Grayson #6

With the series now at the half-year mark and a confirmed hit, it’s time for Seely-King to move on from their usual done-in-one adventures and aim bigger. To put it bluntly, the Paragon organs aren’t really doing it for me. They’re decent enough MacGuffins, but poorly understood and a little too capable of anything the plot requires, not always in the most intuitive ways. The Paragon brain is a good example; it exists to pose a threat for the purposes of the current storyline, but no one can really explain what it actually is and how it’s used.

That’s set to change by the end of the issue, among a whole host of other radical developments for Grayson, including its first “To be continued,” or in its own words, “Yeah but wha?!” It’s almost too sharp a gear shift for a series that’s been coasting on a fairly effective formula for five issues (plus an annual): identify the organ, retrieve the organ, debrief Mr. Minos, debrief Batman—the end. This issue might very well have followed that path if Midnighter didn’t literally drag Dick way off course, into the heart of his outer-space sanctum.

As fun as Midnighter’s appearances have been,* they haven’t really done much to round out his character or explain what his stake in this spy game is. That doesn’t change too much here. His mission may be to “keep superhuman experiments” out of the hands of groups like Spyral, but most of his animosity is personal; he’s got a grudge against Dick and the slippery bastards Dick works for. At some point, however, Seely-King have to give Midnighter a win. He can’t keep getting punked by Dick and maintain his rep as an alterna-Batman.

Anyway, Midnighter is merely a pawn himself, albeit a formidable one. The real player here is the Gardener, a Zen-looking elderly woman who manages the God Garden, a refuge for man-made monsters. [Spoiler alert!] That sounds benevolent, until the Gardener refers to Midnighter as her “first child,” suggesting he, too, is a product of bioengineering, though somewhat better looking than the Frankensteins they’ve got locked up in there. The Gardener reveals a whole slew of information, including the origins of Paragon, but only in bits and pieces that don’t quite form a clear image as yet.

This same vagueness prevents us from getting a firm handle on the people/thing running Spyral, even after Seely-King draw back the curtain to let us see them in plain view. That’s no small trick, to be able to throw us a few tantalizing scraps while saving the meal itself for another day. The hints aren’t limited to the strange, surreal trio composing Spyder, but also to Mr. Minos. The issue doesn’t go so far as to make him sympathetic, but it does encourage you to get your sympathy ready as Spyder and Minos make reference to a painful, personal memory driving him forward.

Meanwhile, Helena’s left to deal with the mission at hand alone once Dick’s put on another, more compelling track. This would be a prime opportunity for her to demonstrate the chops that made her a top agent before Dick came along, which the series has barely scratched. It’d also be nice if for once Seely-King took the time to fully flesh out the minor villain of the month, this time the Fist of Cain, an extremist group whose beef with the world is more philosophical than actual.

Having just been spoiled with some top-notch action work in Jupiter’s Legacy #5, I think I can better pin down my dissatisfaction with Janín’s art. While you can tell neither Midnighter nor Dick hold back in their rematch, you still don’t get a visceral sense of the violence at work. What Frank Quitely renders as disfigured flesh and bones, Janín reduces to abstract impact shapes—you know, those bright, star-like things that appear every time one person’s limbs strikes another person’s body. It gets the job done, but it also leaves Dick and Midnighter looking relatively unscathed by each other’s blows. Still, Janín is a solid resource for this title; not every artist can make a zombie orca with nanotechnology legs look that genuinely horrifying.

Some Musings:

* Hilariously, Midnighter can now recognize Dick even in Hypnos mode by the fact that “I’d know that ass anywhere. Grayson.” Cue the slash fanfiction writers.