Set between the end of Killer Instinct and the beginning of the stories from the '80s, Manx Cat continues to fill in some gaps in the backstory, while providing a fairly entertaining adventure.
It's a difficult stretch for Gaunt. He's still settling in to being independent again, and seems to take that to mean he should keep everyone away from him. Gordon's acting as bartender, but the two are hostile to each. Gaunt barks orders, Gordon makes smart-ass remarks, and is clearly more than a little resentful of what happened to Jo Chaney in Killer Instinct. Gaunt saves Bob the Gatorlizard, but keeps trying to make him leave. It's a contrast with BlacJacMac, who's been leading a merc crew since the Demon Wars. Gaunt lives in a crappy bar, BlacJac has an entire multi-story compound. BlacJac has a new steady girlfriend (Goddess, who hasn't decided she hates Gaunt yet), Gaunt has an employee that gives him shit constantly. He's not really close to anyone, and he's going to have to decide if that's how he wants to keep it.
The Manx Cat is a MacGuffin that popped up from time to time, starting with the very first GrimJack story. It's an obsidian statuette, and Gaunt seems to be forever stealing from one person for another person. This story reveals there's a reason it constantly ends up with other people, and that there's much more to it than just being a feline-themed Maltese Falcon. Gaunt finds himself in a situation where he doesn't know everything that's going on, isn't sure who's telling the truth, and has enemies on all sides. Which I believe is what GrimJack calls "Tuesday."
The middle issues send him into the past, suggesting that Gaunt's been tied up with Cynosure since long before his "first" death. That felt contradictory to me the first time I read this, but some of other GrimJack stories (including Demon Knight) had established the notion time isn't a straight line when it comes to Cynosure. So maybe Gaunt's decision during the Ostrander/Mandrake run cast ripples all along the timeline.
This mini-series has more of a murky feel to it than Killer Instinct, but I think that owed more to the printing, or maybe the coloring. Truman's linework seemed blurred and things weren't shadowed so much as muddied. Truman opts for an look to the buildings during the sequences set in the past. A little Victorian, a little Renaissance era maybe. Lot of tiled roofs and narrow walkways. Even though there are demons openly roaming about, the city doesn't seem as dark or a closed in as it does in Gaunt's time. And St. John of Knives isn't nearly as morally compromised as Gaunt, either.
Sadly, this marks the end of Grim Spring. There will be no more GrimJack-related splash page for quite some time. But next week begins a 3-week stretch on a different (very different) creator-owned series.
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