Starslayer was Mike Grell's creation, about, near as I can tell, a Celt space pirate named Torin MacQuillon and his crew, getting into various space pirate-style hi-jinks. All while not wearing a shirt of course, because this is a Mike Grell character.
I say, "near as I can tell," because I only really own back-up stories. Dave Stevens' "The Rocketeer" started in the back of the earliest issues of Starslayer, when it was still being published at Pacific. That only lasted through issue 3 - long enough for Cliff Secord to use the rocket to rescue a stunt pilot. After issue 6, the book moved to First Comics, and in issue 10 John Ostrander and Tim Truman introduced a little character named GrimJack.
During its stint as a back-up feature, GrimJack had three storylines. The first, "Mortal Gods", establishes the nature of Cynosure, a nexus where different realities phase into and out of contact with each other, and where each has its own natural laws that govern it. A bum can cross the street and become a god, with all that entails. Truman establishes Gaunt's look, with the beret, the cloak that conceals pistols, the scar over the eye, the death's head grin when he's got a god that's wandered out if its realm dead to rights. It also establishes his version of Cynosure, all dirty, narrow alleys, buildings with peeling wallpaper crowded together.
Ostrander sets up not only that Gaunt knows all about how the city works, but also his unwillingness to abandon friends, even in the face of a beating, or when the friend is pleading with him to just go. Also, that if you decline GrimJack's first offer to walk away, you don't get a second chance.
"Buried Past" establishes vampires exist and that Gaunt knows a bit about them and magic, but it ends up being more about Gaunt's past. Only a bit, about the one period of time where he found a little peace before it all fell apart.
And then you get "Night of the Killer Bunnies," where Gaunt (unwisely) agrees to help a dimension of talking cartoon animals avoid death at the hands of vicious, giant, heavily-armed rabbits. But it does expand the range of the types of worlds you could expect GrimJack to interact with. It's not going to be strictly medieval or gritty noir type settings.
As annoying and ridiculous as Gaunt finds the whole thing, he still completes the job. It's also when Ostrander and Truman introduce Blacjacmac, Gaunt's best friend and leader of his own team of mercs. Much busting of chops commences.
After that, Ostrander and Truman handle an entire issue of Starslayer, as Torin's been captured by some doofy aristocrat in Cynosure, and his crew hire GrimJack to help with the rescue. A lot of the interactions between the Starslayer cast tend to zip right past me, but this is first time we see GrimJack encounter Chris Heyman, a Space Marine that pops up later in GrimJack during a conflict with the serial killing cyborg Kalibos, and the Sphinx, a wizard Gaunt fights against and with at various times through the Ostrander/Mandrake run.
The team-up story highlights a certain tendency of GrimJack's, where if you behave haughtily towards him, as the woman who owns Torin's ship does, Gaunt will really jam you up on his prices. If you behave fair and honorably, he might make a decision that's very poor for his bottom line. That would come up early in GrimJack, where a kid has only single coin to his name, and Gaunt accepts that a sufficient payment to find the kid's dad.
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