BK FEATURE: Greyshirt, the coolest superhero you've never heard of

Last week, I talked about how Superman sucks and everybody knows it. This week, I'll talk about how awesome Greyshirt is…and that damn near nobody knows about it. 

Everyone will recognize his creator, though: Alan Moore gave us the single greatest graphic novel ever written (Watchmen), and has written consistently great stuff from his run on Swamp Thing, to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, to his work at America's Best Comics.

Ah, America's Best; where Moore brought us the Kabbalah-tastic Promethea, the neo-retro Tom Strong, and, best of all, Tomorrow Stories. Simultaneously imitaitng, parodying, and paying homage to the old anthology comics of yesteryear, every issue of Moore's Tomorrow Stories consisted of multiple short comics starring the series' recurring heroes. You had Jack B. Quick, the precociously evil boy genius; Cobweb, the latently homosexual crime fighter; The First American, a bumbling, idiotic embodiment of everything wrong with the American dream.

And, best of all, you had Greyshirt. 

Dressed in a gray suit  and fedora with a red handkerchief covering most of his face, Greysuit is aesthetically a pound-for-pound ripoff of Will Eisner's The Spirit. Formerly a successful cat burglar, Johnny Apollo was betrayed by his partner and almost died in a subsequent factory explosion. Now considered officially dead by the police, Greyshirt decided to repent his old and unsuccessful criminal ways by becoming a masked vigilante (helped along by an obese Buddhist guy who lives in the sewers of Indigo City, of course). 

So, here we've got all the makings of your typically cool, mysterious masked vigilante with no superpowers. Greyshirt has a spring-loaded cane that can be used as a grappling hook or a weapon, he's trained in some degree of martial arts, and given the amount of backstory we're given on him (the guy is the major hero of Indigo City, having saved kidnapped babies and beaten up evil gorillas), the reader is fully ready for Greyshirt to be the ultimate badass when he finally gets his first short, "Amnesia," in Tomorrow Stories. So what, you ask, does Greyshirt actually do in this first story?

Nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

The entirety of "Amnesia" follows a serial killer with no memory as he runs from the cops and Greyshirt, who are seen pursuing him at least once on every page. We see Greyshirt a couple times throughout the first two acts of the story, but we never hear him talk and the story doesn't take place from his perspective. Greyshirt only shows up at the end, after the serial killer has already screwed himself over. After waiting several pages for Greyshirt to act as badass as he looks, the reader gets to watch Greyshirt come in, say a few clever lines, and then end the story without having personally done anything to catch the criminal.

And this isn't some sort of fluke, limited to only the first story in what might have otherwise been a series of rip-roaring action stories: all of Greyshirt's entries in Tomorrow Stories are like this.

That's why he's so awesome. 

After reading a few issues of Tomorrow Stories, Moore's intentions become very clear: with every character in the anthology, he gives them an image and surface behavior that would seem to suggest one thing, but the stories he ends up writing go in a completely different direction. Jack B. Quick initially seems like a family-friendly romp with a child prodigy, until Jack proves himself to basically be the antichrist in pull-ups. The First American never does any crime-fighting, comfortable instead to act as a vehicle for Moore's bitter, angry satire against every aspect of American culture. Greyshirt, most wonderfully, looks like a vigilante crimefighter but nearly all his stories are about criminals or heroes either punishing or saving themselves.

Greyshirt is basically a ubiquitous force in these stories – he's in every issue – but he's not your typical force for justice or good. He is simply a catalyst for the story's real protagonist to find and develop the evil or good within themselves. Greyshirt is only there to get the story going and spur the protagonist to action through the sheer force of his assumed reputation. We never get to know him terribly intimately (one of the last Tomorrow Stories issues has him tracking down the Cobweb and having sex with her a few times, but that's it) and the few times we actually see him doing any crimefighting, he actually seems to be really bad at it (in the aforementioned Cobweb story, Greyshirt gets his ass kicked at least three times). Greyshirt, in this sense, is not a character unto himself but more of a symbol for inspiring change in others.

 

The stories, of course, are infinitely better as a result. One particularly great story starts off with Greyshirt having been captured and tortured by a mob boss/apartment owner who employs an aging, sad little nerd to clean up the apartment's messes, both literal and figurative. As Greyshirt gets the snot kicked out of him in the present, we see the history of the apartment, the mob boss, and the nerd played out over the course of several decades. I won't get into too much detail about how awesome these flashbacks are represented visually (basically, every page shows a cross-section of the entire apartment building, and each floor from the ground up represents a different time period with the present at the very top). We gradually see the crap this nerd has been forced to take over years and years, until Greyshirt's pummelling at the hands of the apartment owner finally drives the nerd to push the mob boss out the window, saving Greyshirt and avenging himself. Again, Greyshirt doesn't actually do anything other than get beaten up, but his presence alone spurs formerly inactive characters into motion. 

Since we get a new protagonist in every Greyshirt story, every episode feels totally fresh; the Greyshirt stories differ most notably in tone from one issue to the next than any other characters' (one story consists of a Greyshirt musical, for God's sake), and while they all share a supporting character and basic setting, each story has a wildly different theme and plot than any other before it. Where The First American's constant and consistent jabs at all aspects of America get kind of stale by the final issue of Tomorrow Stories, Greyshirt is just as compelling and mysterious at issue twelve as issue one. 

He's a crimefighter who doesn't fight any crime. He's a superhero who inspires others to be super. He's Greyshirt, and he's the coolest comic character you've never heard of.