COMIC
$2.50 Per Issue
A miniseries that really gets under your skin
Mike Chang and his skin lead separate lives. That's the setup for Gilbert Hernandez's latest comic feat, Grip: The Strange World of Men. From there, the miniseries follows the tragic hero's travels in a classic mélange of fantasy, noir, comedy, and sci-fi. The fifth and final issue is due out in March.
Issue one drops the reader into a contemporary city full of freaks, poseurs, and trigger-happy gangsters. After a series of confusing encounters, Chang and his skin part company. How and why this happens are unclear, but the last panel foreshadows what's to come: A gap-toothed little girl with an eye patch frolics with Chang's floppy epidermis, which is drawn in a cheery style.
In issue two, Chang wanders around gibbering like a raw-meat lunatic while his skin tries to escape the little girl, who's keeping it as a pet. It isn't until issue three - an extended flashback - that we learn anything that makes sense of the story. It turns out that, years before, a secret cult tried to breed its own messiah and produced Chang instead. The skin-shedding ability is a side effect of experiments performed on many pregnant women in the cult, including his mom. Though Chang's captors/worshipers tried to prevent him from leaving, he overcame their brainwashing by inducing his own amnesia.
Issue four returns to the present. Here, someone is telepathically summoning all of the oddballs and crooks that've crossed Chang's path to the now-ruined cult compound where he grew up.
No character is what he or she first appears. The sweet old lady from issue one turns out, in issue three, to be a male cult member who murdered his wife and hijacked her skin to assume her identity.
Is Hernandez saying perception is only skin deep? Hardly - his subtext has always been more enigmatic than that. Issue five will almost certainly answer some questions but raise even more. Don't sweat the loose ends - just enjoy a 20-year comic veteran at play in his own strange world.
Vertigo/DC Comics: www.dccomics.com.
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