In pop culture, “putting the team together” is a concept as old as the culture itself and the medium in which it exists.
Classic films such as Seven Samurai or it’s American offspring, The Magnificent Seven put teams of men together to fight injustice. The Dirty Dozen does the same, as do more recent cinematic offerings, such as the Mission: Impossible franchise.
Comic books do it all the time, too. It seems that in every reboot, Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman are flipping through dossiers, deciding on the next iteration of the Justice League. The Suicide Squad puts a new team together after every major story arc, more often than not, as a means to fill out an active roster of characters after a bunch of C and D-Listers met their demise in the last storyline.
Now, putting together a team of disparate fictional and/or real, famous characters is another level up.
Alan Moore has done it, of course, to great acclaim, with his The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, seen in both print and film. Interestingly, writer and director Nicolas Meyer also successfully managed this literary feat decades earlier with his Sherlock Holmes and Sigmond Freud mash-up, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution along with other famous characters in his subsequent Holmes series of novels.
Today, the team-up of fiction and real life is blended once again in the grandiose swashbuckling adventure series, Seven Swords!
Written by the accomplished Evan Daugherty, who wrote the screenplays Snow White and The Huntsman, Divergent and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and realistically rendered in a pulpy cinematic style by Riccardo Mattina, Seven Swords celebrates the swashbuckling adventure and mystery of Alexandre Dumas’ mid-nineteenth century Musketeer, D’Artagnan. That character teams up with a host of other strange, alluring, notorious and notable adventure figures from fiction of the time and personas of the age, including Don Juan, Cyrano de Bergerac, Captain Blood and La Maupin.
All are famous. All are captivating. All are deadly with a sword.
Influenced as much by The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen as John Wick, Seven Swords tells a later life tale of the world-weary D’Artagnan, still out for revenge on the evil Cardinal Richelieu, who has turned to more sinister and supernatural means in his all-consuming quest for power. This forces the former Musketeer to put together his own team of disparate adventurers in order to stop the Cardinal’s unholy machinations.
What ensues is pulp heroism in all its unbridled glory!
If you’re a fan of historical literature, swashbuckling adventure and the age-old pop culture celebration of “putting the team together”, make the run to your local comic book shop today and pick up Seven Swords #1.
The team, after all, needs you!
