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The Manx Cat had gone wandering again-- A review of Grimjack: The Manx Cat (tpb)

If you read any of John Ostrander and Tim Truman's Grimjack back during the 80s, there was one little statue that showed up now and again; the Manx Cat.  Think of it as the Maltese Falcon but only as a cat.  Ostrander wrote some great stories that started with "The Manx Cat had gone wandering again," usually meaning that someone had stolen it and it was up to John Gaunt, Grimjack, to find it for a price; nothing comes cheap in sweet, cynical Cynosure. 

I've always been a fan of Ostrander and Truman's Grimjack, discovering the book shortly after Truman left it to work on his own comic series Scout.  To a teenaged me, Ostrander's stories were so much more real than anything out of Marvel or DC.  While they were filled with more than their share of supernatural elements, Ostrander always knew what his stories were about; the characters.  In everything from his runs on Suicide Squad and The Spectre and through to his current work on Star Wars: Legacy, his writing is all firmly rooted in strong characterization.  The center of any Ostrander story are the people who inhabit his story.  At its heart, Grimjack: The Manx Cat is a heist story set in a sword & sorcery world; it's Elmore James meets Michael Moorcock.  It's a fantastic high concept but it only works because Ostrander makes the characters work.  He makes the characters real.

Following up 2005's Grimjack: Killer Instinct (think "Grimjack: Year One,") The Manx Cat is a great story about a man who thinks there's no one else in the world he can count on.  As is pointed out to him, "Mister Gaunt hates everybody.  The ones he loves tend to die."  As a coping mechanism for all of the death around him, Grimjack has come to count on only one person- himself.  As he has to learn what the Manx Cat actually is and his own ties to its origin, Ostrander makes the larger by having Grimjack realize what sacrifices he's maybe unnecessarily made in his life that have cost him.  While Ostrander doesn't dig deeply into Grimjack's past in this book, we see Grimjack dealing with people in this book with more than just a sword or a gun or just as clients or enemies. 

Even with great artists like Tom Mandrake, Flint Henry and Tom Sutton working with Ostrander in the past on Grimjack, there's only one artist who is Grimjack's true artist; co-creator Tim Truman.  Over the years since Grimjack first appeared, Truman has only gotten better, a master storyteller who is also a fantastic craftsman.  He perfectly brings Ostrander's story to life, creating a visual world where anything can, and often does, happen.  The Manx Cat is a blend of many kinds of genre stories but Truman mixes them all together to create a wonderfully grim and gritty world, a world where you feel the sweat, heat and grime from a knock-down fight or can smell the beer that's seeped into an old bar's walls.  Truman gives The Manx Cat the physicality that the story needs.  After working together for so long, Ostrander and Truman's works blend seamlessly together in The Manx Cat to create a fantastic Grimjack story.

It's been over 25 years since Ostrander and Truman originally worked together on Grimjack and a lot about comics and storytelling have changed since then.  Their first stories with the character were short, little 8 page backups in the back of Mike Grell's Starslayer.  Throughout the run on Grimjack, Ostrander pushed his comics by telling 4-5 issue stories but never lost sight of the individual issues.  Grimjack: The Manx Cat has been an online comic, a six issue miniseries and is now collected together in one book.  In this final form, The Manx Cat works perfectly as a comic book novel.  Ostrander and Truman have told a Grimjack story perfectly for modern storytelling, creating a graphic novel without needing to pad the story at any point.  Comic storytelling has changed and they've adapted perfectly to it.


Grimjack: The Manx Cat
Written by: John Ostrander
Drawn by: Timothy Truman
Colored by: Lovern Kindzierski
Lettered by: John Workman


Grimjack: The Manx Cat is available on Amazon.com.