Friday, September 30, 2022

Jack Staff: Everything Used to Be Black and White

Jack Staff Volume 1: Everything Used to Be Black and WhiteJack Staff Volume 1: Everything Used to Be Black and White by Paul Grist
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This collects the original black and white Jack Staff stories, written and drawn by Paul Grist, and it's fantastic. Time to put it all out there - There aren't a lot of super hero comics I enjoy beyond a feeling of nostalgia these days. Jack Staff is one of the exceptions.

Born out of a rejected Union Jack proposal for Marvel, Jack Staff is Britain's greatest super hero. Accompanied, or sometimes in spite of, the agents of Q, Jack battles vampires, super criminals, time leeches, and various other things.

Paul Grist's art isn't typical super hero fair. It's more cartoony, more angular, less muscle bound. It's also much more moody, akin to Hellboy in some ways. The writing is crisp. I know Grist did some crime comics too. He must have honed his chops there.

The stories themselves are told in short installments. A lot is left unanswered. By the end of the volume, we still don't know much about what happened to Jack Staff after World War II. It's pulp fun, featuring guest stars like Betty Burdock, Vampire Reporter, and Charlie Raven, greatest escapologist of the Victorian Age.

Jack Staff himself is sort of an enigma. By day, he's a builder named John Smith. By night, he's a costumed hero with a power staff that ends up getting beat up and/or thrown in jail a lot of the time. All of this stuff is in my wheelhouse, by the way.

I'm probably not selling this adequately but Jack Staff is exactly the kind of super hero book I want to read. It pays tribute to the past without being shackled buy it and pretty much does whatever it wants. Five out of five stars. I'm glad I have the other three volumes en route.

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