Throw a noose around my neck and hoist me up to be fed to the vultures, but I think the comic book – more than the movies, more than novels – is the ideal venue to tell the Western tale. While the genre flounders in those other media, the old West is brought to life on the four-color page. MARVEL WESTERNS attests to this.
Collecting four recent one-shots, this anthology offers new stories on forgotten Marvel cowboy characters, as well as reprints some classic (at least by virtue of being old) adventures of The Rawhide Kid. But those old stories – coming from the team of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby – are secondary to the new stuff, which both pay tribute to and revive with excitement the gunslinging traditions of the past.
Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers’ “Black Rider” is a masked avenger in the mold of Zorro or The Lone Ranger, but here plunked in the middle of an old-fashioned mystery. Well-told with suspense, the story offers a surprise ending that ties it into the more modern Marvel universe. Dan Slott and Eduardo Barretto plunk The Two-Gun Kid into the future – with a baffling cameo from She-Hulk – before settling into a flashback battle with werewolves.
Karl Kesel’s “The Legend of Red Wolf” shines the spotlight on a Native American hero, in a story of generation-spanning revenge, and Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti – currently working wonders with DC’s JONAH HEX – strive for high action and good humor, hitting both, with the bickering Kid Colt and the Arizona Girl. Of the main stories, only Jeff Parker and Tom Coker’s “The Man Called Hurricane” fails to gel.
Backup features include a horror yarn by Joe R. Lansdale; Keith Giffen’s humorous “Tall Tale,” starring one of Marvel’s strangest Western heroes, being a midget carnival performer who goes undercover as a ventriloquist’s dummy; and Jim McCann and David Williams illustrate why women are no damn good in “The Philadelphia Filly.”
As a bonus, the hardcover also boasts “Outlaw Files,” a text-based feature that is the kind of thing I hate to see in comics, since I don’t buy them to read lengthy, faux newspaper articles. But being a bonus, it’s like icing on the cake; in this case, you just scrape off the icing, because the cake itself is so damned good. Giddyup. –Rod Lott
Buy it at Amazon.
Discuss it in our forums.
OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS SERIES:
• MARVEL MONSTERS
• MARVEL ROMANCE
