Random Back Issues #18 - GrimJack: Killer Instinct #5

Maybe so, but you gotta admit it'll fit easily on a tombstone.

As usual, GrimJack's gotten himself tangled up in something big. In this case, his boss in Cadre, that'd be the eloquent Mayfair up there, setting Gaunt up as a patsy in Mayfair's play to seize control of all the security angencies in the city.

Gaunt had been unwinding things steadily with the aid of the only other person to survive the fake mission to kill a politician named Ilsa Kalter, Jo Chaney. That included figuring out Kalter's body was being possessed and manipulated by a vampire named Simone, while Kalter's soul is trapped in a ka stone. Good news is, you can question ka stone's and they can't lie, so they're admissible as evidence. Bad news, Chaney's been a plant of Mayfair's the whole time.

This gets Gaunt thinking about how he keeps taking jobs that let everyone else make his decisions for him, and why. He decides he's done with that, dons the outfit that was his standard for the first three years of his ongoing series.

He has a decent plan. Give the kaa stone to his old cop partner Roscoe. Kalter's soul will help bring down Mayfair and his whole scheme. Plus it earns Roscoe brownie points with his angry boss. Little bit of an apology for costing Roscoe his eye back when they were chasing the Dancer. Meanwhile, Gaunt gets himself out of town for a while until things settle. If he can get past the sentient dinosaurs hunting for him at the train station. Fortunately, John's willing to resort to chemical warfare with his grenades from the "Knights Sewar". I love the random stuff Ostrander and Truman throw into this series.

Unfortunately, Gaunt may have underestimated Mayfair's reach, as the kaa stone gets confiscated, and the whole thing is quietly buried. Leaving GrimJack no choice but to return to Cynosure to confront Mayfair, but his old boss has his own problems. All of his other agents have been turned by Simone and her newest recruit, Chaney. Gaunt's bad luck with women holding true to form. Plus, Mayfair released Kalter's soul, so there goes the evidence against him, if they even make it out.

There was one more issue to go in this mini-series after this, which gets the status quo to where it was when Ostrander and Truman originally started GrimJack as a back-up series in Starslayer. They did one more mini-series, The Manx Cat, through IDW a few years after this one that was set some time after this one.

{5th longbox, 210th comic. GrimJack: Killer Instinct #5, by John Ostrander (writer), Lovern Kindzierski (colorist), John Workman (letterer)}