Grayson #16

This book has been a pretty consistent beacon of hope for me through the shakeups over ar DC comics, from the dismantling of the New 52, the rise (and almost immediate fall) of the DCYou. Grayson has been a fun, unique book that really took me by surprise. I actually read the first issue of this series when it came out, picking up the gorgeous Jock variant cover for the issue, but feeling completely and utterly lost in the first moments of the story. I fell behind in DC events, and never even got started reading Forever Evil, so I had no idea about ANYTHING Dick Grayson was going through, so it felt like a bit of a mess reading that first issue without any background.

So I dropped it after that first issue, and left it in the past. It would be months before I picked up another issue of Grayson- and it is all thanks to Jim at Weird Science DC, because he messaged me on twitter one day asking if I had read that month’s issue of Grayson. I told him how I hadn’t read it from the first issue, but that I had since read Forever Evil (I waited until the book was finished, and bought the full event run in a collection of single issues from my local shop) so I understood where Grayson’s situation issue one generated. Upon the suggestion of Jim that I get back into reading that book, I picked up a bunch of the back issues on the cheap, and proceeded to binge the book- hard.

After binging many issues in such a short time, I caught up to the current issue. I read it, and I have to say that it was a great and interesting story, and that Jim’s recommendation was right on the money. It is thanks to that moment that I have stuck with this book since then (probably issue nine or ten) and have loved this book completely. This issue is yet another example of why I love this book: the humor that is threaded throughout the series gets brought to the forefront, and even is worked into the artwork and panel layouts of the issue. Seeing Dick Grayson sing his Spyral name “Agent Thirty-Seven” to the tune of James Bond’s “Goldfinger” is something that, I genuinely would NEVER have expected; but now that I have seen it, I don’t know how it took this long for the sequence to play out the way it did.

I love the art on this book; Grayson’s devilish good looks and superior posterior are constantly on display, plus this issue has tons of great spy thriller action. I love all the 007-themed moments that we get in this book: from the opening scene with misdirection as to who was playing the international man of mystery and playboy, to the flying car with a big red “parachute” button and baddies on skis with parachutes and automatic weapons, to an homage to Halle Berry’s bond moment with Grayson and Agent One walking out of the ocean with an exploding boat as their backdrop wearing speedos and their chiseled muscles dripping… This book reads like a “How To…” in spy movie comic book adaptations.

This book was great. It is a lot of fun to read each month- and this issue was no exception. I think that the story that this issue builds to (because there is still a lot of story happening behind all this humor and 70’s spy sendups) is going to be a great, and pretty large-scale endeavor. I hope a lot of people are reading and enjoying this book, because if you slept on reading this book as I did- I think you will regret it. It was a great issue, packed with humor and action, and it is really par for the course of what to expect from Grayson as a whole- so maybe flip through it, or just look at the panels/pages that you can see in previews out there and gauge just how silly/awesome this book is, and get on board while you can, because it is definitely worth checking out.

Rating: 9 out of 10