Britain's Greatest Hero is back!
Jack Staff is writer-artist Paul Grist's attempt to produce an authentically British superhero comic that works.
John Smith, salt-of-the-Earth builder and decorator of Castletown, Yorkshire, is really Jack Staff, Britain's greatest hero. Since World War II, he's been defeating threats to the people of the islands, mostly by hitting them with a stick until they give up.
Much of the popularity of the series comes, however, from the range of weirdos surrounding Jack, including BECKY BURDOCK, VAMPIRE REPORTER!, the government Weird Shit Investigator Agency known only as Q, old-fashioned copper Inspector Maveryk, and robot guardian Tom-Tom the Robot Man. To reflect this, Grist eventually renamed the book The Weird World Of Jack Staff.
Tropes
- All Germans Are Nazis: Played with in an interesting way with Kapitan Krieg, who's first presented as simply seeing himself as the German equivalent of a Golden Age superhero just like Jack and Sgt Stripes, in the late 30s. So of course he fights for his country when the war breaks out, because he's a Captain Patriotic too. He finds out the hard way things aren't so simple.
- Bandaged Face: "Mr Green"
- Belligerent Sexual Tension: Jack and Becky, right from the beginning.
- Big Bad Friend: Sergeant Stripes is actually the Castletown Vampire.
- Bilingual Backfire: The unfortunate end to the Brain Head / Capitan Krieg team-up.
- Captain Ersatz/Expy: After the Spider crisis, Grist turned to these instead of directly using older characters. Some of them are straightforward Ersatzes, others are playful combinations or remixes of multiple characters, both British and American.
- Jack himself supposedly began as a pitch for a Marvel Union Jack series. Although aside from Wearing A Flag On His Chest and fighting one vampire, little of that remains.
- Straight examples: General Tubbs is General Jumbo, Charles Raven is Janus Stark, Ben Kulmer is the Steel Claw (created by Ken Bulmer). Lord Nod is Dream from Sandman. The Freedom Fighters are a new take on The Invaders - Sgt Stripes is Captain America, Blazing Glory the original Human Torch. The Druid is a crustier Doctor Strange. And Detective Inspector Maveryk likes to think he's the kind of old-fashioned copper played by John Thaw.
- The Eternal Warrior looks like Adam Eterno but is closer in concept to Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion. Tom Tom the Robot Man is Robot Archie with a little Iron Man added in. The Hurricane is Valiant's rage-powered, humourously foul-mouthed Captain Hurricane redone as a Hulk-level disaster with full-on Symbol Swearing. And Helen Morgan, with her immortality-granting crystal shard, is a very loose take on "Kelly's Eye", here linked into the Eternal Warrior.
- Bramble and Son, Vampire Hunters are Steptoe and Son... if they were vampire hunters!
- The Cameo: Jack Staff himself would appear in the Invincible War Crisis Crossover, protecting London against one of the Evil Invincibles brought by Angstrom from other Mirror Universes. He fights the same Evil Mark Grayson twice before sadly losing, although coming out of the counter alive at least.
- Captain Patriotic: Jack Staff, Sergeant Stripes, and Kapitan Krieg.
- Clingy MacGuffin: The Steel Claw, which Ben Kulmer can't remove.
- Demonic Possession: Kapitan Krieg finds out the Nazis had more plans for him than just being a superhero...
- Due to the Dead: Jack burying Krieg under his civilian name.
- Dying as Yourself: Kapitan Krieg manages to avert being made
- Even Evil Has Standards: Chinard is very upset that his wannabe gratuitously shot and killed someone.
- Evil Twin: The evil vampire Albert Bramble who survives the collapse of the Mirror Universe reality.
- Eye Beams: Kapitan Krieg when possessed.
- Fourth-Wall Observer: The Druid, who frequently talks to the reader.
- Hate Plague: The Hurricane situation.
- Hulking Out: Captain Gust, whose rage problems manifest by turning him into the Hurricane.
- Immortal Life Is Cheap: Helen Morgan. Not treated quite comically enough for "They Killed Kenny Again", but approaching it.
- Jack the Ripoff: Chinard is lured out of retirement when a wannabe steals one of his old Spider-suits and starts committing crimes with it.
- Magic Feather: General Tubbs's Super Wrist-Gadget keyboard, as Commander Malone finds out the hard way.
- The Men in Black: Q are the mostly-sympathetic version.
- Mister Big: Brain Head or "Hässlicher Kleiner Mann".
- Mugging the Monster: The Claw in the jewellers' shop, with a twist (he ends up robbing the place himself and using the dumb robber as a patsy). Played straighter when a hoodie tries to mug the harmless old Mr. Chinard.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Jack's dissipation of the Hurricane's power into the environment ends up causing a Hate Plague with several fatalities and a number of innocent people being turned into murderers.
- No Celebrities Were Harmed: Morlan the Mystic is an affectionate caricature of Alan Moore, while horror novelist Iain M Angel is an anagrammatic Shout-Out to Neil Gaiman (with presumably a little Iain M. Banks added in). Lord Gilbert Pearce is a much less affectionate hybrid of Jeffrey Archer and Lord Lucan.
- Older Than They Look: John/Jack looks in his 30s at most, but has been fighting crime since the 1940s. (The strip can't begin earlier than 1991, given the registration plate on John's truck in the very first panel.)
- Old-Fashioned Copper: Inspector Maveryk - in fact, it's practically his catchphrase, and usually manifests itself by getting in everyone else's way.
- Oop North: Castletown is in Yorkshire.
- Poisoned Chalice Switcheroo: Subverted. Both glasses were poisoned and it was the antidote that was ostentatiously added to one.
- Power Armour: Tom-Tom the Robot Man, the second Molachi, and less overtly Chinard's costume.
- Public Domain Character: Grist introduced an ageing and semi-retired version of 1960s British comic supervillain The Spider to the second arc, in the belief that either he was out of copyright or nobody would care. The copyright owners did notice, but fortunately they liked what Grist had done with the character and allowed him to carry on using the Spider, as long as he was identified in future only by the civilian name Grist had given him, "Alfred Chinard".note
- Required Secondary Powers: Lampshaded when Brain Head takes down Blazing Glory by turning off her ability not to get burned.
- Samus Is a Girl: Tom-Tom the Robot Man is actually disabled teenager Patricia Carthy in armour.
- Significant Anagram: "A Chinard"="Arachnid"
- Unrobotic Reveal: Tom-Tom the Robot Man.
- And later zig-zagged with a straight Robotic Reveal when a villain blows a hole through Tom-Tom and Jack mourns Patricia as dead, only to discover that she upgraded the robot to being fully remote-controlled rather than Power Armour.
- Vagueness Is Coming: The long-running Red Vs Green plot. Still not explained.
- Wearing a Flag on Your Head: Well, not his head, exactly, but on his chest.
