Zatanna 4
From Barbelith
Categories: Seven Soldiers Issues
"ZOR!"
Barbelith thread: Liar! It's a magnificent beard and I know you want one! (http://www.barbelith.com/topic/20686/from/315)
| Table of contents |
Background and General Commentary
Synopsis:
After sending Misty into hiding on the back of Vanguard the flying horse, Zatanna fights a magical duel of epic proportions against Zor the Terrible in the mud of Slaughter Swamp. In the process, Zatanna gets a glimpse of the structures holding her universe together ...and what lies beyond. In a space beyond the panels of the printed page, she meets the Seven Unknown Men and gains that rarest of gifts: Redemption. Zatanna wraps up her crisis of faith, and just in time, too, ...'cause Misty's back and Armageddon is chasing close at her heels!
Annotations
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Page 2
PANEL 2: "...the city of Gorias was high in the mountains of the East."
The city of Gorias (http://www.timelessmyths.com/celtic/celtworld.html) is one of four magical cities comprising the Irish 'land of the young', [1] (http://www.answers.com/topic/t-r-na-n-g-2). Interesting that it's located in Tibet, and not Ireland, but this may be due to tectonic shifts, or the spread of Celtic peoples ten thousand years ago. Note that the first link has correspondant treasures for each locale (scroll down,) and the Spear of Lugh, which is "never thrown", is Golias'.
Page 3
PANEL 1-2: "Oh, look! Black flowers. One day they'll cover the whole earth."
The Terrible Time Tailor said the same thing in Guardian #4.
Additionally, 'gloom cookie' is a goth comic (http://www.serenavalentino.com/gloomcookie/), and may be an affectinate term for this subculture, though google doesn't seem to produce any verification of this.
Page 4
PANEL 1: "There is something familiar about this loom..."
The spinning wheel that Zatanna and Misty find in Cyrus Gold's shack looks exactly like the one upon which Misty was forced to spin a cobweb dress of forgetfullness, as shown in Zatanna 3. When the Newsboys visited the shack in Guardian 4, they saw a sewing machine there, the same Time Sewing Machine abandoned by the Seven Unknown Men in Seven Soldiers 0. Looms, spinning wheels, and sewing machines are all tools use to produce cloth and clothing.
PANEL 5: "Wait until you have your very own crisis."
Crises are pretty much any really big events in the DC Comics universe; Seven Soldiers runs concurrent to the present 'Infinite Crisis', and Zatanna's abilities were used to mindwipe many of DC's heroes in the preliminary 'Identity Crisis' last year; this is the source of much of her present low self-esteem and shame.
Page 6
PANEL 1: "Ladies and Gentlemen, for one night only... ZOR!"
In his hand, Zor holds a headless white dove. Stage magicians often use white doves in their magic acts. Ozzie Osbourne once bit the head off of a live bat while onstage during a set. Since Zor is an evil magician, he has combined the two and bitten the head off a white dove.
Some English readers think Zor's name rhymes with the last of a famous comic-scribe, who killed Zatanna's dad...
Page 7
PANEL 6: "I planned my appearance in the Craft woman's store to set you up for this cruel disappointment."
Zor is referring to the event seen in flashback in Zatanna #2. He was the Eternal Gentleman who left behind his top hat, not Zatara, as Zatanna was meant to believe.
Page 8
PANEL 3: "Each black flower in Slaughter Swamp is a guilty secret. Each year there are more and more."
Zor echoes the observation of the ferryman in Seven Soldiers #0.
Page 9
PANEL 1: "I brought the Wrath of God to its white and knobbly knees."
Zor is referring to his battle with the Spectre back in the MORE FUN #55, a very old Golden Age comic. Their colossal clash, towering over the treetops, is played out nearly frame-for-frame here.
PANEL 4: "Gwydion the Merlin am I, of seven treasures one."
Gwydion admits to being one of the Seven Treasures of Camelot, which Gloriana Tenebrae has been trying to collect over in Shining Knight. Two of the other treasures are Arthur's sword, Caliburn Ex Calibur, and the Undry Cauldorn.
Page 12
PANEL 5: "It felt like a bungee jump backwards: I saw recent time from a really bizarre angle that made it look static and fractured and then..."
This sounds like the way a comic book character might describe the experience if she were given a glimpse of the comic book page in which she lived: static images representing discrete moments from her own past.
Zatanna appears to be breaking through the surface of the panel, as if she exists above the page. When the glass is shattered, what lies beneath is a mixture of creative tools, cogs, scissors, a sellotape machine (?) and a printing press which is printing, apparently backwards '...KRA...' Perhaps 'KRAACK!' as the glass smashes, although it looks more like a comic cover. The two simian creatures are a curiousity, too: they may be representative of what Terrence McKenna called the machine elves (http://deoxy.org/timemind.htm); for a more literal visualisation of this concept, John Cassady and Warren Ellis' Planetary comic, #21 is recommended.
Page 13
PANEL 2: "And I... I, the many thousand hands that hold it... I, the multi-colored eyes that gaze upon you..."
Gwydion seems to be referring to the hands and eyes of comic-book readers in the real world.
PANEL 4: "Call it a leap of faith. A blind jump through spaces, vectors, geometry problems I couldn't solve. But I got ahead of him. And then he arrived moments later, I was already there, pulling his whole magical universe down around him."
Zatanna leaped out of panel five at the bottom of page 12, through the white space beyond the panels and landed at the bottom of page 13, thus getting ahead of the flow of the story. The ink-diving Hand agents in The Filth accomplished something similar.
Page 14-15
PANEL 2: "Then it all went soft and flipped again. Scary soft."
Slaughter Swamp is an in-between place where things turn soft and change.
In the fifth panel, Doctor Thirteen is pointing directly at the reader(s).
Page 16
PANEL 4: "Whatever you are. Help me before it's too late."
Zatanna reaches her hand out of the comic book page and appeals directly to the readers. This is one method of charging a magickal working, I suppose. This is also where some of the lettering goes a bit wonky - in the bottom right, it says 'ZA steps thr', which one might extrapolate to 'Zatanna steps through the page' or similar.
Page 18
PANEL 1: "You're in a dimensional lock, Zee."
A lock is an enclosed part of a canal in which the water can be raised or lowered to move a boat from one level plane to another. Zatanna is in-between two dimensional planes: the DC Universe and the higher plane of existence where we read her adventures in comic books.
Zatanna is surrounded by letters, ink, pens, and type-writer components. These are the tools used to craft stories, specifically comics, and thus to shape the world in which Zatanna lives.
"We want to thank you for subduing the Renegade, but he's caused some Terrible trouble I'm afraid."
Zor is a renegade former member of the Seven Unknown Men. The description also implies that he is the same Terrible Time Tailor seen in Guardian 4.
"There were eyes, tens of thousands of eyes, in different times and places all converging on me."
Zatanna can sense the eyes of comic-book readers watching her.
Page 19
PANEL 1: "But he took it too far."
Zor is literally being "peeled off the surface of [the] spacetime" he had occupied during his fight with Zee; this is how Grant Morrison described his by-now infamous 'alien abduction'.
PANEL 3: "Had I always known the universe was like this?"
The object Zatanna holds in her hand is a caption box waiting to be installed onto the panels of the printed page. The words it contains are Zatanna's mental narration of her own adventure. Narrative caption boxes exactly like this one appear throughout the previous nine pages depicting Zatanna's battle with Zor.
Page 20
Zatara's books can be mapped onto, variously, the four issues of this comic or perhaps the first wave of the seven soldiers (Klarion, Guardian, Shining Knight and this one.) Question is, if she's the books and Gwydion the living language and also "the man of her dreams" what is, or would be, the product of their union? The comic you're just finishing?
Page 21
PANEL 1: "Thanks for seeing me on such short notice, Etta."
The head of Zatanna's support group is implied to be Etta Candy (http://www.fanzing.com/mag/fanzing37/feature9.shtml), who was Wonder Woman's friend and sidekick in her Golden Age comic-book adventures. However, a different version, of lesser proportions, appears in the present Wonder Woman ongoing.
Page 22
Panel 1: "I deen a wen erutnevda."
The arrival of Misty and the flock of winged horses so soon after Zatanna magically requests a new adventure again raises the question of 'is it coincidence or magic?' Just like the end of the previous issue. Synchronicity, some might call it.
To see why Misty had to leave her hiding place in the Himalayas, read the beginning of Frankenstein #4.
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