 Noteworthy Items:
This is the first time the Sheeda are mentioned in the series.
Who is Lil’ Hollywood? She is the only living member of the Newsboy Army alive. Many have speculated Gimmix. Turns out that Gimmix isn’t actually the DC character Merry the Girl of a 1000 Gimmics. Merry the Girl of 1000 Gimmicks is Merry Pemberton King. Gimmix is Jacqueline Pemberton. Now they could be the same person seeing as Merrys last name was Pemberton before marrying Henry King(Brain Wave). Possibly changing her first name and dropping the King after her disappearance. Merry was also the adoptive sister to the Star-Spangled Kid giving Merry a direct line to the original group. Merry didn’t have any sisters nor a daughter. It’s also been speculated that the 75 year old unnamed alcoholic from Zatanna #1 might be Lil’Hollywood.
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Mo’ Colley says in Sheeda tongue: Mmm… death. |
Seems the Sheeda might be hunting teams of seven. In the IC minis there’s mostly teams of six. Secret Six not counting Mokingbird, Shadowpact not including Black Alice(especially seeing as she doesn’t want a part of the battle), and in Rann/Thanagar War which team fluctutated rapidly with deaths and betrayals but was at it’s least five members and never seven for a lengthy period of time.
The time tailor bares some resemblance to Grant Morrison. Who is the Time Tailor? A traitor from the Seven Unknown Men of Slaughter Swamp? Why do they flee the Sheeda? Does this flashback tale take place before or after the events in Seven Soldiers #0?
Speculation as to if Morrison was stating, in certain scenes, how creators now take innocent characters and taint them. Possible swipe at Identity Crisis which Morrison admittedly didn’t like? The knowledge that Chop Suzi was pregnant at the time of her death could support that theory.
Captain 7 might have sexually assaulted, or something worse to, Chop Suzi as alluded to on page 17. However she dies before we hear her side of the story. The kids may have been pitted against one another by the Time Tailor.
From the CBR forums: The Time Tailor's treatment of the 7 kids was echoed in advance by Melmoth's treament of his 7 kids ("the Deviant Ones"), representative of so many others in his case of course, in Klarion #3. The Time Tailor forces them to try on "special clothes, suits you'll wear when your older" just as Melmoth tries to represent his enslavement of his kids as part of the natural process of becoming an adult (which, incidentally, brings us back once again to the theme of false distortions of the normal cycle of maturation). The Time Tailor's idea of facing the real world is shown in the series of panels in which we see the innocents subjected to various depressing or unsavory fates, just as Melmoth preaches to Billy that being a man means a life of hard labor in the gold mines (like the "Gold place," Cyrus Gold's Slaughter Swamp cabin, where the 6 kids meet the Time Tailor) .
Love the way that Jake broke free from the pattern at the end and started writing his own script. Everything was set up to follow a certain course - Ed was to sacrifice himself, one more victim of the Time Tailor's false representation of reality, and Jake was to somehow muddle on. But Jake rejects this fatalism, maybe because he isn't a kid, he's an adult who's had the opportunity to reach maturity via a relatively undistorted path, and isn't as susceptible to the kind of mental and spiritual domination the innocent 6 kids and the dog were subjected to (and through the fictional lense maybe we can see how this kind of treatment of innocent minds is truly one of the worst crimes its possible to commit; wonder if any advertising or MacDonald's execs read this issue).
By rejecting Ed's scenario - which really isn't Ed's but the Time Tailor's, from this POV - he rejects the false image of reality that's been imposed on Ed, and begins an attempt to become a truly free agent. He decides Ed can still contribute, more that he's vital tot he task ahead, whatver it might turn out to be in detail (notice that "free agent" in this case doesn't imply adolescent illusions of complete self-sufficiency).
More annotations from LITG I have discovered make me question a certain scene in Shining Knight #2 and Zatanna #2.
"The end of the Queen of Terror's reign with a spear that never was thrown" - riff on Longinus' Spear? The Dolorous Blow to the Fisher King in the Morte D'Arthur? Again, just like Spyder, Gloriana knows the circumstances of her doom - are the 'villains' fated to lose? Have their 'suits' already been decided, just like those of the 'heroes'?
The Tailor says to the Newsboy Army, 'Give me that silly outsize TOP HAT you wear, Ali. I'LL look good in that.' ...and so perhaps it is the Time Tailor, not Ali, that appears in Shining Knight #2 on the bench next to Justin, or in Cass' magic shop in Zatanna #3? Or perhaps Ali Ka-Zoom becomes his fiction suit? |
