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.