Jack Staff: Everything Used to Be Black and White
Paul Grist
Reprints Jack Staff V1 1-12
Get this for: somebody else’s nostalgia
A bit of a cheat this time, as I was getting a bit bored with Silver Age DC but didn’t want to skip another week. Hence this compromise. I’d gotten the first three volumes of Paul Grist’s retro nostalgic English superhero series at some con and had read bits and pieces of them, but not yet the first volume all the way through. This was a nice excuse to do so.
As I understand it, Jack Staff grew out of a proposal Paul Grist made to Marvel for an Union Jack miniseries, this being one of Marvel’s patriotic British superheroes created by Americans and therefore somewhat on the naff side. What works well for Captain America doesn’t quite work for British superheroes. So it’s a good thing it was rejected, which meant he didn’t have to adhere to American ideas about superheroes and could indulge in nostalgia for much more English sort of heroes.
Because there is a sort of British superhero tradition, even apart from reworkings of American imports like Marvelman, a tradition coming out of the old IPC and Fleetway weekly comics anthologies of the sixties & seventies, full of weird not quite super, not quite heroes. This isn’t a nostalgia I share too much about, knowning about most of these comics only secondhand through well, projects like this. There have been a lot of British writers who have been indulging in this nostalgia, like Alan Moore in Captain Britain and Grant Morrison in Zenith, basically whenever they needed an army of superheroes to get slaughtered, and you pick up a lot of this by osmosis.
So while the series is called Jack Staff and he is the nominal hero of it, quite a lot of it is actually devoted to all these lovingly done introductions of characters like Tom Tom the Robot Man (who is of course an expy of Robot Archie). Grist introduces a hell of a lot of characters, both expies like this, but also more original ones and every single one of them gets their own half or quarter page introductionary panel. This works well to give an old-fashioned feel to the strip, in effect dividing each issue as if was one of those old anthologies.
When it works well, it’s great, but it depends a lot on creating atmosphere and the average comics nerd’s ability to fill in the missing pieces themselves through decades of experience with this sort of retro continuity. Reading it all at once, instead of issue by issue makes for a disjoined experience. These aren’t so much stories, as sketches of stories. that’s always the risk with this sort of comic of course, when you’re trying to hint at an entire universe worth of back story, again relying on the average reader’s understanding of superhero cliches.
The funny thing about the series is also how incompetent and useless Jack Staff is. His secret identity is unmasked in the first issue, he gets knocked out more often than Green Lantern used to be and most of his cases are resolved by others. It’s a very English view of superheroes, of not very useful, not very dependable weirdos, even in an universe filled with strange beings and alien menaces.
What makes the series is Grist’s artwork, which is gloriously expressive, making full use of the possibilities of black and white. At times it’s Toth like in its use of shadows, but Grist also uses white backgrounds a lot to isolate his characters, especially in those half page introductions. Many artists would be afraid to leave so much empty, but Grist has the courage to do so when necessary. All in all this was a very enjoyable trip through somebody else’s nostalgia.