If you're an old GRIMJACK fan, and are looking at the title for this gallery entry, and not recognizing the series... well, your memory isn't failing you. (For once.) This is going to take a bit to explain fully.
Waaaaay back in 1990, FIRST COMICS began publishing a new version of the famous old CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED title, with the modern twist being each story would be carefully paired with a master of the comic book form. So you would have, for example, Gahan Wilson producing Poe's THE RAVEN, or Bill Sienkiewicz taking on MOBY DICK, all presented in fancy squarebound editions.
I don't recall ever seeing any sales figures, but I do remember the series generating a lot of fan excitement at the time. But there must have been enough success that the honchos at FIRST COMICS thought it would be a great idea to produce ALL of their titles in the deluxe format. That, at least, was what was announced to the comics-reading public.
So FIRST COMICS... cancelled everything, all at once. They published one issue of something in the new format... and then vanished in a puff of unpaid invoices. Their success with CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED had led them to believe they could replicate said success with their whole line. They were wrong. One of the more spectacular miscalculations in comic publishing history, in my opinion.
(In their defense, I suppose that this would have been right at the dawn of the era of the formal Graphic Novel format, where comics began to be collected together more often. Their miscalculation, I think, was attempting to produce a large volume of comics designed to go straight to an expensive, deluxe format, rather than recouping production costs from a cheaper format
first. In addition, the famous-creator-driven draw of their CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED format would perhaps not have been easily replicated with their 'normal' slate of titles.)
Anyway. Enough with the accounting/history lesson.
FIRST COMICS cancelled GRIMJACK. Hastily, I might add. Ostrander and Henry did their level best to craft a finale worthy of what they had been building, but the strain showed. GrimJack was rather unsatisfactorily killed off in the final issue. Plans which were hinted in the final letters column called for a mini-series titled GRIMJACK: OUTLAW IN HELL. Obviously, it never saw print.
Fast-forward to 2020, when the above piece showed up on Heritage Auctions. I knew each of Flint Henry's published GRIMJACK covers well, and didn't recognize this one. Based on the content, I thought it would have been an unused cover concept from earlier in Flint's run on the book. But I was unsure enough to feel it wise to run it past the Flintster first.
Turns out, (as you might guess from the long preamble) it is indeed an unused cover concept, not from the series, but from the mooted follow-up mini-series. Flint calls this cover a 'comp' - which stands for 'comprehensive' cover; a prelim completed to a publishable standard, with the understanding that there may be further changes. It's as close to a 'final' as this particular issue will ever get.
I presume, since the above was supposed to be for
issue three, and judging from the roughs Flint provided, that there is one more unpublished cover for the miniseries floating around out there... somewhere. And together they may have formed a rough triptych. Hmmmmm... okay,
ON THE LOOKOUT FOR ISSUE ONE. Help out if you can!
Notes on the prelim roughs - for nerdy old GJ fans. The two 'big head' versions of GrimJack fighting in the background of the above cover were supposed to be the original 'Truman' version and the 'Mandrake' version (i.e. 'CloneJack') and not the latest ginger version of the character.
