Mike Grell

DC has been taking its "tabloid editions" from the 1970—massive oversized comics—and reprinting them as high-quality hardcovers. I previously read the Suerpman vs. Wonder Woman one; most recently, they've reprinted All-New Collectors' Edition #C-54, which depicts the marriage of Saturn Girl and Lightning Lad. This story was previously collected in Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes, Volume One, but I wasn't passing up the chance to see some Mike Grell and Vince Colletta art at jumbo size.

Thankfully it looks great because as a story it's not up to much. Superboy travels to the future to see the wedding, only the timeline has changed, so everyone is mean. He still manages to convince the Legion to look into this; the team splits up into three groups to handle different aspects of a crisis. It has its moments—I do always like some Saturn Girl—but even by the standards of comic-book time travel, I don't think it really makes sense, and the Legion in twentieth-century New York doesn't seem to be worth getting Mike Grell to illustrate at enormous size. Give me something cosmic and epic! Still, I'll take Mike Grell drawing Dream Girl any day, and the new afterword by Levitz providing background and context is nice.… (meer)

Because I'm slowly working my way through Mike Grell's shockingly good Warlord series, I decided to re-read his Green Arrow story, that I hadn't read since its initial three-issue release almost 36 years ago.

And honestly? Yeah, it shows how great Grell is with Warlord.

I'll go on record right now as saying, with some notable exceptions (Alan Moore's Watchmen, Tom King's Mister Miracle, Frank Miller's first Batman: The Dark Knight Returns), I'm really not a DC fan. And this series, while trying really hard, won't be the one to sway me.

Unlike Grell's work on his creative baby, Warlord, that he conceived, scripted, and drew, he's now playing in the larger DC sandbox with an established history, so it felt slightly more forced, though he took a good angle...Oliver moves cities and because of the physical move, he begins to also question where his life is going and some of the decisions he's made to get him there.

There's also, of course, the shadowy (pun intended) villain of the piece, as well as two plots, both involving people showing up dead.

Grell's trying to make a point with the drug smuggling, money laundering, justice system, and the jaded public that's happy to turn away and ignore all these injustices. He sort of gets there, but not completely successfully.

Then there's the art. With Warlord, I'm constantly struck by Grell's impeccable design and layout sense on page after page. But here, it's somewhat less successful. Once again, Grell used the DC prestige format to experiment with his art as well, combining his excellent pencil and ink linework with coloured pencil sketches and even what appears to be watercolour painting. At the same time, he utilizes a lot of double page spreads that aren't, unfortunately, always obvious—at least to me—which lead to reading, then re-reading the dialogue in the correct order. I will say, though, that the actual art itself is simply stunning.

So, in the end, while I applaud Grell for what he was trying to do, it was only partially successful.… (meer)

Access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.

The last complete James Bond film comic was an adaptation of Licence to Kill from Eclipse Comics. This was published as a standalone graphic novel, apparently in both trade paperback and hardcover (I have the former). It's oversized, as I think a lot of early graphic novels were. The cover trumpets it as being by Mike Grell, but it actually has a large number of contributors. Grell just did the breakdowns, while the script was by Robert Ashford, the pencils by three different artists, and the inks two.

Despite that, it's definitely the best of the three Bond film comics I've read. Grell seems like a creator born to do Bond, and this one breathes as a comic book until many film adaptations even if it has a lot of compression to fit the page length. (This is most notable in the very brief climax.) The art is strong and atmospheric, even if it seems to me that sometimes Bond looks like Timothy Dalton, sometimes he looks like Roger Moore, and sometimes he looks like the sort of generic, idealized Bond from the Daily Express strips. I assume the use of three different pencillers is responsible for this. Interestingly, he's often drawn with the facial scar he had in the books, but which was never used on screen! The painted style is a good fit for the atmosphere of Bond.… (meer)