Paul Grist's Jack Staff

I am in the process of rereading all of the issues of Jack Staff that Paul Grist has put out over the years and they are still as entertaining as they were the first time that I read them.

A page by the great Frank Robbins,

from The Invaders #15 page 3, 

showing the creation of a Super Hero Team.

Despite, as Paul freely admitted in the past, being

a story that takes it's inspiration from a couple of Mid Seventies Marvel Comics, it is as engaging and satisfying as the first Alan Moore stories for the reintroduction of Marvelman in Warrior.

Paul manages the amazing feat of incorporating some fairly "cheesy" story lines, at least that was how I viewed them at the time they came out and without destroying anything,

come up with a comic book that is deeply engaging.

It is a great shame that it met the same fate as Paul's first series, the police drama called KANE, which came to an untimely end 

at issue #31.  The combined issues of Jack Staff, self published under the Dancing Elephant imprint, that ran for 12 issues as a complete mini-series.  Jack Staff, under the Image Comics imprint, that ran for 20 issues plus a Special Issue.  Then finally, The Weird World of Jack Staff, still with Image Comics, that began with the Special, a reprinting of a sequential story that had originally appeared in Comics International #185 to #191 and was followed by 6 more issues...

My mathematics isn't what it used to be but I 

calculate that as a total of 40 issues!  All in a continuous storyline.

Paul Grist has a style that often incorporates playing with time or perhaps more accurately, playing games with timing.

It can be a little bit disorienting at times but there is no denying it's effectiveness as a storytelling ploy.  I believe that the late great Wally Wood was supposed to have given this piece of advice about making a comic book story, "Start in the middle of the action and move backwards and/or forwards from there".

I wish there were more Jack Staff stories but I buy anything that comes out by him, most recently the aborted Mud Man.  I hope too that his latest work, Demon Nic, will be collected for me to buy.