Saturday Splash Page #103

"No Candy Apples at This Fair," in Swords of Texas #4, by Stephen Scott Beau Smith (writer), Flint Henry (artist), Sam Parsons (colorist), Tim Harkins (letterer)

There were two mini-series set in the years between Tim Truman's Scout, and his follow-up, Scout: War Shaman. We'll get to New America eventually, but for today, we've got Swords of Texas.

Swords of Texas was 4 issues, with a lead story and a back-up. The lead story, written by Chuck Dixon, with art by Ben Dunn, Mark McKenna and Sam Parsons, was about a gun runner named Banner and his crew agreeing to supply arms to a revolutionary seeking to overthrow the joint Soviet/Japanese Communist government that ran Mexico and locked peasants up in work camps under threat of not seeing their families again. That was not, in practice, an approach that did much for production or worker morale, but they figure there are always more workers, so who cares?

It's a real "politics make strange bedfellows" story. Banner would prefer to not get mixed in politics and stick to profit concerns, but finds that difficult. He's being bankrolled by both Israel and a Navajo politician working on making what had been the southwestern United States an independent nation. Having Baja splinter off from Mexico and feel indebted would be at least one less pressure for all that. The Japanese governor of Baja has a whole samurai mentality, albeit one where it's perfectly honorable to run a prison camp calling itself a factory. The guide arranged for Banner's group - because as a real American, Banner has learned no Spanish despite living in the Southwest - is a Jewish-Hispanic New York cab driver.

It's got a very '80s action movie feel to it, with a few smaller gun battles prior to the big fight at the prison, which includes some vaguely Robotech-looking mechs (although they don't shift into a jet or anything cool like that.) Lots of tough guy dialogue, with the occasional one-liner or banter scene to lighten things up in between the shooting.

It doesn't end neatly. The workers are freed, but there's no guarantee they'll be able to set up their own government and make it stick, even if they can hold off the army. Banner and his crew are not seized by revolutionary fervor to ditch life as gun dealers. They haven't even gotten paid yet by the end of the mini-series.

There wasn't really a great splash page from that, so I went with the back-up story, by Beau Smith and Flint Henry, revolving around what feels like a Beau Smith self-insert character named Beau LaDuke (who had, to be fair, been a regular supporting cast member in Scout.) Beau must hurry back to West Virginia, picking up the rest of his siblings and some other people along the way, to help his dad defend the family amusement park from some scumbags looking to pull a insurance scam/land grab with government help.

The help includes a preacher who machine-guns those unwilling to turn from their sinful paths, and a private security guy Beau's dad calls C.I.A. as short for "Chuckie-in-Action." Flint Henry's art is pretty much perfect for this, with the little background details, the way he can make everyone look rabid or deranged, and the cartoonish energy he brings to violence. There is a panel is this where the preacher shoots a bunch of guys while driving one of the bumper cars, and another where Beau, while attempting to bear hug a general he crossed paths with previously, gets big chunks of his chest hair ripped out.

It also ends with LaDuke encouraging people to write in and request a Beau LaDuke series while what I assume are the Eclipse editorial staff try frantically to white out that panel.

Sunday Splash Page #215

 

"This Neighborhood's Going to Hell," in GrimJack: Demon Knight, by John Ostrander (writer), Flint Henry (artist), Martin Thomas (colorist), Gary Fields (letterer)

Demon Knight was an original graphic novel, published the same month as GrimJack #64, which I reviewed for Random Back Issues #72. The machine which controls any and all time travel in Cynosure is glitching out spectacularly and GrimJack takes the job to go in and pull the plug. Except he gets distracted by a memory and falls back through time to his first life. Specifically his peaceful, happy times in Pdwyr, after he left the Arena, but before he went to fight in the Demon Wars.

GrimJack at least avoids meeting his younger, original body self, who is already off to war, but can't stay away from Rhian, the love of his life. He's determined to fix his past mistake, or so he says. He takes his sweet time getting to it, and by the time he decides to hunt down Major Lash and kill him, well, see the splash page. Never put off a manhunt until tomorrow when you should already be killing him today.

Ostrander presents GrimJack as the only one who knows what's coming but refuses to accept it. Rhian doesn't know exactly what's going on, but if her love has returned from the future in a different body it can't be good. But she doesn't fear death, because it's just the body not the soul. Likewise, her father Maethe knows exactly what's coming, but feels what would be required to avert it would be worse than letting events go as they do.

GrimJack, meanwhile, is so caught up in trying to break out of this cycle he's in he grasps at straws. Pdwyr is the place where he was happy, where he had peace. He left, it burned, so that must have been his mistake. If he just prevents that, he can escape everything else! Which ignores the fact part of the reason Maethe couldn't teach him to be a wizard was because of all the anger in his soul, that same anger that drove him to go fight in the Demon Wars. And even once he's failed, he can't let go. Has to take revenge on both the demons and Major Lash. Both decisions end up causing him trouble once he gets back to his proper time. 

There's a strong current, especially in things Maethe says, that make me think GrimJack's doomed to this cycle because he can't ever simply accept his past failures and move on. He's always torturing himself over them.

Henry's version of GrimJack here is able to exhibit a wider range of emotions because there's a brief stretch where he's actually feeling good. But when things go wrong, he takes on a nearly rabid expression. Wild-eyed and grinning in a way that looks like his teeth are going to shatter. When he really starts to let loose and tap into the energy inside him, Thomas has it green and purple energy practically bubbling out of and off GrimJack. Like he's a bomb about to explode and just so gleeful about it.

Demon Knight isn't referenced in the ongoing series until issue #70, by which time the Steve Pugh-drawn "Demon Wars" story arc, detailing John's leaving Pdwyr to join the fight to drive the demons out of Cynosure, had concluded. And the decisions he made in this story accelerate his decline in the last dozen or so issues of the series.

Sunday Splash Page #214

 

"Back Where It Ended," in GrimJack #77, by John Ostrander (writer), Flint Henry (penciler), Hilary Barta (inker), Martin Thomas (colorist), Gary Fields (letterer)

In the last issue with Tom Mandrake as series artist, Gaunt learned a rather disturbing fact: Death was not going to be the end for him. His unwillingness to abandon a friend had far-reaching consequences, and the last third of the series starts to explore that.

Set 200 years later, GrimJack is a man named Jim Twilley, but he's also John Gaunt, whose fate is now tied to Cynosure's, condemning him to be reborn so long as the city exists. He takes it well. That's a lie, he takes it horribly, initially refusing to try and reconcile two sets of lived experiences. once he remembers his past, he goes out of his way to claim that Jim Twilley doesn't exist, his family and friends remember someone who doesn't exist. He eventually pulls his head from his ass, but as usual, his decisions had consequences.

This version of GrimJack is wilder, more vicious than his earlier incarnation. Which is saying something given what that guy got up to, but it's true. He has less control of his worst tendencies, or more likely he doesn't bother to control them. Learning that you're a long way from ever getting back to your loved ones in Heaven will do that to ya. In his previous life, he knew how to bargain with people, how to at least attempt to sweet-talk someone. Now he doesn't even try. Even when people agree to help him or extend a helping hand, he goes out of his way to push until he pisses them off. His best friend BlacJacMac made allowance for him if he did return, GrimJack burns that bridge down in one issue.

I think the first third of GrimJack (roughly the Truman and Tom Sutton issues) is about how Gaunt how Gaunt's stubbornness and loyalty lead to him standing by his friends and they, in turn, stand by him. The second third (Mandrake's run) highlighted how that, stubbornness and loyalty can go awry for his friends. The final third seems to highlight that GrimJack is his own worst enemy. He grows more reckless and desperate as it progresses, the faint hope of what he might get back to someday failing to keep him going. 

All his attempts to improve his lot, or even to help save a long-lost friend, end up failing because he can't put his own selfish desires aside. He can't let what Major Lash did pass, which would have let him stay dead. Instead, he takes revenge and ensures he'll have to deal with him again, and again. So that when he does finish it, he puts everything else he was trying to accomplish at risk. As he can't seem to find any pleasure in anything other than tormenting people or taking revenge, he just keeps pissing different people off until he's besieged from all sides. All the times he just had to have it his way coming back to haunt him. Not even in any coordinated, "super-villain team-up" manner, just all these people deciding, "fuck it, I'm sick of that asshole," at the same time.

(There's a series of back-up stories that run near the end that detail Gaunt's life growing up, and what happened between him and his brothers. The main thing is we learn that is was impressed on John very early in life that he should never allow anyone to disrespect or harm him. Every injury must be repaid in kind, or worse. He never unlearned that lesson.)

Flint Henry's GrimJack is different, and not just because it's an entirely different physical body. His version is more expressive, less guarded. Truman and Mandrake's GrimJack has a death's head grin that suggests a cold enjoyment of the fact they're about to kill an enemy. Henry's is wilder, like he's either not even aware of what he's about to do, or he's planning to go a lot further than just killing. And Henry is more graphic with the violence. When GrimJack cuts somebody apart, there's blood and guts following the arc the sword. 

The whole run looks more, I'd almost say lurid. The closest thing Twilley gets to a romantic relationship in this run (minus some time travel hijinks) is with a sorceress who draws off tantric energy. So, you know, a fair amount of implied fucking to charge her engine. The colors are brighter, the oppressive shadows of Mandrake's run largely banished. Henry's version of Cynosure is the most crowded, the most hi-tech. It feels like it owes more to Blade Runner or sci-fi of that sort, whereas Truman's ran more to noir and Mandrake's to horror or German Expressionism, maybe. It is 200 years into the future, so that makes some sense, though I'd also expect there to be dimensions coming into phase that time runs backwards, or it moves faster and civilizations have been destroyed.

Random Back Issues #72 - GrimJack #64

John Gaunt's looking a bit different than the last time we saw him, but that's because he's also a guy named Jim Twilley!

By this point, we're following one of GrimJack's reincarnations, 200 years later. He's still getting the right people pissed off at him, though. Hired by a man named Alfred Godden, who feared he was going to be killed by someone named Dis, Twilley arrived to find Godden dead. Godden's daughter shouted an accusation at him, which is enough for Justice Drok (has to be a Judge Dredd spoof) to carry out an execution.

Gaunt/Twilley gets a reprieve in the form of Justice Peece, who resembles Commissioner Gordon a bit. Peece is a robot cop capable of non-linear thinking, so he's been assigned to investigate murders. Peece hears GrimJack out, who explains Godden believed he was going to be killed by someone named Dis, for doing them dirty in a past life. Godden's daughter explains she was just pissed GrimJack didn't protect her dad, so Peece commutes the sentence and takes over the investigation, sending both Drok and GrimJack on their way. 

Neither is happy about it, but Drok can't disobey programming. Gaunt however, does as he pleases, and heads to the suburbs. The Bainbridge family's kid had lots of souls, but only inhabited the body at the time. The rest roaming Cynosure, learning anything they want. Like, possibly the location of a person named Dis. Chuckie's not interested in sharing, but Twilley's magic speaks louder and the kid coughs up the goods. Chuckie relinquishes the body back to Zack, who breaks down sobbing. At the dad's question of how he did that, GrimJack only replies 'I know the dark better than you son will ever know it.' That's an understatement. Also awkwardly worded.

Meanwhile, a group called the Ninth Circle, is making backup plans. They're a bunch of demons using human bodies for shells, including Godden's daughter. The Circle isn't convinced they can pull off their scheme without some help, so they summon a 'True Hell's Angel,' TDP bike cop Jericho Noleski. Who arrives on a flaming motorcycle with four cans of a six pack left.

The last time Noleski showed up was 200 years (and 14 issues) ago, when he drove into a demon gate to seal it up as a final act. Hard to believe he only drank two of those beers in all that time, but Hell probably has some decent booze, and Noleski's the sort who would find it.

GrimJack, following Chuckie's information, heads to the Thatcher Building. An entire apartment block on wheels, endlessly circling a massive highway, offering temporary housing for the poorest of the poor. Dis is hanging out inside Li Ho Fok's opium den. They don't remember killing anyone, but do know about the Ninth Circle. And that's because. . . well, if you had, "Dis is the first thing formed after the great battle between two primal gods and created the multiverse," you are correct. Also, you're probably cheating.

Dis created different universes by dreaming them, but lost energy in the process. They created the demons to build Cynosure to gather back that energy so Dis could achieve full strength, split back into the two gods, and start the whole thing over. The demons decided they preferred the universe gradually burn out, and designed a building to keep Dis trapped. Essentially, the Big Bang/Big Crunch theory versus the entropic universe theory. Did the Legion of Superheroes do that with Time Trapper versus the Infinity Man or something?

Anyway, GrimJack destroyed that trap 200 years (and 10 issues) ago. Dis isn't sure they care whether the demons succeed in killing them or not, and neither is GrimJack. If Dis dies and Cynosure eventually burns out, Gaunt can't keep being reborn, since his fate is tied to the city. Sure, but how quickly does that happen? There's gotta be a quicker way to end that cycle.

That's about when Noleski makes the scene. GrimJack tries getting his attention, but remember what I said about Noleski plunging into a demon gate? Gaunt's partially the reason Jericho needed to make a grand final act at that moment, so Jericho goes ahead and causes the building to crash.

In the Munden's Bar back-up (set 200 years in the past), a reporter waits for his informant, I mean snitch. Flea had been a series regular whenever Gaunt needed information, but even he has scruples. Mac Heath (who was the loan shark that was an literal shark in GrimJack #29) killed a judge brutally enough, Flea's gonna tell the papers. If he makes it to Munden's Bar.

[5th longbox, 10th comic. GrimJack #64, "Catspaw" by John Ostrander (writer), Flint Henry (penciller/inker), Gerald Horton (inker), Martin Thomas (colorist), Gary Fields (letterer). "Snitch" by Kim Yale (writer), Tony Akins (penciller), Tom Baxa (inker), Paul Mounts (colorist), Gary Fields (letterer)]