo’s people saying, “We see creating SEVEN BROTHERS as a comic book first, which is in turn the perfect springboard to take this title into films and games.” Might want to try a little less corporate planning, and a litte more heart, guys.

But, despite the snide comments, I really do hope for the best for the book. Garth Ennis is a solid writer, and John Woo’s name should be something that brings legitimacy to the table. You never want a quality names like those being associated with crap. So here’s the news – If you missed the book when it first came out, today Virgin handed over the entire issue to Newsarama. And I’m definitely one of those that missed it, as I never even saw the first two issues show up at my local comic shop. Seriously, if even Virgin can’t buy any rack time at the comic shop, it’s time to ask – Has the buy-in to this industry gotten a little too high?

Having read the issue from Newsarama’s site, my early impressions are (aside from unfortunately poor file quality on the splash page) that the art can be quite beautifu. However, this seems mostly due to the colorists – The actual layout and design have plenty of stiffly posed characters, but other than that, the penciler’s work is serviceable. As for the plot, well, it’s your classic (or clichéd?) gather-the-team issue. While there’s some interesting (and some amusing) stuff going on, and some of the characters are pretty interesting (in that there’s a lot unknown about them); in the end there’s very little else to be said for the story. Maybe it would have been better to do a double-sized first issue? At least then the ‘gather-the-team’ plot device could have been finished, and we could have gotten more of the actual story – not to mention, we might have gotten to see more than one super-powerful individual use their powers. It was a nice moment, but when we have seven characters with those sort of powers, it would be nice if they could show us some of it, instead of just telling.