All-Star Western #9 – Review

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

The Story: Hex sure has had an interesting mix of women in his life, hasn’t he?

The Review: In an era of decompressed storytelling, Palmiotti and Gray’s done-in-two style of narratives is something of a pleasant novelty.  Most of the time, they do a neat job of wrapping up their plots in the couple issues they set out for themselves, but every now and then, it feels like they cut their tale off just before it gets to fully stretch its legs, leaving it slightly unresolved, aimless, or a bit inconsequential.

That’s the feeling you get on this whole “August Seven” affair.  We only just got acquainted with the other four of these highly cultured and bigoted individuals, and before they ever execute another move, Hex and his pals (to use the word loosely) shut them down.  Obviously, the imminent danger to a ship full of immigrants required immediate action, but for all the effort Palmiotti-Gray took to build up the Seven, the Southerners prove rather weak-chinned in a real fight.  And without further ado and little sentiment, Hex and Arkham say so long to their New Orleans companions and go on their own merry way.

All-Star Western #8 – Review

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

The Story: Hex discovers that on occasion, violence can be a turn-on.

The Review: The thing about genre fiction, which includes the western, is that the stories are frequently restricted by conventions.  They have certain archetypes fans easily recognize, and their plots tend to follow well-established patterns and formulas.  Breaking out of these ruts can be quite difficult, considering the limited range each genre offers.  With the western, the limits are even greater since it has restrictions on both geography and time.

This title has defied the traditions of its genre by moving the story outside the usual dusty, frontier town and placing it within urban settings.  While we’ve gotten a lot of entertainment out of observing Hex’s unique brand of “country mouse, town mouse” conflict, it’s more important to note that putting him in cities like Gotham and New Orleans means he encounters the kinds of problems we can relate to, making him more accessible to us.  It also means he has to re-discover and re-use parts of his humanity he hasn’t had to deal with in a while.

All-Star Western #7 – Review

By: Too many to list—check out the review.

The Story: Well, if you’re going for a name change, “Scarface” is nothing if not apt.

The Review: You don’t get too much genuine historical fiction in comics unless some time-traveling weirdness is involved.  Even then, writers don’t do much more with the period other than use it as an excuse to put their characters in costume and maybe throw in some anachronistic gags—most of which involve utterances of modern curse words, to the shock or confusion of the antiquated people around them.

All-Star Western provides an opportunity for Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti to land in a period and stick with it for a while, exploring all the issues it has to offer.  We got some child laborers in the last story arc, and a brief foray into early Chinese-American life with the “Barbary Ghost” feature, but so far, these plotlines have only scratched the surface of the post-Reconstruction era, which by all accounts was a very volatile time for the (re)United States.

By taking Hex to New Orleans and introducing him right off the bat to the plight of immigrants under siege by Southern xenophobes, Gray-Palmiotti may be making their first, genuine attempt to deliver a more historically sophisticated tale.  That said, they don’t go much further than having the heroes express pity for innocent victims (“These people killed children!”) and the bad guys dabble in metaphor-laden bigotry (“…the human filth hits our shores with the vigor of an invading army.”).  But these are comics, after all, not socio-political treatises.