Oh no! Once again I have chosen to write about a superhero comic in an article specifically designed to not write about superhero comics! What am I doing here?
Then again, the modus operandi of the article series is really to just spotlight creator-owned books not published by either of the Big Two, and Jack Staff’s ongoing certainly falls into that category. Plus, everyone else at Multiversity is going pretty gaga for Paul Grist’s new book Mudman. I suppose it’s only decent of me to remind everyone of that other great superhero comic he wrote/is working on more of slowly but surely, right?
Hop past the cut for some thoughts on Britain’s Greatest Hero!.
I suppose I should not hide the fact that, in no uncertain terms, I am an anglophile. I’m a huge fan of media from across the pond; my favorite television show of 2011 was the Black Mirror, which I don’t think I’m technically supposed to have seen. Almost all of my favorite comics are produced by Brits, and fellow MC writers usually make fun of me for talking too much about non-American films and not liking The Descendants. So when I say that I went out and bought a comic book just because the character on the cover was dressed in a Union Flag, it really shouldn’t surprise anyone. At all.
It’s this that brings us — or, more specifically, me — to Jack Staff. Born out of the ashes of a failed Union Jack pitch (or so I read), Jack Staff is Paul Grist’s ultimate tribute to British comics; full of rich characters pulled and re-translated from a large collection of source material, Jack Staff is in many ways similar to other independent superhero comics, playing off of analogues or archetypes to create a familiar-but-new world of heroes and villains. Yet, where Jack Staff succeeds and few others of this style don’t, is that it knows exactly when to stop being something else and delve into its own mythos. Beyond introducing a familiar enough world, Jack Staff very quickly evolves into its own beast within just a few pages of the first issue.
This is largely in part to Grist’s fantastic sense of storytelling. When boiling it down, Grist specializes in two elements. The first is in the aforementioned familiar-but-new world building; we’ve all seen examples of comics, books, television or even film “borrowing” specific ideas, characters or roles. After so many years of stories, it is sort of an inevitability that certain things will ultimately be re-used. Yet, the true mastery comes in how you re-use them, and to that Grist is a magnificent puppeteer. There is a grand wealth of British comics that Grist pays tribute to in Jack Staff, the entirety of which I can’t even begin to name (and, truthfully, there are others better at compiling this than I am), yet in every example the world is inviting. It’s similar to what Paul Cornell did with Knight and Squire: this is a world immersed in a culture unfamiliar, but the very nature of the comics it is born from ultimately makes it accessible to even the neophyte of British entertainment.
As Grist writes in the introduction to the first collected volume on Image, “Much has been made of the cultural references in the stories, but please don’t let that put you off. After all, we British have been able to cope with American comics for the past 40 years!” So if you get the references, great! If you don’t, no worries, you can still follow along quite easily. While Grist certainly reinvents things like Robot Archie into Tom Tom and the Spider into… well, the Spider, they instantaneously take on a life of their own, leaving little behind of their previous existences and inhabiting a world of their own. This is, in so many words, the ultimate success of Jack Staff: it manages to both be something old and something new at the same time.
This ultimately leads directly into the second thing that Grist does best: razor sharp plot lines. With Jack Staff, Grist shows off his mastery of storytelling, plotting up to six or more plot threads at a time and telling each simultaneously, both in the past and present. We see Jack Staff in the 40’s, 60’s, and today, but every story is told at once for maximum effect. You’ll ultimately spend only about a page or two at a time with any given character or thread before being rushed away to another edge of Castletown, and the pacing as such keeps the book at a rhythm all of its own — fast, loose and sharp. These various threads all collide in a powerful climax after a few issues, resulting in some of the most satisfying stories available in stores today (which, admittedly, read better in trade than single issues).
So what do we actually have from Jack Staff and The Weird World Of? Many things (and, as a note, I suppose these are all technically spoilers): Vampire reporters. Self-aware fourth-wall breaking mages dictating tasks to the reader (who get increasingly aggravated the more you turn the page). Age-old escape artists and bank robbers. Dark curses and rage bombs. World ending prophecies. Demonic swords and the mad men who wield them. Genre-bending storytelling. Robots, and the girls who run them. Posh demon hounds. Jack Staff‘s scope is far and wide, and yet despite pulling from all corners of the world and filling itself to the brim with mythology, it never loses focus or pace, and it always hits its mark.
Of course, it also doesn’t hurt that Grist has a fantastic sense for visual storytelling. Despite operating in part as a tribute to superhero comics, the book could not be handled visually in a less atypical style. In many instances of the book, Grist eschews the typical formats of panels and gutters and instead fills the pages to the brim with a diverse style of eye-catching layouts, from buildings integrated into text or poster-esque introductions to characters. The landscape of Jack Staff is an ever shifting one, and when Phil Elliot joins the book as colour artist with volume two the book really begins to sing. Grist and Elliot make for a great duo on par with that of Laura and Mike Allred, creating a delicious and bright comic with pop-sensibilities, and it ultimately increases the level of which we experience the weird world of Jack Staff.
Jack Staff was always meant for bigger things, and hopefully one day it will achieve that. (He was supposed to have an Invincible and Savage Dragon crossover at one point, but scheduling conflicts ended up burying the idea — although he does appear in the background in two issues of Invincible.) Last we saw him, Jack Staff had just barely defeated a world-ending prophecy before his series mysteriously disappeared with two solicited issues pending, with Mudman showing up sometime after. We cross our fingers evermore that he will return, but if Grist’s love of the character is any indication, Jack Staff will be back — and it would behoove you to be caught up with his adventures when he returns.
