Blue Aliens Are Hiding Inside Everyone, Sure They Are

I was thinking, do you think Grifter could work as a series if the reader wasn't sure of what was going on? This isn't meant as a comment on whether it works as presently constituted, it's just a thought I had.

What I mean is, we would know what Cole thinks is going on (weird creatures pretending to be human or hiding within humans for some reason), but we wouldn't know if that was true? Say Edmonson had opted to leave out the section where Cole wakes up in a warehouse, with wires running from him to the creature floating in the tube, and Cole's subsequent escape. We might know something happened to him, that he lost time, that he's hearing voices, but we wouldn't necessarily know that the situation is what he believes it is.

In the audience's mind, there would be the question of whether Cole's right about what's going on, or if he's crazy. Maybe some person he conned in the past caught up to him and tortured him. Maybe he decided to celebrate his succesful con at the start of the issue, and took something that doesn't agree with him.

The problem might come with the fact that Cole's already killed two people*. Since we know they're creatures in disguise out to kill him, it's more excusable. He's acting in self-defense, since he didn't kill either of the people on the plane until after they attacked him. If there's the possibility he's imagining all this, then there's also the chance he killed two innocent people. It would require the scenes be presented differently in the comic, since it would have to be ambiguous whether the woman pulled a metal spike from her arm and tried to kill him, but it's workable. Make it so we don't see where the stabby object comes from, or perhaps we don't even get a good look at what she attacks him with.

The part about him being on the run from the authorities wouldn't be altered all that much. We might wonder if it wouldn't be a good thing for him to be caught, but his flight and attempts to evade capture would otherwise play out the same. I think it'd be possible to portray the forces pursuing him in such a way the reader wouldn't be sure whether they're after Cole because they think he's a terrorist, or because they're some of these creatures trying to keep their existence secret. It's a question of how long one could go with the "is he crazy or not" storyline before there would need to be some resolution one way or the other.

* Three, if we count him clubbing Xavier to death in the warehouse with the pipe, but in this hypothetical scenario, we wouldn't have seen that.