Review by Andy Williams
Co-created by Alan Moore and Rick Veitch, Greyshirt debuted in the pages of the anthology title Tomorrow Stories and Indigo Sunset is a decades-spanning tale focusing on the crime-ridden Indigo City’s infamous gangsters. At the same time it subtly tells the origin of “science hero” Greyshirt, a dapper-suited masked detective in the pulp tradition of The Shadow or The Spirit. Our protagonist tackles evil-doers on the mean streets of the grim metropolis, unaware that mystifying elements from his past will come back to haunt him. All the while, an ancient evil bides its time beneath the urban jungle, a horrific catastrophe waiting to happen.
As the story hops about from the 1960’s, 1970’s and 1980’s into the modern day (or 2001 as the date of initial publication would suggest), writer and artist Rick Veitch delineates each of the characters excellently throughout the various stages of their lives. Pre-teen tearaways Franky Lafayette and Johnny Apollo encounter a mysterious presence in an abandoned sapphire mine and we see how this affects them as they mature from juvenile delinquency to full-blown gangsters. Although the characters age and change, the backdrop of Indigo City remains the same, stuck in its own film noir bottle of hard-boiled crime and urban decay. The other-worldly entity that lures unsuspecting victims into its serpentine clutches has shades of Stephen King’s It and may be a magnet for, or influence on, the weirdness that inhabits the city.
Veitch is aided by other creators, with artists Frank Cho, Russ Heath, David Lloyd and John Severin illustrating individual chapters and Dave Gibbons scripting another, to successfully pull all the elements together to form a satisfying whole. This includes the “back matter”; a la Watchmen, text pieces in the form of articles from the pages of the titular local paper, The Indigo Sunset, form part of the narrative, also offering glimpses of other Greyshirt stories as yet untold in strip format.
It’s an entertaining read with an intriguing jigsaw puzzle of a plot, told in myriad short stories allowing the reader to fit the pieces together themselves, seeing how the characters age and interact with each other over extended time periods. Veitch is a top notch creator who knows his storytelling inside out and shows it off with a deft touch.
