All-Star Western #12 – Review

By: Justin Gray & Jimmy Palmiotti (story), Moritat (art), Mike Atiyeh (colors)

The Story: Real women speak with their fists—and guns.

The Review: All-Star Western is yet another one of those titles you’d think I’d have abandoned by now, and yet here we are.  Considering that the western is hardly the barnburner of a genre it used to be, it’s even more remarkable this title has lasted this long on my pull list.  But maybe it’s precisely the rarity and specialized nature of westerns that has protected it from a more rigorous standard of judgment.

Then, too, Gray-Palmiotti have delivered some fairly original material on this series.  Hex in industrial Gotham would’ve been good times enough, but with the addition of Dr. Arkham as sidekick, as well as mixing it up with lineage villains like the followers of the Crime Bible or the Court of Owls, we’ve gotten a pretty lively title on our hands.  Gray-Palmiotti may not have done anything worth alerting the presses about, but they’ve got the guts to try new, interesting things on a consistent basis (Dr. Jekyll as Hex’s next client?  I’m game.).

All-Star Western #10 – Review

By: Justin Gray & Jimmy Palmiotti (story), Moritat (art), Gabriel Bautista (colors)

The Story: Anyone care to guess the one thing that puts a merry smile on Hex’s face?

The Review: Don’t tell anyone, but I actually don’t care too much for these short features Gray-Palmiotti keep inserting at the back of this series.  This is no reflection on the concept of back-ups themselves; Nick Spencer’s Jimmy Olsen bit was a fantastic bonus to Paul Cornell’s already solid run in Action Comics, and was even better collected.  But the All-Star Western short features have been mainly jumbled, pointless, underwhelming at best and dull at worst.

The tale of Bat Lash generally follows in this vein.  Despite fun art from José Luis Garcia-López (colored by Patrick Mulvihill), the story makes only a weak attempt at fun by portraying Lash as the most hustlin’ swinger in the Wild West.  The idea isn’t bad, but Gray-Palmiotti just try way too hard to sell Lash’s bon vivant manner, to the point he just comes across as the dirtbag you don’t even care enough to hate: “Aside from my enviable gambling skills, did I mention that I am also devastatingly handsome?”  By the end of the feature, you have no idea why it exists in the first place, other than to take up space no one knew what to do with.