This Week, on Grifter...
The Good: Grifter himself is very well positioned on this cover, and the buildings look excellent, and everything but Green Arrow himself on the cover is pretty much well drawn and well laid our.
Scott Clark is a surprisingly good successor to CAFU. There's nothing quite the same as CAFU, and I normally like Scott Clark's art for entirely different reasons; but somehow the art manages to capture the same 'primetime action drama' feel that CAFU's artwork was so perfect at.
Grifter is just so damn inventive with his combat. Everything is so high-octane cool, again fueling the 'Primetime action drama' feel that I love this book so much for.
And again, each issue feels like an almost self contained episode within an ongoing plot. All of the plot elements just balance each other out so smoothly.
I really like the way Grifter protects his 'face.' Not in a psychotic Rorschach 'GIVE MY BACK MY FACE' kind of way, but part of the sense that it's the face he wears to both paint a target on himself to lure the Daemonites and create a face for them to fear.
The Bad: Green Arrow on the cover just looks.... wrong. His head looks really off, and his positioning is really static. He kind of takes up too much space and overall ruins the look of the cover. I think it would've been better if he was more in the back, shooting arrows from a distance, but I guess DC wanted to whore out the fact that Green Arrow's in here, despite his crrent series being in the bottom group of the New 52.
I recently spent three issues giving this series the 'best issue title presentations' award. They were always so seemlessly and beautifully integreated into the artwork. But the loss of CAFU brought about the loss of this amazing little tough. I'm actually pretty heartbroken about that. Not enough to affect my opinion more than it should, but still.
Will the 17 mystery ever be solved or acknowledged again?
There was a scene towards the end, where Grifter shoots next to Green Arrow's head, and then the next panel the gun is in front of Green Arrow and GA has stabbed an Arrow into the barrel. How/when did that happen? It feels like there's a panel missing, the two panels just have a horrendous flow beteen them.
In Conclusion: 3.5/5
This issue was mostly an excuse to have Grifter fight a major DC hero, and Green Arrow was actually a perfect choice. But the story lacked a bit, and Scott Clark has NOT picked up CAFU's habbit of interating the issue titles into the art in this series. There were a few other flaws that kept this from being a fantastic issue, but it was still a pretty great issue in the end.
