Tue Oct 30, 2007 — by Andrew Wheeler

The Legend of Grimjack, Vol. 8: Review

'80s adventure from Ostrander and Mandrake

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.)

Mandrake’s work followed a somewhat lackluster period illustrated by Tom Sutton (after the original penciller and co-creator, Tim Truman, left GrimJack to launch his own series, Scout) but Mandrake’s arrival on GrimJack brought a great revival of energy in both art and story. Ostrander and Mandrake clearly work well together, so if you liked their later work, drop back to GrimJack and check out what happened the first time they hit the comics page together.

I’m trying not to talk about the plot of these stories because this is the end of an extended storyline (and I’ve already given one major spoiler – though, if you know anything about GrimJack, you’ve probably heard that he’s died a few times). But the stories collected here are the climax of a storyline that ran for nearly two years, with Gaunt and his friends fighting to save their home, the interdimensional city of Cynosure, from a demon takeover and Grimjack himself finally facing down his long-time nemesis.

And, even after the big plot finishes up (and after a change-of-palate silly story about bowling with guest star Judah the Hammer from Nexus), there’s yet another wrinkle to Gaunt’s new status quo, with a look into his future – or, at least, what could be his future.

This was one of the best adventure comics of its day, and it holds up just as well now. If any of you out there want to see what kind of stories can be told without spandex, Grimjack is a great place to start. And for those of us who were there when, it’s a much more convenient from than the ones lurking in longboxes under giant piles of stuff in the basement.

The Legend of GrimJack, Vol. 8
John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake; cover by Tim Truman
IDW, 2007, $24.95

Andrew Wheeler has been a publishing professional for nearly twenty years, with a long stint as a Senior Editor at the Science Fiction Book Club and a current position at John Wiley & Sons. He’s been reading comics for longer than he cares to mention, and maintains a personal, mostly book-oriented blog at antickmusings.blogspot.com.

Publishers who would like their books to be reviewed at ComicMix should contact ComicMix through the usual channels or e-mail Andrew Wheeler directly at acwheele (at) optonline (dot) net.

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