The Legend of Grimjack, Vol. 8: Review
Yes, we’ve hit the point where reprints of medium-level ‘80s comics can run to eight volumes – and, since the comic in question is GrimJack, that is perfectly dandy with me. Since GrimJack was gone for a good decade (before the recent Killer Instinct miniseries, and, of course, these trade paperback reprints), I suspect that some of you might not know what the man and his world.
Well, let me quote myself to bring you up to speed:
John Gaunt, aka GrimJack, is a cop/secret agent/PI in an aggressively multi-dimensional (and arbitrarily immense) city, and he walks down those mean streets, yadda yadda yadda. It’s hard-boiled fantasy adventure, in a setting where anything can pop up and probably will. Everybody betrays everybody (especially the dames), and everybody but our hero is corrupt as all hell. This is the kind of comic that the comics world thinks of as being vastly different from superheroes, even though John Gaunt:
- wears the same clothes all the time, which instantly identify him
- saves people (and the world) regularly
- has what amounts to a codename
- has a couple of similar friends who he "teams up" with on occasion
- appears in 4-color pamphlet form
This volume reprints issues 47 to 54, right in the middle of the 81-issue run, with stories that originally saw print at the end of the ‘80s. Most of this book consists of the end of a long storyline that started in the comics collected in Volume 6 and saw John Gaunt killed and resurrected, among other changes. That big storyline (which doesn’t seem to have an official name) had kicked off when Tom Mandrake took over penciling this series, which was the first time he and Ostrander worked together extensively. (They would later rack up long, successful runs on Spectre and other series at DC.) (more…)
