I think the question “who is the best comic book creator of all time” is too subjective and can’t really be answered. Jack Kirby probably wins for sheer relentless creativity, but for technical perfection you can’t really do better than John Byrne. And I firmly believe that Jaime Hernandez is the greatest cartoonist who ever lived.
I could go on, but if you were to ask me who my favorite comic book artist of all time is, my answer would be easy and immediate: it’s Mike Grell. Hands down, no question.
Covers from across Mike Grell’s career: The Warlord #3 (1976), Jon Sable Freelance #18 (1984), and Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters #1.
While Grell’s artwork isn’t always flawless, there is a warmth to it that I’ve never seen matched by any other mainstream comic book artist. His characters are always expressive, both in their faces and their body language, and he can turn on a dime between lighthearted humor, dynamic action, and highly emotional drama. There is a…twinkle to Grell’s work that very few of his contemporaries have ever been able to match.
His writing is just as good, if not better, whether he’s writing for himself or another artist. He consistently brings a high level of realism and relatability, even to the most outlandish characters and situations, and without falling into the often juvenile “grim and gritty” trap that plagued so many of his contemporaries. As early as 1976, in his fantasy adventure series The Warlord, Grell ascribed a more understandable and nuanced motivation to Travis Morgan, his fantasy hero. When called out on why he’s so driven to lead a slave revolt, Morgan admits that, while his intentions are more or less noble, he’s really in it because he loves the excitement.
When is a Superhero Not a Superhero?
With Jon Sable Freelance, Mike Grell clearly wants to tell contemporary adult action stories. At the same time, he understands that he’s working in a medium and an industry that is dominated by costumed superheroes, so he includes a few tropes of the genre as a way to ease his audience into Jon Sable’s more realistic world.
For the first few years of the title, Sable often wears a “battlemask,” a distinctive pattern of makeup that he says “scares the hell out of the bad guys” but also serves to make the character immediately recognizable, which was probably very helpful for marketing the title. Sable isn’t quite a billionaire industrialist, but he is very well-off, living in a luxurious multi-level town house with a firing range and training area in the basement, his own version of the Batcave.
He even has a secret identity…sort of. From the very first issue it is established that Jon Sable’s relative wealth comes not from being a well-paid mercenary, but rather from moonlighting as a best-selling children’s author. Reasoning that no one will take him seriously if they know he actually writes about leprechauns for a living, he publishes his books as “B. B. Flemm,” and makes personal appearances wearing glasses, a wig, and a false mustache as a disguise. Remember, the series takes place in the 1980s, long before the era of constant scrutiny that we enjoy now, so he was probably pretty likely to get away with it…
Far from being just an amusing gag, the children’s author angle provides Jon Sable, Freelance with several supporting characters whose presence in the series might not make sense otherwise. Chief among those is Myke Blackmon, the illustrator of B. B. Flemm’s books. She quickly becomes Sable’s main romantic interest, but definitely not in a “girlfriend who constantly needs to be rescued” sort of way. Myke gives Sable someone to talk to, alleviating the need for the thought balloons and internal monologues that are an often tedious staple of the comics medium.
Other supporting characters include Eden Kendall, Sable’s long-suffering agent and on-again, off-again lover, and Sonny Pratt, retired Hollywood stunt man and mischevious teenager in an old man’s body whose antics keep Sable on his toes. But the real standout is Grey Adler, Myke’s roommate and one of the first openly gay characters in a mainstream comic book. Grell spends a fair amount of time developing a warm, honest friendship between Grey and Sable, and it’s some of the finest comics writing you are ever likely to see.
Not Exactly a Heart of Gold, but…
Grell uses Sable’s independent and at least somewhat realistic source of revenue to establish a sort of “code of ethics” for his hero. Sable often finds himself in the traditional hero role, defending the innocent and punishing the guilty, or at the very least landing on the right side of whatever conflict he’s gotten involved in. He justifies his heroics by cynically stating that “no one does this for free.” He further clarifies his position as a mercenary: “the amount doesn’t matter, only that it’s paid.” It’s a solid philosophy – money makes people take things more seriously than they would otherwise, it’s why legal agreements usually require at least a token payment in order to be ratified.
A four part origin story gives us Sable’s tragic background: a one-time Olympic pentathlon contender who finds love (if not success) and ends up working as a game warden in south Africa. He lives a fairly idyllic life for a time, until he inevitably runs afoul of ivory poachers who murder his family and leave him for dead. After revenging himself on the villains, he finds himself unwelcome in Africa so he puts his skills to use as a mercenary, eventually settling in New York where we find him in the first issue of the series.
While Grell makes it clear that Jon Sable is a man tormented by his past, he is a man who processes that trauma not only through an addiction to violent action. Grell imbues Sable with a charming bravado that always stops short of falling into machismo.
Every Issue is Somebody’s First
I was a little young to be there for Jon Sable’s debut. The first issue of Jon Sable, Freelance I was able to get my hands on at the time was issue 18, published in the summer of 1984. Despite being the conclusion of a two-part story, you couldn’t find a better introduction to the character, or to what makes Mike Grell a great storyteller.
Sable wakes up in the wilderness with a knife sticking out of his chest. He manages to cauterize his wound but shortly passes out again, to be found later by an eccentric backwoods artist – his conversation with her provides a convenient but natural way to fit in a “story so far” recap. As Sable makes his way back to civilization, his job as bodyguard for a defecting Russian ballet star quickly turns into a terrorist plot against the 1984 Olympics. This one issue really does have everything that makes Jon Sable what it is: a ripped from the headlines story with a lot of action and Grell’s unique, careful balance of serious drama and lighthearted humor.
We Were Just Getting to the Good Stuff
The next year and a half of the series runs the gamut from James Bond-style globetrotting adventure to an issue about B. B. Flemm’s books, guest drawn by renowned cartoonist Sergio Aragonés. All the while, Grell imbues his characters with an amount of emotional depth that would be surprising now, let alone in the 1980s.
The romance between Sable and Myke Blackmon continues to develop, with their conversations giving Sable a chance to process his grief over the murder of his family in a much less destructive way. Issue 36, published in January 1986, depicts a day in their life that’s almost entirely free of action an intrigue: the story cuts back and forth between Myke painting a portrait of Sable, and the two of them visiting friends and talking over Sable’s first publication under his own name, in a travel magazine. It gives the impression that maybe Sable is ready to quit the mercenary business and move on with his life. It’s only in the last few pages that we’re reminded that this is an action/adventure comic, after all, as Sable is approached to lead an expedition to his old stomping grounds in Africa, in search of a semi-mythical treasure.
Grell’s writing is never better than at this point in the series – by this point he’s moved well past the need to trick superhero fans into reading his book. To judge by the letters columns, Jon Sable Freelance is enjoying a passionate readership who love the book because it’s not the usual fare. Unfortunately, for whatever reason his artwork starts to suffer, often looking sketchy and rushed, and it’s not helped any by a new (at the time) printing process that uses brighter paper and inks, giving the color an overly flat, sharp look.
Can a Leopard Change its Spots?
The next three issues detail a story that has Sable taking on what he thinks will be a relatively harmless job, guiding his new client around the south African plains looking for a legendary treasure he doesn’t believe really exists. Because he doesn’t think it will be dangerous, he invites his girlfriend Myke along, wanting her to see where he comes from in the hope that it will make her understand him better.
Jon Sable Freelance issues 37, 38 and 39. Cover art by Mike Grell.
Mike Grell is an avid hunting enthusiast (or at least he was when he was writing these comics in the mid-1980s), and this story’s African setting gives him a chance to talk about the subject. Sable’s client Madame Jobert is the quintessential entitled tourist, wanting to shoot everything in sight without any thought to the consequences. As a former game warden, Sable is the voice of the “responsible” hunter, only killing when necessary (although that is a whole other debate) and preferring to scare off dangerous animals rather than shoot to kill. It’s a difference in attitudes that immediately puts the two characters in conflict.
That conflict comes to its logical conclusion as it is soon revealed that Jobert was the head of the poacher organization responsible for killing Sable’s family, and she wants revenge for him shutting down her operation. As soon as Sable discovers proof that the treasure they’re after is just a legend based on a long-dead captive gorilla, she turns on him, and he quickly responds the only way he knows how: with horrific violence.
Mirroring his earlier vengeance trail, Sable takes out all the bad guys, but this time Myke is there to witness his killer instinct. Their path of escape, perhaps inevitably, leads them to the ruins of Sable’s previous home, where he has an emotional catharsis. When the two return to civilization, Sable asks Myke to marry him, but in another moment of high emotional intelligence, she says no. He may think he’s finally ready to let go of his violent past, but she saw how easily it comes to him, and isn’t convinced.
Back to the Usual Stuff
After showing us Jon Sable at his most raw and vulnerable, Grell seems to want to reestablish him as the capable and highly competent mercenary that (presumably) people want to read about. What followed was a series of two-part stories that, while perfectly serviceable, are a bit on the formulaic side, especially after the emotional rollercoaster of the previous four issues.
In “The Fan,” Sable attends a shooting competition, where it is established that he’s a professional among amateurs. In the course of showing off, he humiliates an obnoxious fan, who then follows him to New York and enacts a somewhat outlandish plot to lure Sable into a trap. It’s not the most original story, but we do get some of that trademark Mike Grell humor, as Sable is forced to leave an endangered prostitute in the care of his girlfriend Myke.
“Appointment With a Lady” brings back a former love interest, a secret agent who embroils Sable in a plot involving arms dealers and an attempt to blow up the Statue of Liberty. It’s about as “James Bond” as it gets, but the relatively lighthearted adventure is a nice bit of relief after how heavy the last few issues have been. It’s also the last issue of the original Jon Sable Freelance series that Grell would illustrate himself.
Jon Sable Freelance issue 44. Story and Cover art by Mike Grell, interior art by Judith Hunt and Mike Manley.
After a month off, the series returned with “The Hard Way,” a locked room mystery written by Grell and illustrated by Judith Hunt, a relative newcomer to comics. Hunt’s work on the two part story is quite good, but quite a change from Grell’s – in particular, her faces lack the warmth and humor that Grell is so good at, which might have suited this relatively lighthearted story a little better.
The series struggled through the next year, under a revolving roster of fill-in artists. Grell was still writing and doing covers, but he was also working on a major relaunch of Green Arrow for DC, which was clearly taking up the majority of his time and attention. Jon Sable Freelance ended with issue 56 in October of 1987. It was replaced the very next month by Sable: Return of the Hunter, a new series featuring the character as written by comics mainstay Marv Wolfman, but of course it just wasn’t the same.
You Can’t Keep a Good Mercenary Down
n addition to the Return of the Hunter series (which lasted an improbable 27 issues), Jon Sable endured a mercifully short-lived television series that aired in late 1987. The first ten issues of the original run by Grell were reprinted by First Comics in 1990, but then the character went quiet until Grell brought him back as a guest star in his 1993 Shaman’s Tears series. A novel, written by Grell and retelling Sable’s origin story, followed in 2000.
The character returned to comics in Jon Sable Freelance: Bloodtrail, a 6-issue series published by IDW in 2005, followed by another 5 issues under the subtitle Ashes of Eden in 2009. Both were written and illustrated by Grell, and are extremely technically competent – Grell’s artwork has never looked better, and benefits greatly from modern coloring and printing methods. But the stories are lacking that twinkle that was such a huge part of Jon Sable’s appeal in the first place.
