Greysuit.

by Pat Mills, John Higgins

THE GREYSUITS ARE THE UK EQUIVALENT OF THE MEN IN BLACK IN THE US – GOVERNMENT agents that operate in the shadows, removing threats to the ruling status quo. John Blake is one such Greysuit, who has undergone traumabased psychological programming to give him heightened speed and strength. But Blake's progamming is starting to break down, and he's slowly becoming aware of what his masters have done to him...

184 pages, Unknown Binding

Published February 17, 2021

About the author

Pat Mills, born in 1949 and nicknamed 'the godfather of British comics', is a comics writer and editor who, along with John Wagner, revitalised British boys comics in the 1970s, and has remained a leading light in British comics ever since.

His comics are notable for their violence and anti-authoritarianism. He is best known for creating 2000 AD and playing a major part in the development of Judge Dredd.

Reviews

[Chris Browning · Rating 2 out of 5]

So maybe Matt Smith’s greatest achievement as longest running editor/ Tharg for 2000AD is neutralising the Pat Mills menace. Because whatever you think about Mills in the seventies and eighties and some of the nineties, he’s insufferable 90% of the time since then and this is Mills at his Millsiest. Millar and Ennis may suffer from an overt fondness for lazy nihilism and black humour, but somehow the fact they write like that because they just have, respectively, no moral compass and just aren’t very good as writers makes them somehow easier to cope with than Mills. Because Mills combines lazy nihilism (did he really ask Higgins repeatedly in the script to “knock the jaw off” because almost every ten pages there’s another jaw flying off to the extent that it’s genuinely hilarious when it keeps on happening) with some of the most heavy handed satire you have ever seen.

And I think Mills really believes this guff and that he’s thumbing his nose at the elite with silliness like the private school stuff (oh! Larks! That one schoolboy worrying modelled of Llewelyn Bowen is wearing a Clockwork Orange waistcoat, as if any school would allow that FFS) or Johnny Sahib (really? REALLY?) or that one picture of Ian Richardson on House of Cards that Higgins keeps copying for the government minister (to the extent that again, I like to think Higgins is just giving up and sending Mills lazy stuff because Mills is too blinkered to notice). It’s lazy and stupid and somehow manages to avoid any of the purpose Mills thinks he’s achieving: in angrily and messily screaming about the secret rulers of the world he’s not somehow chipping away at their hold but instead just like an angry wasp stuck in a car with them. It’s noisy and annoying and defeats the, at heart, well intentioned purpose of the whole thing

It doesn’t help that Mills is at the stage of writing where you can’t tell if he’s being funny or not. The interminable sheep stuff, an apparently non ironic character called the Ginger Ninja… all of it is so messy it doesn’t so much appear scattershot as like a minefield set up by an actual idiot. Higgins tries so hard, but you can see the effort and annoyance getting to him by the two thirds point which is more than most would have gotten to. I give it two stars mainly because it’s genuinely fascinating to see everything that has gone so wrong with Pat Mills as a writer in one place, and all the more so because the afterword contains him at his most passive aggressive. Towards the twilight of his time writing for the prog I was genuinely dreading the obligatory Pat Mills As Angry Paranoid Hippy In Pub nonsense he would steamroll over us with. I think hopefully now he’s fallen out with Smith, and with no sense Smith is going anywhere soon, we have a few more years of reprieve leaving us just to his Twitter and Facebook rants rather than inert, terrible iterations of his once beloved franchises

[Dave Tindall · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a good book. The Greysuits are elite assasins who are super strong and super fast. My only gripes are that the conditioning appeared to be far too easily broken and some of the characters ending was left vague, leaving it open for a sequel, even though they state there isn't going to be one. I'd have liked to see what happened to the other characters.

[John Somers · Rating 4 out of 5]

16/20.

[Charlie Richardson · Rating 4 out of 5]

if your into Men in Black, this is a British take on the men in Black , like all of these Pat Mills graphic novels it takes something familiar and does something different with it.
a recommended read

[Adrian Bloxham · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pat Mills writes another ace comic...