Grifter
44 years ago - Cole Cash is born, the son of Sofia, an expatriate Amazon forbidden from returning to Themyscera.
42 years ago - 2-year-old Cole begins studying Amazonian battle tactics.
27 years ago - 17-year-old Cole's mother's slowed aging from the Purple Ray ends, and she dies peacefully. He joins the army, where he excels and is moved into an elite tactical ops unit.
25 years ago - 19-year-old Cole is recruited as the youngest member of Team 7.
23 years ago - 21-year-old Cole, King Faraday, & Christopher Chance become full-time DEO operatives after Team 7 is shut down. They infiltrate the underground casinos of Stephen Sharpe, taking him into custody.
12 years ago - 32-year-old Cole is one of the few victims of the Pax Parasites to survive due to his Amazonian heritage, developing low-level psionic powers. He steps down from the DEO, working independently to track down other Pax survivors.
9 years ago - 35-year-old Cole first works with Josiah Power, another survivor of the Pax parasites, as a privately funded international operative.
1 year ago - 43-year-old Cole & Josiah Power work with Koriand'r to build her Haven Project and protect earth-displaced non-humans.
I will probably have to summarize this for every Wildstorm character I wind up using, so let's just do it quickly here; Image Comics was founded by a group of superstar Marvel artists in 1992, taking ownership of their own work. Image started as a new interconnected narrative with each artist owning their own characters. Over time, the fictional world depicted in Image became more and more narratively distinct, with the different internal studios of the different creators crossing over less and less; Todd McFarlane Productions, Top Cow, Extreme Studios, Shadowline... and of course Jim Lee's Wildstorm. With the decline in comic readership toward the end of the 90s, Lee sold Wildstorm to DC Comics in 1998 to return to focusing on art (and has gone on to become the Chief Creative Officer of DC Comics today.) Wildstorm remained a distinct imprint within DC publications, but eventually, during the Flashpoint event and New 52 continuity reboot of 2011, the Wildstorm characters were fully integrated into the new DC continuity.
I'm really much more a fan of the original Image continuity for most of Wildstorm, so for the most part, I think of it kind of the same way I do Kingdom Come, Kamandi, Omac, or Far Sector... great stories that just don't need to be integrated into the core continuity. Let them stand on their own. However there are characters in the world of Wildstorm that work really well in particular roles in our reimagined DC continuity, and since we literally are answerable to no one, we might just adapt a few of them anyway.
I'm really much more a fan of the original Image continuity for most of Wildstorm, so for the most part, I think of it kind of the same way I do Kingdom Come, Kamandi, Omac, or Far Sector... great stories that just don't need to be integrated into the core continuity. Let them stand on their own. However there are characters in the world of Wildstorm that work really well in particular roles in our reimagined DC continuity, and since we literally are answerable to no one, we might just adapt a few of them anyway.
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Grifter's Comic HistoryJim Lee's initial Image book was WildC.A.T.S. with Brandon Choi. He was coming off what is very likely one of the most successful runs by any artist on any comic EVER, his X-Men series by Chris Claremont (the first issue of which remains the highest selling comic book in history. I own four copies).
The original Image comics did have some pretty interesting stories, but I don't think it's controversial to say that, as properties created by artists, they were really built primarily around the visuals. WildC.A.T.S. in particular was clearly constructed out of the same Legos Jim used in his approach to the X-Men, with the characters pretty clear pastiches of the same designs that Jim had so clearly mastered. Grifter in particular wore his influences on his sleeve; elements of Gambit and Wolverine combined with a healthy dose of John Woo gun-fu action movie try-hard. His backstory slowly came into focus over the course of the series, but it was all kind of secondary to his overall cool factor. One detail that stands out is his relationship to fellow WildC.A.T. Zealot, a member of an ancient order of female warriors who actually taught him their fighting style. (This will become important later.) |
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He was featured in several subsequent Wildstorm series, always one of their most prominent characters, crossing over into practically every corner of the shared universe. He became a member of the Authority, was a mentor to Gen 13, and teamed up with fellow former Team 7 members Backlash and Deathblow.
Even when Wildstorm was purchased by DC, Grifter continued to appear consistently across the line. There was almost always at least one ongoing WildC.A.T.S. series, and Grifter was almost always featured as one of the main players. In 2006, Wildstorm's continuity was reset in a crossover called Worldstorm which was kicked off in a DC miniseries called Captain Atom: Armageddon, featuring Captain Atom being lost in the Wildstorm universe... with Grifter as a guide. he dies in the series (along with lots of other characters), but he made his way back in the Worldstorm event, and of course, the entire Wildstorm line was updated AGAIN a few years later when it was shuffled into the new DC continuity in the New 52. Grifter was one of DC's new launch titles. It didn't last long, only 18 issues, but Grifter is one of a very few Wildstorm characters to continue to appear in DC pretty much consistently. In books like Future's End, or in his own backups in Future's State: Dark Detective. |
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Our Grifter StorySo we're going to use Grifter, but we have a few things we want to do with him first. We're zeroing in on one detail of the classic character; that he's one of the only men to ever receive training from a order of lethal female warriors. In DC, that clearly means Amazons, but how to make that happen? We used a story that happened back during Hippolytas time in the Justice Society to introduce Sofia, a expatriate Amazon willingly exiled in man's world... And Cole's mother. This opens him up so much; fully explaining his unique, unorthodox fighting style and giving him a really healthy, internalized respect for and comfort with women.
He serves in team 7, just like in the comic. But rather than being empowered there (he has some low-level telekinetic power) we made him one of the only survivors of the Pax Parasites, a storyline astute readers might recognize as a reference to the Mid-90 Bloodlines crossover. From here, we're partnering him with a fellow survivor of the parasites, Josiah Power. This brings him into contact with Starfire when she's building her Haven Project.... Which gives him his own cause he can focus on, and a group he can support. This is really the role that led us to bring Grifter in in the first place, wanting to create a core group of support characters for Kori, and Cole just feels like he slots into that role perfectly. Tough enough to keep up with her, but secure enough to have no problem following her. He's a character that can thrive in that role. In some ways... He's kind of filling a platonic Steve Trevor role for Kori? This is a pretty thorough repurposing of Cole, but I think the result does a good job of respecting the core of the original character while also creating a unique space for him. |