Seven Brothers #1

Written by Garth Ennis

Art by Jeevan Kang

Covers by Yoshitaka Amano or Greg Horn

Garth Ennis is one hell of a busy writer. He's something of a Punisher script factory, churning out the Marvel monthly and throwing in minis and one-shots on Frank Castle whenever inspiration strikes. For DC's WildStorm imprint, he's currently got three series going—Battler Britton, A Man Called Kev, The Boys—and is about to add another, the Midnighter solo book.

Somehow, he still found time to work on this brand-new series from Virgin Comics' "Director's Cut" line. Or, more likely, he made time to work on it, as it's created by John Woo (whose name appears over the title), and Ennis is apparently a huge Woo fan. Hell, his Hitman series featured a character that was a walking homage to Woo's Hong Kong work.

If Ennis sometimes seems in danger of spreading himself too thin—I'm a fan, and even I can admit that The Boys is no Preacher, and A Man Called Kev no Hitman—he brought his A game to this project.

It's never been clear what the person credited as a "creator" in Virgin's books does exactly, so it's hard to say how much of the book Woo is responsible for, but it does gather a group of rather manly-man hero-types together, the sorts of characters that would be just as common in a Woo film as they'd be in an Ennis comic.

We open with a tale of 15th century China, which reveals that the Chinese not only beat Columbus and the rest of Europe to the New World, they beat them to every corner of the world, by sending out a huge fleet of ships that mapped the entire globe and spread Chinese culture around it, bringing back elements of the cultures they visited. And then the entire endeavor was all but erased from history.

Flash forward to today, when a mysterious woman with a mysterious power (or at least some hardcore mastery of hypnosis) is gathering seven men from all around the world. Six of them she lures to her with a $50,000 check and a promise of another just like it; the other is a wannabe pimp named "Double-Double" who is in the middle of being beaten down by his own prostitutes when she intervenes and adds him to the group.

If these are the seven brothers referred to in the title, it's a metaphorical thing, as they come from just about every major race, ethnicity and corner of the globe. Six of the seven have also, at one time or another, experienced a nascent "superpower," of the sort that the seven brothers of an old (and real) Chinese legend have.

The art by Jeevan Kang is, typical of Virgin comics, pretty great, and the depiction of the history lesson at the beginning particularly so, with Kang and co-colorist S. Sundarakannan giving the scene a painterly look.

Like all Virgin launches, this is a somewhat slow start, but, it's much less slow than all the others, and is definitely the most promising of the number one's I've read.

The cover, by Japanese illustrator Yoshitaka Amano, is typical of Virgin covers in that it's unclear what it has to do with the insides, and that you'll hardly care, because it's such a nice piece of art. I'm not sure why they even bothered with a Greg Horn variant; Horn's a fine artist, no doubt, but Amano comic covers are so rare and so awesome, who could pass this up for yet another Horn cover?

Rating – 8