Why Shaolin Cowboy 2 is A Terrible Comic

Shaolin Cowboy 2 by Geof Darrow
Dark Horse Comics

Geof Darrow's Shaolin Cowboy has always been one of those legends told in comic book circles, described with reverence and awe, the truth getting lost in the legend enhanced by its unavailability. The first series was published as seven issues intermittently between 2004 and 2007 by long-since-shuttered Burlyman Entertainment and has been subsequently out of print since. When Darrow started doing spot-illustrations for the revived Dark Horse Presents and was subsequently announced as reviving the title, there was a great deal of buzz and anticipation. I haven't read the originals as, perplexingly, neither Dark Horse nor Darrow saw fit to reprint the first series as a lead-in to the current one (maybe the reprint rights are all weird, as can happen with creator-owned books pulled from limbo). But I was aware of the legend, and eagerly anticipated the first new issue which came out in October. And needless to say, I was suitably impressed. Darrow's hyper-detailed art style and unhinged story involving slackers and zombies and pop culture and all kinds of crazy shit with the badass eponymous character were unique and delightful. Darrow's exhilarating work in Shaolin Cowboy 1 was quite stunning, and the detailed, manic nature of the work invited continual reappraisal.

Now knowing what to expect, I was very happy to see issue 2 drop without delay, and was floored for a completely different reason: Shaolin Cowboy 1 is one of the best comics of the year. Shaolin Cowboy 2 is one of the worst.

First, Shaolin Cowboy 2 isn't really a "comic." Sure, it quacks like a comic and looks like a comic, but when you open it up all you get are 33 images of a dude attacking a horde of zombies by swinging a large stick with a chainsaw at each end. And that's it. For 33 pages, Geof Darrow presents the Cowboy swinging his contraption and bifurcating many, many zombies.

I know more than a few people who would make the argument that 33 uninterrupted splashy pages of Geof Darrow-illustrated widescreen zombie annihilation is worth the price of admission. The level of gruesome detail Darrow lavishes on his undead horde and the physicality of the Shaolin Cowboy are all without par. Individually, each panel is a frankly masterful display of deliciously delineated violence. But there is no variation to the ceaseless butchery. None.

Every single panel is staged from the same angle. There is no sense of setting or threat, just repeated image after image: Panel: The Cowboy swings the contraption, kills some zombies. Panel: The Cowboy swings the contraption, kills some zombies. Panel: The Cowboy swings the contraption, kills some zombies... One panel of Darrow illustrating this is like fine caviar. 33 pages of this is like having fish eggs shoved down your throat for breakfast, lunch and dinner for a month.

The structure, the staging and the storytelling are all atrocious. Every single panel, with the exception of the first, can be interchanged with any other, making them all pointless. Look at all the images I've included with this review. They include the second panel, the final panel, and a random selection of others, all completely out of the order from the published thing. Could you tell? Could you put them in order without reading the comic? Could you do it after reading it? There is zero sense of progression. Comic books are sequential storytelling, but there is nothing sequential about Shaolin Cowboy 2. Of course many comics and many cartoonists can manipulate the language and mechanics of comics in daring ways to tell different kinds of comic stories. But that is not what is happening here.

Within the context of the larger eventual graphic novel, one could see these pages as simply an elaborate illustrative sequence, and within that context it is a forgivable excess that is quickly breezed by on the way to (presumably) actual plot and storytelling. But the appropriate context for this piece is as it was released, as a comic book - and as a comic book it is an abysmal failure and a waste of money. Whatever wow-factor we get from the first issue turns into an again?-factor. Like Darrow had one idea and stretched it about twenty times longer than it should go.

If the scene was the same - The Cowboy swings the contraption, kills some zombies - throughout the issue, but presented with some actual visual dynamism, from varying angles or panel constructions, (maybe, I dunno, sequentially!), then maybe it would be tolerable. But reading this, I'm struck by two things: that Darrow spent a great deal of time drawing all of this, and that he essentially chose to draw the same thing, over and over. If you are going through the trouble, when you have proven skills as a visual storyteller, why do this? It would be wrong for me to try to divine the artist's intent without knowing his true feelings, but this feels like simple, hollow artistic masturbation in four colors, stapled with a barcode for the suckers to lose three fifty on.

Ad nauseating ad nauseum ad infinitum.

Visions of Epilepsy from David B and Sam Humphries

Looking at two radically different responses to a life marked by epilepsy, Sacrifice by Sam Humphries & Dalton Rose and Epileptic by David B.

Epileptic by David B
L'Association/Pantheon, 2005

Epilepsy, a blanket term for a range of varied but related neurological syndromes, often involve seizures that can range from minor to completely incapacitating, sometimes accompanied by hallucinations, often having adverse emotional effects on the sufferers and those around them. Two completely different graphic novels deal with this in their own ways: David B.'s ground-breaking memoir Epileptic deals with the effect his brother's condition has had on his family, and writer Sam Humphries' Sacrifice, a fictional take of one epileptic's journey from a writer who suffers from the condition himself.

Epileptic by David B. (the pen-name of L'Association co-founder Pierre-Francois Beauchard) was serialized in France between 1996 and 2004 as L'Ascension du Haut-Mal (The Rise of the High Evil) and released as one extraordinary volume by Pantheon in the United States in 2005. A memoir of Beauchard's upbringing and his brother Jean-Christophe's debilitating epilepsy and the profound effect that had on Beauchard's life and that of his family, Epileptic sits at the vanguard of the modern graphic memoir movement.

The memoir opens up with Beauchard visiting his family as an adult, and encountering his brother, a physical mess, his face and body racked with scars, out of shape and all but unrecognizable to Beauchard. Things then process chronologically from early childhood, beginning in Beauchard's idyllic youth in Orleans, France. But the innocence of childhood is shaken up by his brothers frequent seizures, and Jean-Christophe is diagnosed as epileptic. Sometimes his crippling seizures, which can last seconds or hours, are triggered by stress or high emotion, and sometimes they just happen randomly. Jean-Christophe's condition casts a pall over the entire family as they come to terms with their capricious, random effects and the lack of understanding from friends, neighbors, and authorities.

The time frame of the events in the book begins in 1964, and the public and medical understanding of epilepsy was scant and even contradictory, at best. Differing diagnoses and treatment schemes all fail to work on Jean Christophe's condition for very long, and soon the family finds itself repeatedly trying the services of obvious quack physicians, far-fetched dietary restrictions, and full-on cults replete with hippie communes and restrictive living practices. Jean-Christophe's condition is all but untreatable, and soon the darkness of his condition draws him down a path of depression and anger. Jean-Christophe withdraws into himself, lashing out at his family and pursuing dark obsessions, shutting himself off from the world. The entire family suffers through Jean-Christophe's disease and increasingly useless treatments, and soon have to suffer Jean-Christophe himself, a shell of a person given over to a darkness that spreads out all around him.

There is a repetitiveness to the family's cycles of quacks, cults, and diets, but whatever narrative deficiencies are made up for in Beauchard's consistently astonishing art. Beauchard's hyper-dense, stylized art frequently breaks down into abstractions of breathtaking artistry, visually representing both the horrible effects Jean-Christophe was suffering as well as the shadow the disease cast over the whole family. As Beauchard grows up, he is shown developing his artistic style and coming into his own as a fiercely unique artist with an original visual style unseen anywhere else in comics. The visual poetry of Beauchard's work in Epileptic is anarchic, bracing, explosive and always astounding.

But there is a certain self-absorbed coldness to the proceedings as Beauchard begins to remove himself from his brother's enormous influence. At one point it is mentioned that his sister, barely a supporting player in this drama, tries to kill herself. This event, which by any measure should be a significant turning point in the family's history, is glossed over without further comment, with ever increasing weight given to how this is all affecting Beauchard himself. This is a memoir of Beauchard's experience, after all, not a biography of Jean-Christophe or anyone else. But it seems Beauchard, in suffering under Jean-Christophe's shadow and the weight of the disease on the family, has gotten to a point past acceptance to one of complete removal. It would be oversimplifying things to suggest that there is a vein of resentment in Beauchard's approach, but perhaps this is all an understandable coping mechanism, a natural reaction to the first part of his life given over to another's suffering, then to the weight that person's increasingly negative personality.


Epileptic is a vivid chronicle of one epileptic's mental and physical deterioration and the effect the disease and the sufferer's experience had on those around him. It is a vibrant artistic response to a persistent, ceaseless trauma and a history of both a family and the medical and social approach to a complex condition at a place and time now passed. In Epileptic, Beauchard has crafted a masterpiece of graphic nonfiction that captures the physical horrors and emotional turmoil of a ravenous disease that will not release its stranglehold, and of a man who gave in to the suffocating darkness, taking those who love him down with him.

Sacrifice by Sam Humphries & Dalton Rose
Humphries 2011-2013, Dark Horse 2013

Writer Sam Humphries has epilepsy, but unlike  he has it under some level of control. It was his experience with epilepsy (and an apparent obsession with Aztec history) that fueled his self-published mini-series with artist Dalton Rose, Sacrifice, now out in hardcover from Dark Horse. Hector is a suicidal epileptic slacker obsessed with Joy Division who finds himself having psychedelic visions during his seizures. Things quickly take a trippy turn during a particularly severe seizure when Hector finds himself captured by warriors from the Aztec Empire in the early 1500s. He's taken to Tenochtitlan - a city-state and an Empire founded on repeated human sacrifice - just prior to Cortes's conquest. More than just a brief seizure-induced hallucination, Hector's trips to Tenochtitlan become increasingly elaborate, lasting days, then weeks, then years. He learns the Aztec language Nahuatl and ends up playing an unwitting role in the sociopolitical and religious conflicts engulfing Tenochtitlan.

And its these conflicts that end up bogging down the book for a pretty large portion of the narrative. Humphries seems clearly well-versed in all things Aztec history, and there is a significant portion of the plot given over to the political struggle between the cults of Quetzalcoatl and Huitzilopochtli. It's a bit too uninteresting and clunky (not to mention all the bloody long Aztec names and words), and the only saving grace is Dalton Rose's wonderful, highly colored art. Rose is able to capture the visually engaging setting of Columbian Mesoamerica as well as the psychedelic experience that Hector (and soon enough, the audience) goes through.

The more time Hector spends in Tenochtitlan, the more he is convinced that he is time traveling to the period, not just engaging in elaborate vision quests (as the Aztecs call his seizures). He resolves to change history, using his knowledge of the coming Spanish armada to take control of Tenochtitlan and attempt to defeat the Spanish and preserve and expand the Aztec Empire. Things don't necessarily turn out how he wants, and soon enough the plot takes a very Grant Morrison turn. The time traveling Hector, unmoored between the Aztec past he is trying to manipulate and the future in the 21st century he no longer wants, is given an ultimate choice that may result in seismic religious and cultural changes that will reverberate through centuries and entire divine pantheons. Ultimately, the slog through ancient Aztec politics is a bit much to endure, but Humphries and Dalton bypass any attempt at open-ended interpretation and deliver a whopper of a conclusion in the unexpected final chapter.

Both Epileptic and Sacrifice use the comic medium to cope with the subjective and often terrible trauma of epilepsy. David B.'s by-proxy experience and the impact on his family fueled his highly artistic memoir of the pain suffered by those who have to deal with the most severe forms of the disease. Humphries fictionalized his own experience, using it as a springboard to explore his passions and tell an odd little historical melodrama that morphs into a psychedelic journey to godhood. These are two completely different works attempting completely different things - David B. succeeds wildly, indeed being one of the best comic memoirs yet produced, where Humphries and Dalton fall a little short. But both have value as unique takes on a condition that effects millions of lives.

Super Spies, Secret Histories: Matt Kindt's MIND MGMT Volume 1

MIND MGMT Volume 1: The Manager
By Matt Kindt
Dark Horse Books, 2013

Matt Kindt is a cartoonist with a unique visual style, often coloring his distinct drawings with watercolors or other mixed media that bleeds past the borders of the narrative art into the edges of the art boards. He'll reproduce the whole board with meta-messages plastered in the margins, the grain of the paper coming through and giving texture to the rough imagery.

As a storyteller, in his creator-owned works Kindt excels with stories dealing with espionage, deeply invested on the effect spying has on societies and the individuals who wage the never-ending shadow wars that steer the course of history. The technologies used in spying and the winding pathways of interpersonal and intergovernmental treachery share equal focus with stories of human beings giving everything of themselves for an ideal or profit, often caught up in waves of human events beyond their control, sometimes controlling those waves themselves. In a similar way to Garth Ennis's masterful cornering of the war genre - not just his entertaining and historically accurate war stories but the deep psychology of those who wage war - Kindt masterfully utilizes espionage and everything it entails to explore unique facets of human interaction and global history. Kindt's breakthrough work was Super Spy (as well as its spin-off 2 Sisters), richly detailed and beguiling graphic novels exploring spies and spying from various conflicts throughout human history. His follow up graphic novels all played with similar themes but in increasingly unique and exhilarating ways: Revolver, his mind-bending story of a man caught between alternate realities, and even 3 Story: The Secret History of the Giant Man, his modern fantasy of a man whose body grows to extreme heights in his short and tortured life, are at their hearts spy tales. MIND MGMT, his new ongoing series from Dark Horse, is a natural extension of the work he has dedicated so much of his career to, a perfect distillation of the ideas and themes he excels at exploring, a vastly entertaining mystery set against the backdrop of sci-fi superpowered spycraft and secret histories.

MIND MGMT Volume 1: The Manager (released this week) is the first graphic novel in the series collecting the first seven chapters, packaged in a gorgeous hardcover with fantastic and innovative trade design. The story opens with journalist Meru working on a book about the notorious Flight 815, a plane where everyone aboard were afflicted with amnesia. Meru is at the end of her rope, for reasons to be revealed constantly finding herself blowing deadlines, behind on bills, becoming increasingly obsessed with the flight and what happened to it. Her investigations take her around the world, getting wrapped up in a deeper mystery, the recurring theme of some secret organization told in whispers, a group called Mind Management. Meru finds herself trapped in a web far larger and deeper than even she realizes, illuminating hidden corners of a world dominated by secret agents of a defunct organization who have unbelievable powers, telepathy, telekinesis, even the ability to warp reality itself. The mysteries abound, who are these people, what is Mind Management, and what is Meru's connection to it all. The answers may lie with a man named Henry Lyme, but the quest for Lyme may just be a symptom of a larger disorder that is afflicting the very fabric of history itself.

MIND MGMT is an enthralling journey into a world of superspies and secret histories, unique powers and the unknown forces of global manipulation. This is a bracingly original work, the first in what promises to be a series of unique and attractive graphic novels from one of the medium's most distinct creative voices.

Post-Apocalypse Now: Brian Wood's The Massive, Volume 1 Reviewed

The Massive Volume 1: Black Pacific by
Brian Wood, Kristian Donaldson & Garry Brown
Dark Horse, 2013

The Massive Volume 1: Black Pacific, out this Wednesday, collects the first six issues of the latest ongoing series from writer Brian Wood. On a near-future Earth, there has been a ceaseless series of environmental and geopolitical calamities. There has been a complete global environmental and economic collapse (referred to as The Crash), and when I say complete, imagine the worst that can happen, then imagine the worst thing that can happen about once a month for a year. The Massive takes place in the immediate aftermath of the Earth's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Year.

The setting is a ship, The Kapital, the floating operational base of the one-time militant environmental activist group Ninth Wave. Founded and run by shady former mercenaries and a multinational crew of far too-willing volunteers, the ship's mission has changed from environmental activism (think Whale Wars just with more competent volunteers with an eco-terrorist edge) to coming to terms with the nigh-apocalypse and the search for their missing sister ship, the titular Massive.

It's the search for The Massive that drives the leader of the group, internationally wanted man Callum Isreal, and also the book's weakest element. It's Israel's white whale and possibly one Massive MacGuffin - maybe the bloody thing just sank, who knows. He's fairly certain the ship is still out there, but why it's so hard to find (or unwilling to hook up with their brethren) isn't remotely explained yet. Thankfully the search for The Massive isn't the central plot point, as the series immediately focuses on the Kapital's exploration of the post-Crash world. Where your average post-apocalyptic fiction piece tends to be focused on a small aspect of a larger conflict or conflagration, the book's setting of a ship abroad affords a unique look at the entire geo-political post-apocalyptic landscape. Coupled with flashbacks to the days of the Crash Year and to Israel's mercenary past, you get a broad milieu of an Earth in political and environmental transition.

The book's expanded cast is made up of environmental nuts who suddenly have nothing to be nutty for because the environment is well screwed by this point. Their motivation for continuing, beyond simple inertia or lack of choice, is not really explored. Israel's closest allies up the chain of command do get a little more play, and have their own mysteries and hidden motivations that are slowly (and effectively) being doled out.

Brian Wood is really excelling at world building in the book, far more than he was in DMZ, constructing a vivid and well-delineated landscape recognizably built from the soggy ashes of the world we now inhabit. Things are very different here, but it's not too far removed from the present, nor our present understanding of the world, to get into Mad Max-like post apocalyptic territory. There is a great deal of narrative setup in play, but more in setting rather than plot, to the point where we can see that we will always be in a kind-of set-up mode because the world has been so profoundly changed and there is quite a lot of world out there left to see.

It's not quite clear where the book is going - unless, of course, the search for The Massive is the point, which would be most unfortunate. The other big mystery is what precipitated the Crash - we know very well and in great detail what happened, but there is some mystery as to why it all happened at once. I honestly doubt the book will be about the search for why, because no answer could really be satisfying (and how can a lone crew on a single ship discover the answers to such huge questions anyway?).

The initial story arc features nicely detailed art from Kristian Donaldson, who decidedly excels at building the environmental landscape and producing the look of the Kapital. Garry Brown, the series' current ongoing artist, takes over in the second arc of the book, with a slightly rougher but perfectly appropriate style. Dave Stewart's colors and Brian Wood's impeccable design centers the overall feel of the book.

The first volume of The Massive is an attractive graphic novel with an assured voice and viewpoint from what is Wood's best ongoing work, and presents enough of an intriguing mystery and setting to keep readers wanting more. At $20 it's a nicely valued trade paperback from Dark Horse, who are, to the benefit of readers and creators alike, very much keeping pace with the recent Image-spearheaded creator-owned renaissance.

Quick Hits: Delicate Creatures, Persepolis, and Last Day in Vietnam

Delicate Creatures
by J. Michael Straczynski
Art by Michael Zulli
Top Cow/Image, 2001

Reviewed in this week's Quick Hits, three works that reflect on the cost of war and revolution, in two memoirs and a modern fantasy.

Delicate Creatures is often listed as one of J. Michael Straczynski's graphic novels, but this is not a comic by any standard - it's an illustrated novella in album format, featuring art by Michael Zulli. At first blush a light modern fantasy story about tiny whimsical children's story characters living within the walls of a castle in war-torn Europe, it quickly evolves into a parable of loss, pain, freedom, death and revenge as these creatures witness and try to come to terms with the horrors of human war and occupation unfolding before them. Soon, one of these Delicate Creatures intervenes in the conflict with ramifications that can destroy everything around them. Straight-forward, beautiful, and heart-breaking, the only weakness is in the art which again isn't any kind of graphic narrative but simple representative fantasy illustration. Straczynski's exemplary storytelling takes the forefront in this, one of his better early works.

The Complete Persepolis
by Marjane Satrapi
Pantheon, 2007

Marjane Satrapi was 8 years old when the revolution started. Born into relative wealth and comfort in a western, modern Iran, it was in her formative years that a popular uprising unseated the US-friendly Shah in favor of a restrictive, conservative theocratic government. This was an uprising committed by the people, against the people. In her stunning and influential memoir Persepolis (originally serialized in France by L'Association), Satrapi tells her story and her country's story with gripping simplicity from the perspective of a child witness to the confusion and loss that such a revolution (and resultant brutal war with Iraq) can cause. The revolution and war took its toll on her home country and her people and played a unique role in her own personal development. While uneven in its second half, the narrative hits all the right notes in a fascinating and brutally honest character study flawlessly interwoven with the developing cultural history of one of the world's oldest and most complex countries. Perceptive, entertaining, educating, Persepolis is one of the new century's truly required reads, a graphic novel of unique power and importance, a vital historical document and startlingly fresh and important work in the often uninteresting genre of the graphic memoir.

Last Day in Vietnam
by Will Eisner
Dark Horse, 2000/2013

While not the inventor of the graphic novel, Will Eisner is often duly credited with popularizing the term and the form - although many of his works were in reality collections of short stories. Last Day in Vietnam, his 2000 collection re-released last week in a fantastic new edition by Dark Horse, is one of his most focused and best. A memoir of his experiences in World War II as a soldier and later conflicts as a military journalist, most of the short stories are simply told in engaging, first-person vignettes, relating tales that re funny, thought-provoking, and most of all honest and real. The collection's concluding comic, A Purple Heart for George, is an astonishingly concise synthesis of story and art, relating in less than ten pages one of the Second World War's tiny personal tragedies in a conflict full of them. It's works like that again put Eisner on the map after an already long and influential career, one of the medium's true giants.

Resident Alien, The Best Undercover Extra-Terrestrial Murder Mystery Comic, Reviewed

Resident Alien: Welcome to Earth
by Peter Hogan & Steve Parkhouse
Dark Horse, 2013

Dr. Harry Vanderspiegle came to the small town of Patience, U.S.A., lost a bit far from home. He lives in a quiet cabin on a lake, generally sticking to himself. One day the police arrive at his door - there's been a murder, and could Dr. Harry help out by looking at the body? "But... Why ask me? Sure your own doctor..." "Well, that's our problem in a nutshell, doc. See, we only had one doctor in town, and he's the victim."

Dr. Harry - that's not his real name, of course - reluctantly agrees to aid the police in their investigation. But Harry is hiding a secret, a secret that could be blown by dealing so closely with the authorities in this middle-of-nowhere town, Harry is an alien from another planet.

Resident Alien, Volume 1: Welcome to Earth by Peter Hogan and Steve Parkhouse is a fascinating and unique murder mystery. Harry, who is nothing more than your average normal guy who wants nothing more than to be left alone, gets roped not only into the investigation, but into being the towns new practicing doctor. He is decidedly alien in appearance, but with some telepathic effort he is able to disguise himself - but any interaction puts him at risk. The residents of Patience obviously don't know there is a alien in their midst, but the U.S. government knows something crash landed three years ago and they are looking for him.

Harry agrees to help out with the investigation, in part because to refuse would arouse suspicion, and in part because the idea of solving a murder is an interesting one - who wouldn't be curious about helping to solve a crime? But as he digs deeper into a web of drugs, death and deceit, he puts his identity and his very life at risk. Resident Alien is an utterly fascinating play between murder mystery and an alien far from home looking to protect himself and the people of his temporary life. How much of himself is he willing to give to these people who would hunt him down if they knew his secret? And how far is he willing to go to stop a murderer?

Presented with easy and accessible art from Parkhouse and simple yet engaging storytelling from Hogan, Resident Alien is a superb read now in trade paperback from Dark Horse.