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To skip the rambles and get straight to the yea or nay on picking this up, click here for the Bottom Line
First before it’s asked, no I haven’t read anything by Paul Grist. I know I know I should read Jack Staff but it’s on my list of crap I can’t afford to buy at the moment. Fortunately though this one-shot of his I happened to pick up during my random indie comic buy, back about a month or two ago
SOOO, the Cosmic Warrior (hey I can list the entire title but do you really want me to write that out every damn time)…it’s good. As a guy that hasn’t really read or viewed anything Paul Grist has done, I gotta say, I dig his style, both in terms of storytelling/dialogue and art style.
This one-shot starts off with the story of a warrior being told to a king, the general implication by the story seer being is the warrior will be the one to come to their lands one day to destroy the “evil king” / him. In a semi-humorous, semi-brutal way , the king, wise to the seer’s story and subtext, kills off the storyteller unappreciative of the discussion of his demise. From here it jumps to another story, and another. Swords, monks, knights, a severed hand and more good stuff is involved but I don’t wanna spoil you too much on any of it.
Ok, so this one-shot is weird but in a good way I guess. Reading to the end of this comic Grist says a little bit about telling random stories in Jack Staff focused around the main character, and I am guessing from this one-shot, he’s basically doing the same for the cosmic warrior, so I’ll cut the man some slack. Taken as separate side stories, this first issue is good, Grist’s dialogue is tight and feels almost lyrical. The writing in each story reminds me of some prior Conan The Barbarian stuff I have read, in tonality and just overall feeling. When reading these stories I am also reminded of parts of Mignola’s storytelling, in that there is a somewhat ancient old feel to the writing. The artwork helps supplement the overall “ancient” feeling in storytelling, mirroring something one would see Mignola draw or Gabriel Ba / Fabio Moon draw. Where Grist is different from Mignola / Ba / and Moon though, is that in his art style Grist manages to stripe away everything in a panel to it’s most essential parts. Case in point, if you look at Gabriel Ba or Fabio Moon’s stuff, some of that shit is intricate, I mean it’s kinda beautiful too but it’s INTRICATE in detail, compare this against Grist’s art style though an you see he manages to somehow create something as equally as beautiful as Ba/Moon’s styles but with infinitely less details. It’s minimalistic yet it still leaves the stuff you need visually.
(Side note: While reading this first issue I couldn’t help but think of Samurai Jack a couple of times, this is like Samurai Jack in a way, just replace the samurai bit with an ancient viking-looking warrior)
So…bottom line, this book is good. The art is easy on the eyes and the storytelling is good…..bastard just needs to give us a full story next issue instead of whetting our appetite and then cuttin us off like a surly coke dealer. You heard me Grist! Full self contained story next time man!
