Reviewer: Jesse Baker
Story Title: New Grifter’s Night Out
Written by: Joe Casey
Penciled by: Dustin Nguyen
Inked by: Richard Friend
Colored by: Randy Major
Lettered by: Richard Starkings
Editor: Ben Abernathy
Publisher: Wildstorm/Eye of the Storm (DC Comics)
I’ve recapped the last three issues of Wildcats and when writing this review, I found my opinion on Casey’s writing of the book to be the same. Spartan is a boring waste of space that should have been jettisoned from the franchise along with Voodoo during the changeover from Volume 2 and 3, Grifter is being misused (the dude gets the Barbara Gordon “Can’t walk again after being crippled thanks to bullets and have to be the token wheelchair-bound hero who doesn’t let being a cripple stop me from fighting evil!†injury and doesn’t get any screen time to see him coping with this injury at all), and Wax’s rape/revenge subplot is going nowhere and gets very little screen time except for when Casey needs to show tits in order to justify the book being labeled a “Mature Audience†book.
I want to see Casey actually do something instead of his usual routine of bragging to anyone who’ll listen about how he’s going to do something radical and innovative only to churn out the same old crap. For a comic that has been said to be based upon the concept of “Thinking Outside of the Box”, Casey refuses to do so.
For chief example: why not have Spartan pop in and out of the Evil Military Base and rescue CC’s kid WITHOUT going through the dance of fighting guards and such instead of sending an newbie super-hero into the base to do his dirty work? Spartan could have rescued the kid in the matter of seconds by way of popping in the room, grabbing the kid, and teleporting out. But instead we get Grifter training Dolby (with the fact that Dolby being selected as Grifter’s heir apparent and Grifter going through the emotional process of passing the torch to Dolby not even being presented) and sending him into the base for yet another clichéd of an action sequence.
And that’s what Casey is doing with the book, churning out hack work with stories running the gauntlet of cliché after cliché rather than addressing storyline points that match up with his boastings about the direction of the book. Stuff like why does Spartan make a big stink about hiding his closet rather than acknowledging his and his company’s alien nature to the press, seeing Grifter dealing and coming to terms with the fact that he’s now a useless cripple who can’t live the life of a gun-toting super-hero anymore is ignored. Meanwhile Agent Wax’s current storyline never get anymore real page-time aside from whenever Casey needs to through some boob shots in the book to justify it being part of the Eye of the Storm line…
It’s lazy writing. I expect more than hack-level writing from Casey. And Casey, when he’s not on his high-horse bragging like a poet on payday can produce quality work. His X-Men was proof of this, as once he got off of his high horse and put away his bridge burning bow and arrow set, he put out strong work. And let’s not forget Casey’s Superman work, which is some of the best work being put out on the books currently…
