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.