SENTENCES: The Life of MF Grimm
By Percy Carey and Ronald Wimberly
Vertigo Books/DC Comics
$19.99, ISBN: 978-1-4012-1046-5

He was thisclose to getting out of The Life for good before the bullets came for his spine. But Percy Carey himself makes it hard to feel sorry for him before and after he was paralyzed from the waist down. Carey grew up in the ‘Hood before it became glamorized in 1990s song and film, and rolled with it simultaneously on his own and its terms. So he simultaneously produced hiphop and pain, strife and glory, street legend status and a criminal record.

So goes “Sentences,” the story of MF Grimm, a.k.a. “The Grimm Reaper,” and his battles using guns on the New York City streets and using words onstage as a rapper with serious potential undercut by tragedy. Carey’s first-person account, published in graphic novel form by DC Comics’ Vertigo imprint, is awash with paradox: shootouts in the afternoon and MC battles that same night; the boring monotony of drug dealing, and the most powerful love mixed in with the most violent hate.

This kind of nonfiction genre’s usual suspects show up—anger, the informant, jail life, redemption, realization, determination. Along the way, the reader gets a bi-coastal idea of how hiphop formed from the days of Run-DMC’s label-approved party jams through MF Doom’s independent moves. Carey was clearly a player: he met Chuck D, once shared a stage with KRS-One, assisted several Death Row Record artists (including Snoop Dogg), and even once interviewed Nas for “Right On!” magazine. As Grimm himself doesn’t fail to point out, he got shot before Corporate Music America learned to pimp that as a marketing move.

Carey relays his tale with a stark power that would make Ernest Hemingway pause and Donald Goines smile. Unfortunately, the wheelchair-bound hiphop artist has no profound thoughts to deliver, only the typical I-couldn’t-resist-the-lure-of-the-streets-so-don’t-let-this-happen-to-you lessons. His memories, regardless, are painful to re-live, even (and perhaps especially) in cartoon form, thanks to Ronald Wimberly. The artist’s superbly realistic but cartoony style, coupled with his brilliant uses of black space, almost produces sound—especially that of the revolving beauty and pain of the author’s personal journey into moral purgatory. Carey seeks to, and succeeds in, understanding his own demons, and he seems glad to be back to square one, ready to make new journeys out of his life.