Grifter #1 – Review

By: Nathan Edmondson (writer), Cafu (penciller), Jason Gorder (inker), Andrew Dalhouse (colorist)

The Story: Ghosts on a plane.

The Review: For years, I had little familiarity with any comic that didn’t belong to the Big Two publishers.  Even so, among the hordes of titles featuring Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, and the X-Men, I could pick out one prominent, unfamiliar face: a blond man, dual pistols a-blazing, a red and black cloth covering his face.  While hardly an icon like the aforementioned characters, Grifter is the face of the Wildstorm universe, and has a respectable status of his own.

In DC’s efforts to promote its acquired Wildstorm properties, Grifter is thus the obvious choice to get his own solo.  But the renewed DCU is quickly becoming a crowded place, and it’ll be a struggle for him (or any lesser-known character, for that matter) to scrounge out a special corner for himself.  What can he bring to the table that we can’t find elsewhere?  Why does he deserve a spot on the stands next to Green Lantern and the Fantastic Four?

Jumping out of a plane after plunging a pointed instrument into a passenger’s eye and before cracking the neck of a flight attendant is a good start.  Really, you don’t get more wakeful openers than that.  The sequence has all the marks of a strong, tense in medias res intro: instant action, a bewildered understanding of events, and a gripping protagonist.  By the time you hit the splash credits in midair, just above the ocean, you’ve already half-invested yourself in his fate.

Edmondson then smartly takes us back to Cole Cash’s quieter days, though you can hardly classify even those as normal.  Even before Cole takes on the name, his talent for confidence tricks has already earned him a rep as an impressive grifter.  That said, the con sequence comes laden with logistical confusion.  You don’t know the target’s identity, the nature of the faked transaction, or even what he gets out of it (since the money he’s given turns out counterfeit).