Paul Grist's black and white work on 'Kane' - a cop book which was the predecessor to 'Jack Staff' - was mindblowingly good. It was what really destroyed my ability to continue reading 'Sin City', as, despite it's lack of bad-boy chic, it continued to show Miller up month on month. Grist totally captured the use of black and white to produce noir stories, and had all kinds of neat storytelling devices and visual trickery tucked away in each issue.
What I think is interesting about his style is that it's very understated, very playful. You at no point feel that he's trying to "wow" you, but overall the effect builds up and it *does* wow you. Well, when I say "you" I mean "me". Over in my original whining thread I was knocking around some ideas about why indy comics aren't more popular and one that occurs to me now is that typically it's the mainstream comics that try hard to manufacture the big contact "wow", the wow that comes off the page in the store and makes you drag the book to the counter and buy it. Compare any widescreen Authority carnage-fest with any two pages from Jack Staff and you get very different feelings. But in most ways I think Jack Staff is really a lot better of a book.
One thing that I'm not sure about is the continuing motif of the "intro page". After a while in the first series I did feel that it was kind of grating on me a bit. It's a clever device and all, and handy for reminding you who the characters are. Moreover, Grist's more or less found a way to integrate it comparatively seamlessly with his narrative style. But still the repeated use gets to me. Seems like on Kane he used a broader set of techniques and only played with each one as much as it needed. But maybe I just miss Kane and shouldn't whine so much.
Khaologan23ris - D'you really think he drew from 'Phase 3' all that much? I mean, beyond the obvious fact that he's reinventing old school British heroes and plopping them in a shared universe? Morrisson's treatment seemed to me to be much, much more po-mo and more cynical. In fact, IIRC, in the introduction to the Phase III trades from Titan he (or maybe Yeowell) talks with great glee about how much fun they had turning these characters into wimps or transvestites and generally slaying and mutilating them. This was, of course, wholly in keeping with the tone of Zenith, and with 2000 AD in general, and was part of the mad genius of the whole thing. But Grist seems to be going for a much more positive re-working. If anything, I'd say he's more inspired by Moore books like 'Supreme' that tried to do a positive re-imagining of the Silver Age during the mid-to-late-90's. Even Moore's early Captain Britain stuff was a bit more deconstructivist, casting the old British characters (including, interestingly, Marvelman) as the parallel-Earth victims of the Fury. I think both Moore and Morrisson, in their '80's work were trying to "clear the decks" of embarassing old concepts and make space for cool, sexy new supers who their readership could relate to. It took till the '90's for the comics field to start looking inwards and go back and appreciate the sheer genius of the Steel Claw or Cat-Man and Cat-Girl or whatever. Hence, Flex Mentallo, 1963 and Union Jack.
Top book, though. |
