Review: Seven to Eternity, Vol. 1: The God of Whispers

Seven to Eternity, Vol. 1: The God of Whispers by Rick Remender
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I enjoyed Kurt Busiek’s Autumnlands enough to give this one a shot, thinking that one graphic novel fantasy success might mean another. Otherwise, I doubt I’d have picked up something that looked so earnest and brooding.

Our bad guy here, known alternately as the God of Whispers or the Mud King, becomes increasingly a fantasy world version of Donald Trump. He’s risen to power on a combination of selfishness and fear. He has the capacity to see a person’s deepest desire, especially when that desire comes at the price of harming others. He incites hatred – in one later sub-plot he’s destroyed an egalitarian community by stoking a sense of outsiders and immigrants as the cause of a sudden plague – and he is a master of negotiation. Once you hear his “deal,” he has a hold on you. Even if you attempt to decline his offer, the damage is done. You’ve seen your own most selfish side; you’re partway toward a seduction that depends upon indifference to others and an elevated sense of your own importance to the world.

As far as I can tell, the original issues of this came out during the Presidential campaign, and the later issues (where the Trump echoes are clearer) may have come out even after the election. In any case, it isn’t fair to claim Remender is writing as a Resist figure, but his sympathies are clear: he doesn’t like bullies.

To Remender’s credit, he’s more interested in the figures opposing such a tyrant than in the tyrant himself. The core of that resistance is Adam, the father-figure in a clan of “Mozaks,” or mutant magic-users who stand as the only threat to the tyrant. In the opening scene, he watches his own father – seemingly the most powerful figure never to bow down – killed in a battle to preserve the rest of the family. With the family then weakened, Adam, who’s dying of a mysterious disease, plots to pledge his loyalty in exchange for the safety of his own wife and children.

Then, at the last moment it seems, a handful of other Mozaks rise up and topple the Mud King. The titular seven behind that revolt then have to go on a quest to destroy him, knowing that killing him outright would result in the deaths of the many thousands he’s compromised.

All that’s a mouthful, of course, and the handful of other reviews I’ve read do talk about the confusion of the plot. I’m willing to forgive that, seeing it as an admirable ambition, but it’s worth noting. You’ll need to a lot of turning back to pages you’ve already read.

I’m more troubled by the persistent grimness here. Others seem very much to admire Jerome Opena’s art, but I find it dark and washed out. The joy of Autumnlands is its reminder of the pleasure in escapism. This is the opposite, though: it’s a bleak world with characters who’ve suffered as long as they can remember. There’s even a kind of my-life-has-been-worse-than-yours pissing match, and one character has to interrupt it by saying it’s pointless to argue over who’s suffered more. Everyone has suffered – whether through disease, murder, or even genocide.

To double back where I started, I’m drawn to the idea that Remender intends this as a dystopian reflection of our current age because otherwise I can’t see why he’s doing it. There’s no joy and little hope here. Unpacking what’s going on makes for an intriguing reading experience, and there are certainly flashes of wonder in the way one or another character’s power expresses itself, but without such a context this is a real slog.

I’m going to go with the benefit of the doubt here, and there’s a chance I’ll scratch the itch to see where the next volume takes it. Still, what’s here doesn’t take us far enough to get a sense of how it all comes together. I hope it does find its way to another level, that it cements its contemporary critique with more than horror and finds a way toward something that, without betraying the darkness it’s wrestling with, looks a little like hope.


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