2 out of 5

In a couple interviews about his take on ‘Grimm,’ Jai was quoted as saying that he’d wanted to do things in the comic they couldn’t do on the show.  Since the show is pretty fantastic (in terms of its content, not making judgments on the quality since I don’t watch it), the comment seems a little odd.  And after completing ‘The Warlock,’ I was still puzzled, because it’s all pretty low-key.  However, rereading those interviews, it seems that the focus was on locations.  Jai wanted to bring in notable Portland spots that just can’t be shot on the show, and I guess that’s in there.  But besides a sports stadium (which I don’t recognize, not being a sports fan, but I understand that it would qualify as a notable, expensive-to-shoot spot), the other named places might as well be fictional – meaning I doubt this holds weight unless you live in Portland.  So then we have to fall back on the story, which is really super duper average.  As a pro, I can say it reads like a TV show – a quick mystery, a quick solve, some super minor ‘character’ developments, and it’s a pretty package for next week.  It maintains the light, jokey vibe of what I’ve seen of Grimm, and uses the show vernacular, meaning its pretty much for fans, which is actually nice – no time wasted for pandering to a new audience.  In fact, this almost seems like a script-to-book, with the way that scenes are not properly transitioned into / out of for a comic, whereas it would work fine with a ‘whoosh’ sound on a TV show.  But apparently it was an original tale, so make of that what you will.  Within, Nick, our ‘Grimm’, attends to four separate cases – game fixing, a robbery, a murder, a break-in – that are being guided by a mysterious dude who’s ‘revealed’ to be a warlock except that it’s the subtitle of the book.  I believe this was meant to be a 5-part series, so I can only assume sales whittled it down to 4, so also make of that what you will.

Jose Malaga’s art is passable.  He has some fun with paneling in action sequences, but unfortunately, as is often the case with trying to depict real people in comic form, any experiments with shading or expression or personality are limited by the keeping the characters recognizable.  Lisa Moore’s colors… are disgusting.  Nick’s skin looks gross, and in some ‘lighting’ he looks dead.  The background colors are drab as shit, and any chances for a ‘pop’ color are watered down too.  Marshall Dillon’s letters are average, but there were definitely a couple poorly placed panels that cause you to read out of order.  Who to blame, who to blame…  But my number one problem with the rest of the team (or maybe going back to Jai) – who the hell was the editor here?  Dynamite is a notable publisher by now.  I don’t see an editor for the book specifically, so maybe it was self-edited?  So the frequent typos and poor punctuation are all on Nitz?  It was just surprisingly unprofessional, and certainly (obviously) didn’t help improve my opinion of the book.

The fourth issue cover (Greg Smallwood) was cool.