I bust people out of prison, hunt down vampires, fight alien gods –
all the fun jobs other people are too squeamish or too polite to do themselves.
Call me a mercenary. Call me an assassin. Call me a villain. I am all that and more. – Grimjack
Sometimes a review of a particular item that comes in to Green Man has to wait for the right occasion to occur before the review actually happens. Grimjack: Killer Instinct waited nearly four years before I realized that I now had the riff I needed to make sense of this graphic novel. And it’s all due to Simon Green’s Nightside series, which I have been listening to in its audiobook format these past few months. Now, I admit that I had read the Nightside novels at least two times each, but didn’t really get the feel for Nightside as a place until I listened to the audiobooks.
That was when I finally got a feel for this series, first published by the now defunct First Comics with John Ostrander and Timothy Truman credited as co-creators of the character, although Ostrander had been developing Grimjack with artist Lenin Delsol before Truman’s arrival as the artist on the project. But a strong central character is only part of the appeal, as Grimjack, like John Taylor in the Nightside series, is embedded in a cityscape that defines and enhances the character.
In Grimjack’s case, it’s Cynosure, a really nasty place by any reasonable definition.
John Gaunt, alias Grimjack, was born in The Pit, the nastiest slum of the pan-dimensional, border shifting, and quite unreliable city of Cynosure, where magic and technology, humans and aliens, honor and deceit, all exist in an uneasy truce. Cynosure, like the secret heart of London known as Nightside, is an urban nightmare taken to an extreme. Demons, vampires, gods of all sorts, crazed cyborgs — both series have them in spades.
- A complex back story that evolves with the series? Oh, yes.
- A hero who’s slightly tarnished? Quite so.
- Really cool train systems? Yes.
- Fascist authorities who claim to rule their cities? Indeed.
There are substantial differences between the two characters. For example, Grimjack is adept at using both sword and guns of all kinds, but Taylor abhors violence and avoids it whenever possible. (Mind you, he can and will use it quite well when pushed to do so.) Grimjack drinks far too much, smokes constantly, and fucks rather well; Taylor’s a bit more refined at his drinking, doesn’t smoke at all , and his love life is, errr, more sparse.
Now let’s talk about Grimjack: Killer Instinct, the second original graphic novel featuring this character. The first was Demon Knight, which is but a mere appetizer when compared to this meaty offering.
Following the bankruptcy of First Comics in the early ’80s and the loss of their rights to anything of a Grimjack nature due to being tied up the bankruptcy process, it would be nearly fifteen years before Ostrander and Truman could team up again to publish Grimjack: Killer Instinct, a six issue miniseries published by IDW Publishing. The miniseries, since reprinted in trade paperback form, which I am reviewing here from the review copy Green Man was sent, serves as a prequel to the First Comics Grimjack series and shows John Gaunt’s life leading up to his first appearance in Starslayer #10.
So what we have is an origin story, a common enough thing in the entertainment world these days, as witness the Iron Man and Green Lantern films, and one that does a very good job of establishing just who Grimjack is and why he is who he is. (Something from The Nightside, the first of the Nightside novels, does the same thing for John Taylor.) And though I like the original Grimjack series, both the writing and artwork are so much better than they were in the original series, which suffered from the usual problems of that era in being a tad, errr, muddy.
From the very first page to the the cover art gallery in the back of this trade paperback, Grimjack: Killer Instinct is a class act all the way. Great story, superb artwork, and a first-rate printing job — congratulations to all involved!
No, I won’t detail the plot here as it’s much too easy to spoil by saying anything at all about it. Long-time fans of the original Grimjack series will really want to read this if they haven’t already done so; anyone who hasn’t yet encountered this series will want to start here.
(IDW, 2005)
Postscript: IDW Publishing re-issued the First Comics Grimjack run in a series of trade paperbacks under the title The Legend of Grimjack but October 2007 saw the series cease with the eight of what should been (rough guess) thirteen volumes. I see no indication that remaining volumes will ever exist.
