The Nicest Thing I Can Say – A Review of The Sixth Gun
Over the weekend I came down with an unpleasant cold with a side order of debilitating fever. It took me out of the game for the two days I'd set aside to write the second part of my ongoing how-to series. So that's still coming, but it's too rough to post today. Instead, I'm going to do a mini-review of a comic book series I recently discovered called The Sixth Gun. It gets my stamp of approval because it made me say the nicest thing I can say about any piece of fiction I read.
The Sixth Gun made me want to write.
Written by Cullen Bunn and set in a recently post-Civil War America, The Sixth Gun is a Weird Western tale of six evil guns with horrible magic powers. The weapons bond themselves to a single living person until that person dies at which point the next person to touch the gun becomes the new owner. My favorite part of Bunn's writing on this is how every character either wears a hat of pitch black or, at best, one of smoky, dirty gray.
Those pitch black hats are undead Civil War generals, his vain and vicious widow, and Civil War criminals willing to follow the aforementioned undead general. Seriously, how much do you love all of that? Evil magic guns, undead Confederate generals and their wicked crews? There is nothing in there not to fall into a swoon over.
The "heroes," though, are where this series shines. And they all wear hats of gray. As a fan of Noir, that couldn't make me happier. I love that. Drake Sinclair, a dandy gunfighter with a very shady past, never does anything for just one reason. But he does enough protective, "good guy" things that you can almost forget he's a self-interested bastard. Naturally, he's bonded to four of the six guns. He seems to hate that fact, but he also went in with eyes wide open so he must be up to something...
Most of Drake's protective moves are for Becky, a young girl who accidentally found herself bonded to the Sixth Gun which gives the gift of prophecy or insight. That sounds like a pretty great power, but at the same time, everyone is at pains to explain to Becky that the gun serves only its own interests, never the interests of its owner. Becky took up the gun without realizing what was happening to her, so she's as close to a victim as you get. But that doesn't mean she's pure as the driven snow.
Gord Cantrell is an ex-slave and leader of men with a wealth of occult knowledge. He seems interested in helping Drake and Becky 
manage the evil of the guns, but he's also got dangerous secrets lurking in his past that might suggest he's traded bits of himself for power and revenge before.
Standing in the middle are Kirby Hale, a handsome gunfighter/bounty hunter that strikes me as a sinister Brett Maverick, the Sword of Abraham, an evil-fighting order of Catholic priests who have fought the evil of the guns for millennia, and Asher Cobb, a mummy with the gift of prophecy, and Pinkerton detectives with a connection to the Knights Templar. These are the secondary characters, people! How amazing is that?
The art is equally amazing. Brian Hurtt drew some of my favorite books of all time including an arc on Queen & Country, Gotham Central, and unfortunately short-lived Hard Time. He's had to master the American West's deserts, the city, swamps, and bayous of New Orleans, prison camps, flashbacks to other times, Catholic missions all look beautiful and hideous or both at the same time.
Not to mention the fantastical creatures like ghosts, demons, thunderbirds, loa, golem-style zombies as well as the stock Western characters of gunfighter, thug, miner, codger, sheriff, and all the others you remember from Gunsmoke, Bonanza, and The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly. The art works as both fantasy story, traditional Western, and murky Spaghetti Western.
The book is a tremendous read with 50 issues (bound together in three collections with a fourth on the way in November) and it deserves to be read by you. GO BUY IT! The first issue is free on Comixology and each "volume" is bundled together for $8.99. That's a tough deal to beat, but your local comic shop will hook you up if you prefer the dead tree version.
I couldn't recommend this series more. In fact, as I mentioned above, I have the nicest words I can say about it: It made me want to write. That'll be good news for you guys as well.
As longtime readers will recall, I have a Weird Western languishing unpublished. This is mostly because it was my first finished novel. For those of you that don't know the curse of the first novel, that means it is a horrible mess of a manuscript. It is such a mess, in fact, that it has been easier to just write new things than to fix it. Well, no more!
Hell Bent for Leather has demons and a gun full of blessed magic and a cowboy roped (see what I did there?) into a a larger world full of evil monsters and Devils that make deals for your best friend's soul. It also has a finished but unpolished sequel titled On Leather Wings with definitely non-sparkly vampire-type things.
I'm looking to polish Hell Bent and release it as a serialized novella via Amazon's new Serials project. That lets me fix it in smaller, bite-sized chunks and release it to you as I do so. That's super exciting to me and, I hope, to you guys also. So celebrate some Unruh-style Weird Western fun by reading Mr. Bunn's and Mr. Hurtt's supernatural rollercoaster ride across the Old West today!
Tomorrow (not literally) you can celebrate by buying mine. I won't be jealous in the meantime, I promise.
