Das ist Grifter!

[arbre_rieur]

Four pages from GRIFTER #1...

As the story begins, Cole Cash is an exceptionally talented con artist, fresh off of scamming his latest mark...



He wakes up in an abandoned warehouse, next to some creepy creature in a test tube.



So that's the situation he finds himself in: Confused as to what the hell happened to him, able to hear snippets of a mysterious hive-mind wherever he goes.

On a plane to San Juan, his new ability helps him realize the passenger sitting next to him is part of that hive-mind.



One of the crew also turns out to be one of... them, but our lead manages to escape the plane by means of a bluff involving a small bottle of alcohol. (Well, he *is* a con artist.)

Judging by his watch, he was unconscious in that warehouse for 17 minutes, so he's quite surprised to realize that's not actually the case.



I admit, I'm a sucker for stories about ordinary individuals who by chance get caught up in extraordinary, larger-than-life circumstances. Granted, a gifted con artist who used to be special ops strains the definition of "ordinary" a bit, but it's all relative. It's ordinary in comparison to a world-wide conspiracy between telepathic aliens secretly living among us. I'll be picking up the next issue.

Comments

[darkknightjrk]

I flipped through this one...you know, for a guy who's supposed to be this super-charming con-man, I thought he was really bland. I'm hoping that isn't the case, because this could be a fairly interesting story.

[icon_uk]

Actually, being anonymous when he's not on the job would be exactly what a con-artist would want to be. To be able to move unnoticed most of the time would be perfect.

[darkknightjrk]

Fair point, but we never really saw him doing the con, all the blandness was him off the job.

[icon_uk]

Heh, it's a personal thing. Zartan and Zarana got all the fame because of their ability to appear to be other people, but I always found their brother Zandar more interesting, he specialised in being UNmemorable, in being the guy you'd see, possibly, but never think twice about and you'd certainly never remember what he looked like five minutes later.

Also, in an otherwise fairly horrible UK show featuring Roland Rat (A very unfunny funny animal puppet), there was a character called Chameleon Woman), who had a rather interesting variation on the traditional power. She was a shapeshifter with chameleon powers, but in the disappearing sense, and the sense she was a social chameleon. So she'd commit her crime, and walk away because she was always someone who you'd expect to be in whatever setting she was in, so you would walk right past her. A subtle power, but I have a soft spot for the subtle powers.

[shadowpsykie]

Heh, it's a personal thing. Zartan and Zarana got all the fame because of their ability to appear to be other people, but I always found their brother Zandar......


,,,, ilove you.....

[magus_69]

but I always found their brother Zandar more interesting, he specialised in being UNmemorable, in being the guy you'd see, possibly, but never think twice about and you'd certainly never remember what he looked like five minutes later.

He's unmemorable In THAT outfit? Damn. He is GOOD.

[icon_uk]

:)

Though it should be noted that it WAS the 1980's... In some circles he's be approaching the subtle

[aaron_bourque]

I kinda liked this. It was one of the few in the past 2 weeks that felt like a first issue, setting up everything going on, as well as being a decent single issue.

[domino_blue]

I never got Grifter's appeal other then being a badass he always came off as bland to me, hell in Wildcats 3.0 I liked the guy who became Grifter two better just because it showed how out of touch the first one was. Still I may check out more but this just was not my cup of tea.

[halloweenjack]

I found WildC.A.T.S., at least in the original formulation, to be pretty bland overall--a bunch of well-used tropes that held little real interest aside from being drawn by Jim Lee, if you like Lee's artwork. It was up to writers like Alan Moore and Warren Ellis to do something interesting with them.

[timgueugen]

Frankly the early issues of Wildcats were a mess. They set up a premise, but sort of ended up rambling around without seeming to have a clue where they were going with it. The X Men parallels were obvious, with good aliens/alien hybrids, and evil aliens/alien hybrids in place of mutants. JIm Lee and Brandon Choi did manage to avoid it being a complete X Men ripoff by lifting bits from the Avengers as well, such as Maul being a Hulk standin, and doing a Scarlet Witch-Vision style romance with Spartan and Voodoo. And they split elements of Wolverine into Grifter, the grizzled veteran of covert wars, Jacob Marlowe, the short guy with amnesia about his past, Zealot, the psuedo-samurai, and Warblade, the guy with blades in his hands who likes to slice stuff up.

[joasakura]

I picked this up, and I was surprised by how much I liked it. I had never been a wildstorm grifter fan, but I'm really interested in this story XD

[cainofdreaming]

You know, it just recently dawned on me. Thanks to the reboot Sleeper doesn't exist anymore.

Now I really need to invent that time machine and jump forward to the point in time when the next reboot returns the multiverse... err, multiverses this time, I guess... to us.

[mrstatham]

Yes, Lee has happily taken his pieces of silver to piss all over his company and any integrity he once had. Everything from Brubaker's Sleeper, Casey's Wildcats and Ellis' entire output from the old Stormwatch to Planetary is now out of continuity.

The biggest laugh is that he's now getting DC to put out those hardcovers of Ellis' Stormwatch, which defies the new 'easy to understand' maxim of the DCnU.

[fifthie]

out of continuity

I find more and more I just don't care what whichever company's current writers think is and isn't in "continuity". This is just a new alternate universe, just like boring, douchebaggy, single Spider-Man lives in another alternate universe.

[fifthie]

In the previous universe, everyone's just getting around to noticing that Barry Allen isn't there anymore.

They're feeling pretty okay about it.

[arbre_rieur]

Is it really any harder to understand than DC publishing trade paperbacks of pre-Crisis stories for the past many years? Should "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow" be put out of print because it's a story about a prior contintuity? I suspect Alan Moore would like that, actually, but would anyone else?

[fifthie]

Is it really any harder to understand than DC publishing trade paperbacks of pre-Crisis stories for the past many years?

Considering that the ostensible point of the thing is to make things easier to understand, I would think that there would be a higher bar for success than "hasn't actually made it any more difficult to understand."

[fifthie]

Of course every single other thing about the wonky is-it-or-isn't-a-reboot has already failed to meet that abysmally low standard.

[arbre_rieur]

Success certainly isn't defined as fixing an itch in your toe by blowing off the whole foot with a gun. That's pretty much what refusing to publish set in other continuities would amount to. Hm, I just noticed that they're still showing reruns of THE BATMAN even though BATMAN THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD is also on the air. And all this when THE DARK KNIGHT RISES is coming to theaters soon as well. What the hell are they doing, confusing everyone this way?

[fifthie]

Hm, I just noticed that they're still showing reruns of THE BATMAN even though BATMAN THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD is also on the air. And all this when THE DARK KNIGHT RISES is coming to theaters soon as well.

Things Time Warner/DC's animation and film departments aren't doing: undertaking major revamps of their existing series and engaging in large in-universe events to redefine what has and hasn't officially happened.

Success certainly isn't defined as fixing an itch in your toe by blowing off the whole foot with a gun.

Certainly if there's one thing that can be considered as unto the very foot of DC's media empire, it's trade paperbacks of Stormwatch.

[arbre_rieur]

If DC were to follow a policy of not printing stories removed from continuity, It wouldn't just be STORMWATCH TPBs that stay out of print, it'd be almost every superhero story they've ever published. I don't think any of us believe that's smart business sense.

Moreover, as the example of the alternate versions of Batman in other media illustrates, the general audience does not necessarily find multiple takes on the same character confusing. If anything, they'd probably find the notion that all Batman comics take place in the same continuity -- despite wildly different art styles and even different costumes -- more alien.

[sunaya]

Now that I see it in front of me....why, exactly, are so many reviewers pooh-poohing on this book? It seems perfectly fine to me. Not my absolute favorite, but still good enough to be worth the read. What the heck, Internet Reviewers?

[biod]

Perhaps there is a secret pile of aweful hidden within the other eighteen pages.
Or, even more disturbingly, people can have DIFFERENT OPINIONS and still be RIGHT!

[shadowpsykie]

NO NO NONO NO! MY opinion is ALWAYS right!

:D


oh, and no that lady doing that thing on the bridge, NOT in the least bit awesome, she was clunky and not at all smooth

[kamino_neko]

You know what I liked about this issue?

It actually showed Grifter grifting.

Not that I've read a lot of books with Grifter in them, but of those...he's never actually conned anyone - he's been a badass dude with guns and a fairly interesting mask, and that's that.

Beyond that element, it was not a bad book, even if I'm not all that interested in Grifter.

[q99]

Heh, yea, now that you mention it I barely made the connection with his name :)

[timgueugen]

Yeah, he was never portrayed as being any sort of con men. It's almost as if Jim Lee saw the word someplace and thought it would be a cool name, without having an idea what a grifter actually was.