Written by Nathan Edmondson
Illustrated by CAFUThe DCU’s most wanted man stars in his own series!
Cole Cash is a charming grifter few can resist. And yet he’s about to be branded a serial killer when he begins hunting and exterminating inhuman creatures hidden in human form — creatures only he can see!
Can the biggest sweet talker of all time talk his way out of this one when even his brother thinks he’s gone over the edge?
Grifter #1: a decent character and premise in search of a way to reach out to the readers. More after the jump.
Grifter is a weird character. When Jim Lee created him back at the dawn of the Image Era, he was meant to be the scruffy rogue who all the 12-year-old boys could get behind and relate to when they didn’t want to do their homework or when they wished they could watch 3 Ninjas whenever they wanted instead of having to go to bed. WildC.A.T.s — the series that spawned our man — spent most of its early issues going “We’re not the X-Men, the X-Men would never do this!” while then proceeding to rip off the X-Men. Wolverine’s core attributes got split up amongst three characters: Emp got his height, Warblade got his claws, and Grifter got his shady past and attitude. Cole Cash — seriously, that’s his name, and his brother is Max, and I’m not even lying — always danced on the line between an earnest Wolverine copycat, and a winking Wolverine parody. For a guy who was supposed to be one of the baddest of the bad, he spent half his time walking into traps, getting into trouble while stinking drunk, or otherwise establishing that how he had lived as long as he had was a mystery. He was half killing machine and half hopeless bumbler, and we were asked to take him seriously all the same.
Now, don’t get me wrong: that’s not a complaint, coming from me. In fact, I wish this new series was more like that.
We don’t get a half-badass, half-fuckup Grifter here. We get Cole Cash – half guy, half dude. What’s frustrating about this is that it’s not any fault of the characterization — it’s one hundred percent the fault of the structure through which said characterization is delivered. Here’s what we’re told, essentially: Cole Cash is an ex-military con man who, after being abducted by a mysterious entity, begins hearing voices in his head, and as a result begins killing people he believes to be the voices’ sources. This, as you can imagine, will cause him problems. The way we’re told all of this: We open with a flash-forward of Grifter killing someone, then flash back to Grifter doing his grifting thing, then flash forwards again to the initial killing, then flash back again to — wait, I think I’ve gotten myself tied up here. I read the comic not an hour ago and I already can’t keep track of the chronology of 20 pages of material. I was a dedicated X-Men reader in the early 90s — trust me, I can navigate twisty nonsense. So it’s saying something that Grifter seems to almost go out of its way to be unclear.
When it comes to clarity, though, CAFU shines. I love CAFU’s work, and if writer Nathan Edmondson had taken a different route, they’d be perfectly in sync. Again, it all comes down to the execution. By breaking up the story’s timeframe and emphasizing themes of paranoia and possible insanity (well, we know he’s not really crazy, but still), Edmondson has written a comic that lives or dies by its atmosphere. It demands heavy shadows, a foreboding sense of dread, and a soundtrack by John Carpenter. Even at his most Image-riffic, Grifter was supposed to be the dude with friends in low places, whose mask probably always smelled from the inside like a distinct mixture of tequila breath, vomit, and Zealot’s thighs. If Edmondson had structured the story as a straight-ahead “con man gets blasted by alien jerks, goes on the run, shoots lots of guns” story, CAFU’s great art would have stronger legs. Instead, it’s wonderful artwork that’s nonetheless ill-matched, style-wise, to the tone of things. Lurking and creeping don’t seem to be CAFU’s strong suit.
Continued belowIf I had to pin one adjective to Grifter #1, it’d be “confused.” Confused, naturally, leads to confusing. At one point, Grifter mentions having lost seventeen minutes of his life. Later in the issue, another character refers to seventeen days. At the end, it’s seventeen hours. If this is an intentional discrepancy, it’s a poorly constructed one; it just makes me wonder which of them was a typo. In general, Grifter tries to establish an atmosphere of mystery and confusion, but it does so ass-backwardsly, and just ends up with a mess.
Cole Cash’s internal monologue pops in and out at random, and never actually explicates any necessary plot points — things that could use exposition are never even addressed, while captions almost exclusively record Grifter’s most banal thoughts, offering information that we could have processed just from looking at the pictures. Likewise, Grifter’s Daemonite Awareness is presented through floating word balloons, but how the word balloons actually interact with Grifter himself is a mystery. At one point, he picks up on a Daemonite’s thoughts, kills them, and then is attacked by another Daemonite. Is he unable to differentiate or notice when two Daemonites are in the area? How does all of this work?
For that matter: who was he conning with that briefcase thing? And will it even matter? And seriously, how does it show us he’s the sweet-talker that the solicitation copy at the top of this article says he is? Shouldn’t we see him actually charming his way through a grift, rather than some faceless magic briefcase switch that we only even see the end of? And what about the mask he puts on at the end of the issue? Why was he carrying it around? What significance does it have beyond the fact that he’s wearing it on the cover? It might seem nit-picky to ask this stuff, especially when things like the mask will no doubt be explored later, but in a first issue designed to present us with what is more or less a new character (albeit built from the bones of an old one), we need to know who Grifter is before we can give a damn about what’s going wrong. You have to set a line of dominos up before you can knock them down. Without cause-and-effect, it’s just a comic book about weird shit happening to Bradley Cooper.
The Multiversity staff had a bit of a chat about Grifter while I was working on this review, and EIC Matt brought up the point that Grifter will probably be a much better comic in the second arc. I agree. By that point — if it makes it there — everything should be bolted in place and Grifter can get on with what he does best (fighting, screwing, and reading the news). It seems like Edmondson has a solid idea of what he wants the series to be, but in the process of putting that idea to paper, he lost his way in terms of communicating this scenario to the audience. We shouldn’t have to work as hard as Grifter #1 asks to figure this stuff out. Hopefully, it’s not too late for the series to ditch the overambitious broken-time structures and tedious captions, and sharpen itself into something tense and efficient — because it’s all there, it’s just not all there yet.
Final Verdict: 6.0 – And another thing, why is Maul not in this, getting super tall?
