Grifter #1 – Review

By: Nathan Edmondson (writer), Cafu (penciller), Jason Gorder (inker), Andrew Dalhouse (colorist)

The Story: Ghosts on a plane.

The Review: For years, I had little familiarity with any comic that didn’t belong to the Big Two publishers.  Even so, among the hordes of titles featuring Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, and the X-Men, I could pick out one prominent, unfamiliar face: a blond man, dual pistols a-blazing, a red and black cloth covering his face.  While hardly an icon like the aforementioned characters, Grifter is the face of the Wildstorm universe, and has a respectable status of his own.

In DC’s efforts to promote its acquired Wildstorm properties, Grifter is thus the obvious choice to get his own solo.  But the renewed DCU is quickly becoming a crowded place, and it’ll be a struggle for him (or any lesser-known character, for that matter) to scrounge out a special corner for himself.  What can he bring to the table that we can’t find elsewhere?  Why does he deserve a spot on the stands next to Green Lantern and the Fantastic Four?

Jumping out of a plane after plunging a pointed instrument into a passenger’s eye and before cracking the neck of a flight attendant is a good start.  Really, you don’t get more wakeful openers than that.  The sequence has all the marks of a strong, tense in medias res intro: instant action, a bewildered understanding of events, and a gripping protagonist.  By the time you hit the splash credits in midair, just above the ocean, you’ve already half-invested yourself in his fate.

Edmondson then smartly takes us back to Cole Cash’s quieter days, though you can hardly classify even those as normal.  Even before Cole takes on the name, his talent for confidence tricks has already earned him a rep as an impressive grifter.  That said, the con sequence comes laden with logistical confusion.  You don’t know the target’s identity, the nature of the faked transaction, or even what he gets out of it (since the money he’s given turns out counterfeit).

Anyway, the real tension lies in what kind of forces have caught Cole in their grip, and why.  His waking up in an abandoned warehouse save for a tank containing a translucent, glowing alien figure manages to get across a vague sense of the horrifying changes he unconsciously went through.  But despite the terrible reach of his invisible foes, we still have little idea of their actual danger, except some slightly overdramatic mantras: “Disturbed…transfer …devour…presence.”

Then we also have the extra wrinkle of the U.S. government chasing his tail, for reasons beyond Cole’s inadvertent terrorist attack on a commercial flight and several murders.  With all this craziness going on, and the backburner mystery of Cole’s forgotten seventeen days (or minutes, or hours, as he states at the end of the issue), it looks like he’ll have to deal with it on his own, with no help from his impatient lady or his more straight-laced brother.

If you’ve seen any of his work on T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, you know very well that Cafu is an undisputed master of suspenseful storytelling.  His dynamic use of POV skews the imagery, making the art as disorienting as the story’s events, and he can communicate volumes with just the slightest detail in his characters’ fully-formed features.  At the very least, the presence of Cafu ensures this title will be one of the most distinctive-looking on the shelves.

Conclusion: A lot of promise abounds in the solid script, the engaging pacing, and tremendous art, but you can fill a thimble with what we know by the end of the issue.  The next issue will have to do double-duty to fill the crucial gaps.

Grade: B-

– Minhquan Nguyen

Some Musings: – I don’t know how Grifter got his mask in previous continuity, but it receives a pretty righteous origin story here.

– Some people may scoff at the use of combed hair and glasses as a disguise, but let me tell you from personal experience: it can be night and day if you play your cards right.  In this issue, not so much, but the addition of a cowboy hat helps.