Like a freak snowstorm in May, Grim Spring returns without warning!
We didn't talk about Munden's Bar much when discussing GrimJack three years ago, but it was a back-up story that ran most months. Typically, though far from always, more light-hearted than John Gaunt's adventures, and featuring a wide variety of guest artists, writers and stars. First Comics did two annuals, one in 1988 and the other in 1991, each a mixture of stories that ran previously in GrimJack and new stories.
Most Munden's Bar stories fall into two categories: Those that are about the bar and Gordon the bartender or the other regular customers; and those that are really just about having some notable guest-star from a different book show up. To the latter, this annual reprints the story from GrimJack #26 where the Ninja Turtles came to Munden's looking for a spaceship they could hitch a ride on back to Earth (if I remember the results of the annual poll First Comics ran, was the best-selling but least-popular Munden's Bar story that year), and end up first in a brawl, then in a dance contest. But the annual also includes Evan Dorkin having Milk & Cheese show up to wreak havoc, and Kate Worley and Reed Waller include a story where Omaha the Cat Dancer tries to escape a police raid by ducking into the bathroom and comes out in Munden's.
Those stories tend to feel weak, since they boil down to, "Hey, here's this character you might know from entirely different comics!" Not much else to them, and if you don't care about the character in question, the story hangs on nothing. Not always; the back-up in GrimJack #40 would probably fall under this category and I love it. But I tend to prefer the ones that are more about Munden's or Cynosure in general.
The first annual reprints a story - "Doppelgangster," drawn by Jerry Ordway - where a cop, heartbroken that his wife's been cheating on him with a sleazebag, sees said sleazebag murder him in the mirror over the bar. Except the mirror is actually a window to a parallel dimension. So the cop goes looking to avenge "his" murder. The story for the above image was a new one, although the drunk magician, Foody Magicker, is a character that had shown up and caused mayhem a couple of times previously. In this case, he's not even doing magic for free drinks ("tricky, drinky, drinky, tricky" as he puts it in one of those earlier stories.)
It's not included in the annuals, but I was always fond of "Closing Time" (written by John Ostrander and Del Close, drawn by Rich Burchett) from GrimJack #8, which is, as the title implies, what Gordon does to close down the bar every night. It ends with an amusing 4th-wall break that also gets neatly at how inured Gordon is to strange things, from living in this city and tending this particular bar.
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