A few weeks ago I was enjoying a rare browse through the cheap bins and found several issues of "The Sovereign Seven" from the 1990s. I had missed it during its original run. I rather enjoyed it. The art was quite good, the characters were interesting and complex, and the stories were interesting. The storytelling struck that balance between dense, single-issue stories and ongoing plotlines that all too few comics today seem to manage.

Does anybody else remember this series?

Remember it, but never read it. Interesting wrap-up for the title though, according to wiki:

I read it and liked it.
Ron Lim, the second (or third if you count the 10 pages prologue drawn by Cockrum) artist did an excellent work.
And Claremont get me interested fo the first time in the Legion of the Super Heroes, in the issue featuring Saturn Girl.
One of the scarce readable comics of the 90s. Out of Vertigo i mean.
Now it wasn't on the level of Claremont original run on the X-Men, but still it was very enjoyable.
I loved too the annual, drawn by Rick Leonardi, that was sort of "Sovereign Seven: The End" before that Marvel even began to use the idea some years later.

I love Chris Claremont, so I bought this entire series in one shot a couple years ago. Read it all over the course of a couple weeks.

I definitely liked a lot of elements of it, but I was sad to see that over the course of 36 issues, the huge mountain of concepts and ideas never cohered. He just really likes to not end his stories. On the one hand, this is why he is -- at his best -- such an incredibly addictive writer. On the other, sometimes the fact that the tension is almost NEVER relieved becomes exhausting.

But there were some cool ideas in there. I really liked Indigo -- a character that might've been male and might've been female. But readers never knew, and it was never really clear whether ANYONE knew. It just never came up.

Finale was another bizarre one: covered head to toe in a skintight costume so you never knew what she looked like. Then suddenly a new female character, a civilian, was introduced out of nowhere that was *probably* Finale out of costume, in some sort of fabricated secret identity. But again, it was never addressed, so you were never SURE that other character was her. And then there was the whole thing where she was deathly afraid of water but we never were told exactly why.

Reflex was another novel character. Every super-team has a big guy and his superpower is always strength and/or endurance. So a big guy whose power is super *speed* instead was a fun, somewhat mind-bending notion.

It was a neat series -- really engaging when it was at its best. I wish Claremont had been willing and able to end it more definitively than he did. There was very little closure to be found in the concluding issues.

What were others' favorite moments or characters?

So it wasn't just me who couldn't figure Indigo out? Well that's good to know!

I've only read a few issues. What I've seen makes me ready to read more if and when I find them. I had almost forgotten what it's like to be excited about a pile of new (to me, at least) single issues!

Welcome to IMWAN, Jason.

Thanks, Linda!

I didn't go the distance but I enjoyed it for a year or two. It gave me the Claremont fix I had been missing since his long X-Men run and Dwayne Turners art was pretty good. (Can't recall how long I stayed after Turner left, must consult the attic one day?)

Dwayne Turner was a year or two ahead of me at the School Of Visual Arts, a very quiet guy. This was also my comic partner's favorite book at the time. I found Soveriegn Seven a little confusing.

Well, I re-read this series.

It's probably my least-favorite thing that Claremont has done, but I still enjoyed a lot of elements of it. I mainly blame the artists. Dwayne Turner's storytelling left much to be desired, even though he had some great splash pages and some striking images. By contrast, Lim was a stronger storyteller, but his layouts and images were kind of bland. Neither of them really hit the sweet spot.

There was a little eight-page S7 tie-in story in an issue of Showcase, and it was drawn by Alan Davis, with inks by Mark Farmer. Man, this would have been a glorious series with Davis and Farmer as the regular illustrators. Alas, what could have been ...

Was this the thread that gave us the D.O.O.T.?

If so, it should be preserved.