Brian Azzarello/Marcelo Frusin
DC/Vertigo
in recent years i have come to be somewhat interested in Westerns, perhaps in part due to my travels to Houston (i still want a cowboy hat!), and found myself playing video games on the genre (Red Dead Revolver, Gun). now this series isn't a Western per se, but it does have some of those elements, especially the lawlessness. admit it, who doesn't think its cool to get tense, draw your revolver and gun the fucker down at the O.K. Corral.
set two years after the end of Civil War hostilities (again, not the Marvel Comics series, idiot), we see former Confederate soldier Wes Cutter returning to his backwater town (appropriately called Blackwater), to find the federals/Union soldiers occupying his land. Cutter, right from his first appearance, already looks to be a bad-ass. he proceeds to solidify this impression by gunning down 5 people and beating up 4 more right in the first issue.
Marcelo Frusin likes detail in the fight scenes (okay, that's driven by Azzarello's script), but that's great in the split-second life of action scenes, much moreso in Westerns, where we don't have superpowers and high-tech weapons.
Cutter is a sort of Rob Zombie/Clint Eastwood character, loving the fact that he stirs up a hornets' nest by returning from prison to his town, making the townspeople quake in their boots and then some.
the story messes with our heads by having Cutter apparently looking for his wife (and letting everyone know that), and everyone tells him his wife disappeared a long time ago. but it is revealed later (away from everyone's prying eyes), that his silent sidekick is none other than his wife. our other heads gets messed with furthermore with lots of horizontal tango splattered all over the series.
to see what happens next ... buy the book, dammit!!!
if this woman Ruth is really the Ruth from way back, only Azzarello knows. the tagline says it all: "behind every bad man is a badder woman."
Azzarello stirs a complicated pot here, shifting from flashbacks to the present day, with lots of characters with their own agenda drifting in and out as the story progresses. we have the usual gaggle of bad apples on both sides, a straight shooter in Colonel Silas Redd, and a mysterious black psycho wearing Union blues.
to see what this scene really means ... buy the book, dammit!!!
to further elucidate to us how much of a blunt instrument this series is, as Azzarello uses it, here's a sequence where Colonel Redd fetches Cutter to talk to Union powerbroker Jeremiah Trotter (not the football player, idiot):
Ruth brazenly shoots a Union soldier, if only to make a point (of course no one knows its her, except Cutter). and to add to the fire, Cutter secretly blows up his own house with Union soldiers in it, and blames it on "radical elements." Colonel Redd can barely back up his suspicions as to Cutter's real motives.
and if you think that's not enough, Cutter parlays that the dialogue with Trotter and those events to operate on the side of the "law". nothing gives you a rush of power by aiming your gun while flashing the badge. and thus, the tale has just begun.
Azzarello crafts another multilayered head drug along the lines of his long-running Harvey/Eisner award-winning series 100 Bullets (a subject of a future post). Frusin joins the ranks of Argentine artists of note Ariel Olivetti (The Last Avengers Story) and Eduardo Risso (Azzarello's compadre with 100 Bullets). combined, i'm fascinated.
and if you can't handle this series, Wes Cutter has one word for you losers:
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issues read: #1-5
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