Jack Staff, Volume 2: Soldiers - Paul Grist
As I said in my review of Volume 1, I was anticipating reading Volume 2. The upside of reading obscure books is that there's no waiting list at the library, so I can get them quickly. Unfortunately, it looks like this is all the Jack Staff that's available for now, so it could be a long wait before Grist publishes some more.
This one is a smaller book, collecting five issues that tell one complete story. There are still some threads from Volume 1 that are left dangling, but at least this story wraps itself up neatly, the way you'd expect an episode of a TV show to reveal all the answers by the end of the half-hour. It's about a military project to create the ultimate weapon which (of course) goes berzerk and destroys half of Castletown. The weapon in question is the Hurricane, basically like the Hulk only not green, and the story takes place both in the present time and in the "20 years ago" when Jack Staff was "Britain's Greatest Hero."
There are still the funky page layouts, the clever plot twists, bizarre villains and heroes. But this time there's something else, too: color! As Grist puts it, "when your main character is wearing a red, white and blue costume it kind of loses something to be limited to black and white." Also, the fact that Harry Crane is a black man didn't really come through in the first volume.
Anyway, it was a fun read, and since I can't get any more Jack Staff for now, I may check out some of Grist's other comics.
Fed to jonathan's brain | February 18, 2005
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