Harlan Ellison's 7 Against Chaos

Written by Harlan Ellison
Art by Paul Chadwick

As much as I've always recognized Harlan Ellison's importance to science fiction as a genre, I've barely read more than a handful of his stuff over the years.  The news that he had a graphic novel coming out from DC featuring his own characters interested me, but then I saw that Paul Chadwick was going to draw it, and getting a copy became a certainty.  I love Chadwick's Concrete, and have been hoping to see more work from him.

7 Against Chaos is kind of a strange graphic novel.  I originally assumed from the title that it would be yet another take on Seven Samurai, but it really isn't.  A mysterious hooded character takes he first third of the book to put together a team of strange characters from a number of different planets in our solar system.  All of these people are in trouble when the hooded guy shows up - one is a genetically modified (reordered) miner with metal pincer hands, another a faceless thief, another a sentient robot, an insect guy, and a woman who will burst into flames if she touches another human being).

Eventually, we find out what the mission is - this team is needed to go back in time to man's earliest days, to put a stop to an effort being made by the lizard-being Erisssa to replace mankind with evolved reptiles.  The story is a lot more complex than that - each character is given enough space to develop fully, and Ellison has a good time exploring the ramifications of time travel and how to make some of these concepts work on the page.

The graphic novel has a retro feel to its art.  Paul Chadwick fills it with designs that could have come from the heyday of 50s science fiction magazines, but the book still feels very modern.

Perhaps it's just the inclusion of the character Tantalus, who looks like a human-sized preying mantis and is reminiscent of Bug, but this comic reminded me a lot of the classic Micronauts series.  It has the same general feel of a multi-world system that has gone wrong, and that none of the characters will necessarily stick around through the whole thing.

I think that this was originally written to be a four-issue mini-series (perhaps in the prestige format) because there are a few places where the story gets kind of recapped immediately after a big moment, and am a little curious to know the history of how this project came about (especially because this is not the kind of thing that DC usually publishes, and it didn't get a lot of hype when it was released in 2013.