Sovereign Seven in Seven Parts: Lo, There Shall Be An Ending (A Rushed One!)

Sovereign Seven bows out with issue #36, which seems to suggest Claremont originally had a three-year deal that just wasn't renewed. By the time these last few issues were on stands, Claremont was already back at Marvel, working now in an editorial role and writing Fantastic Four after editor-in-chief Bob Harras and previous writer Scott Lobdell experienced some undefined falling-out. Maybe Claremont's new position explains why the letter column quietly vanishes, and why the big finale in #36 doesn’t even have a text piece from him.

Issue #35 feels like DC scrambling to give the book some kind of curtain call. The history of Maitresse and the Rapture finally appears -- in a four-page sequence drawn by fill-in artist Tom Grindberg. They're the only pages he contributes, which makes it look like a last-minute commission once editorial knew the axe was falling, but Ron Lim had already turned in his pages. At long last, readers get an origin for Cascade’s mother and the Rapture… though, true to form, it's still messy.

As mentioned earlier, Maitresse is revealed to be some manifestation of the Phoenix. After Cascade learns the truth about her mother, she declares the woman she once viewed as a demon wasn't really reshaping reality after all. Maitresse was merely "playing with ghosts" when she sucked the life out of her lackeys and the readers watched them crumple into dust.

As revealed in the flashback, Maitresse is called upon by her world's military leaders to stop the encroaching Rapture. She powers up into what looks and sounds exactly like Phoenix, crackly Tom Orzechowski-styled word balloons and all. "My body exists in harmony with the universe. The abomination you see…represents the ultimate in disharmony. …I am fire. I am life. I am the passion that is the heart of creation. …Who'd have thought that becoming one with creation would mean I'd have to fight for its very survival?" She is fire and life and a potential lawsuit from Marvel, all in one.

But her stand doesn't last. A moment's distraction lets a fragment of the Rapture slip into Earth, and she's imprisoned inside the tower seen in previous issues, the one with a mysterious connection to the mysterious cavern connected to the mysterious coffee house. Emphasizing the idea that Maitresse has been innocent all along, Cascade goes on to say: "I was so wrong about her. I believed her to be evil because from childhood I watched her play with our world and all its people as if it were her toy. She would reshape everything, on a whim, without hesitation or regret. And I hated her for it. It never dawned on me that everything I saw was a figment of her imagination. She was playing with ghosts. But though dead, those spirits are sparked by my mother's passion."

It's a big revelation, sure -- but feels nonsensical. Why would Maitresse spend her life conjuring illusions of herself as a soul-draining villain? What kind of parent torments their kid with ghastly reenactments of cartoonish evil? In the end, the long-awaited backstory plays like an improvised retcon, answers we're only getting because the series wasn't renewed.

Issue #35 also delivers much of the Rapture's backstory: not a villain in the conventional sense, but an energy wave with sentience. Cascade, who feels the Rapture specifically targets superpowered beings, explains, "It feeds off the potential for greatness that exists in all sentient beings. It thrives on our dreams, our imagination, the capacity for us to be better than we are. What it leaves is an endless sameness. What you are is what you will always be."

The finale issue, cover-dated July 1998, closes the curtain on Sovereign Seven with a concluding arc set in the Central Asian city of Kandahar, which comes under siege by evil bug aliens called the Mogollon. They've been summoned by the equally evil General Grushenko, but as it turns out, they're also possessed by the Rapture. It's a clumsy fit, and does feel as if Claremont had to tie a seemingly unrelated story set in war-torn eastern Europe together with the Rapture for the sake of wrapping things up.

Between the firefights and alien mayhem, the romance subplot between Cascade and Prince Temujin is teased once again. And apparently we shouldn't be forgetting that Cascade was revealed only a few issues earlier to be a high school sophomore, since we also see the heroes balancing war maneuvers with their schoolwork.

The romance subplot obviously doesn't work, and the retcon establishing the cast as high school kids is still a little annoying…but the setup actually plays out nicely in these final issues. There are only so many hours in a day, only so much energy even a superhero can expend, so it's intriguing to see the Sovereigns overwhelmed with both high school and modern warfare.

And while Maitresse has been the series' main stand-in for the Phoenix mythology, Claremont can't resist passing some of that cosmic torch to Finale in the very last issue. She receives the kind of high-concept narration Claremont used to save for Jean Grey: "Think of the universe the moment before creation. Take a portion of the passion about to be unleashed, that pure and primal life-force. Give it form and substance. And purpose. Finale links the birth of all to its end. The savior of worlds. And their destroyer."

In practice, that lofty prose boils down to this: Finale, thanks to some hand-wavy cosmic intervention from Violet, suddenly overcomes her poorly explained water weakness and swims to the climactic fight. There she takes on the bug horde, wielding the sword of thematic gravitas…not to be confused with all the other swords in this series, or that time characters from Highlander made unsanctioned cameos. It's big, it's bold, and it's dramatic -- but it also lands with less weight than it should, because Finale's story hasn't truly earned the moment.

The last pages of Sovereign Seven then take a hard left turn into metafiction. Inside the Crossroads Coffee Bar, we find two young-ish women, Morgan and Casey, putting the finishing touches on what is apparently the final issue of Sovereign Seven itself. And…who exactly are Morgan and Casey? Is Casey supposed to be the same Casey who's popped up in previous issues, the one tied into Daisy and Violet's family tree? Ron Lim's art isn’t exactly clarifying, but the dialogue seems to indicate that yes, that's her. Maybe ten years or so older.

As it turns out, Morgan is the writer, Casey the artist, and the comic we've been reading is their creation. In the very last scene, Morgan heads upstairs in the coffee shop to read the tale of Sovereign Seven as a bedtime story to an unidentified little girl. Roll credits. (Or the comic book equivalent -- close the issue and stare at the Sarah Michelle Gellar Got Milk? ad.)

Is this playful or just bewildering? A meta twist that suggests the Sovereigns only ever existed as a story-within-a-story. A rug-pull finale that invites comparisons to St. Elsewhere's notorious snow globe ending, though without the same cultural impact. If we're going to be establishing readers have been following a comic inside a comic all this time, shouldn't a certain Mr. Chris Claremont show up as the writer? Is Morgan an alter-ego he's previously never chosen to reveal? Is Ron Lim okay with being supplanted by this mysterious Casey?

It feels more like Claremont toying with the audience one last time, leaving readers to decide whether it's a tease for a potential series rebirth or just one final dodge instead of a real resolution. And is there any hope we'll ever have it?

As of this writing, Sovereign Seven remains a quiet footnote in the career of Chris Claremont. The only buzz about the title occurred a few years back when Claremont floated the idea of crowdfunding a prose novel starring the S7 characters. Claremont still has an exclusive contract with Marvel, so the characters cannot simply reappear in comic book form unless Marvel is the one publishing the revival. As a prose novel, Claremont's legally in the clear, but I don't believe he's mentioned the idea in years. (I wonder if Marvel would have to approve a reprint of the existing issues, however? Would both Marvel and DC have to agree to this, given the trademarked DC characters who appear in the series?)

Sovereign Seven seems unlikely to hit that nostalgia sweet-spot: it launched just as the comics industry was collapsing, and ended in 1998, before the resurgence of early-2000s event comics, the revived Marvel/DC rivalry, and that initial 1980s nostalgia wave. Online, any detailed writing about the series is scant. The DC wiki contributors don't seem to care much about Sovereign Seven, I've noticed. Rereading the series required a decent amount of note-taking on my part, as the series just doesn't seem to be well-documented.

Claremont doesn't seem to prioritize keeping his creator-owned work in print, which also lessens the odds of a revival. His sci-fi novel First Flight once appeared on the Kindle store (I still have a copy on one of my old devices) but has since vanished; and a quick check of Amazon shows his other prose novels are largely unavailable as e-books. Without an active push from Claremont himself, it seems unlikely the S7 characters will emerge from dormancy.

In a few weeks, we'll have our final installment. Check me out in the meantime at Substack, YouTube, and Instagram (where I'll be posting some comic reviews/retrospectives in the future). And of course I have a book to shill -- GUTBUSTER, a neo-noir novella set in the world of stand-up comedy, free on Kindle Unlimited! If you don't leave a review, my feelings will be hurt.