Author/Artist: Jay Faerber
Publisher: Image Comics
Rating: WORTHY!
Illustrated by Scott Godlewski.
Colors by Ron Riley.
Latters by Thomas Mauer.
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!
I've had a good relationship with Image comics. I like a lot of their stuff (particularly recently!), but I had to wonder if my run of good luck had come to an end with this one! Since it was only 55 pages, I decided to press on and see, and in the end, it was OK.
It's a western, but it's set in the future, so in some ways it's reminiscent of the Firefly TV series, except in this case, the main protagonist is on the side of the law, not trying to sneak around it.
I don't have a problem with either westerns or sci-fi, but I do worry about a host of potential problems when they're mixed. The problem is often either that there's too much western or there's too much sci-fi, so finding the sweet spot lies in getting a good balance between the two, and when this started out with a train which was supposedly a hover-train yet looked exactly like a stereotypical western train (minus the tracks) I was wondering if there was going to be such a problem.
It appeared to get worse when the sheriff had to visit a ranch over a domestic disturbance call. First of all, the ranch was in the middle of nowhere, so who called? Second the ranch looked exactly like a western ranch except that it was run by six-limbed one-eyed aliens - where was the technology? Therein lay my other problem: the artists had decided to go all Chalmun's on us, populating the scenery with almost every variation on alien they could thing up - most of which were really nothing more than Earth animals promoted to humanoid status - and of course, the bad guys were insectoid. Yawn!
That said, I liked the premise. Sheriff Bronson (good choice of name! Charles Bronson made his name in The Magnificent Seven a western movie classic, although it's based on a Japanese movie Seven Samurai). Bronson is a single mom looking to start over after an incident which remains a mystery even by the end of this volume. Apparently her choices are limited and this backwater job is all she can get. So despite the clichéd aspect of this premise, I loved the idea of having a single mom in the 'studly' rôle of town sheriff.
The deputy sheriff - an alien who looks like a giant mutant coypu is resentful of her being promoted over his head, and it doesn't help that the stupid humans are too disrespectful to grasp his full name Budroxofinicus, which although long is hardly forgettable or unpronounceable. It's hardly Raxacoricofallapatorius, but they demean him by calling him "Boo". The Sheriff doesn't even ask his name. It's left up to her son to do the introductions.
Bronson is called into service almost immediately responding to a domestic dispute on a ranch, where later, a mass murder is committed. meanwhile, her idiot son, who was told to stay home and not go out, goes out to help his next door neighbor's kid to look for her lost dog!<.p>
So, in short, I had more than a few issues with this, but overall I decided to rate it a worthy read because I think it has a lot of potential and I'm hoping that I'll grow into it as I move on to read volume 2!
