Jonah Hex #63: Your Monthly Dose of Frontier Justice

I have enjoyed the current Jonah Hex series from the start.  With its consistent pair or writers (Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray) and rotating group of artists, the comic delivers great western stories every month.  It is amazing that DC Comics would keep publishing this book month after month, especially since their Jonah Hex movie flopped (hopefully it will get a True Grit bump, though). The comic is in fact much closer to True Grit than to the Jonah Hex movie.

Each incarnation of Jonah Hex has been a mix of violent and funny, with the latest issue #63 taking us to new levels.  Palmiotti and Gray have a way of periodically weaving flashbacks into stories, fleshing out Jonah Hex’s back story as well as explaining how one man can be so honorably good yet violently sociopathic at the same time (hint: it almost always comes back to Daddy issues).  This issue walks us back through Jonah’s early encounter with a child molester meeting frontier justice, an experience which determines the kind of bloody justice he will exact on another criminal later in life.

Like most of the series, issue #63 is a standalone story.  With a few exceptions the Jonah Hex stories from this run are either single issue stories or told in two to three issue arcs, and these stories don’t take place in any particular chronological order.  This makes the series particularly easy for a new reader to jump in and read an occasional issue, as you don’t need to understand an exhaustive back story and mythology to enjoy an occasional issue, unlike so many other comics published today.  Also, at $2.99 per issue they remain one of the most affordable comics on the market.  Go pick up a copy, pard, and enjoy a face full of justice. 

"Come back, Shane, the bed is getting cold!"

One of my New Year's resolutions this year was to read as many classic westerns as possible, starting with Shane.  It may be a sign that I spent too much time in college in late night discussions of Quentin Tarantino movies, but I am seeing homoeroticism everywhere.  I am only halfway through this book, which deserves a more thorough posting, but I am really shocked by what I see.  At first I was a bit taken aback at the long, languid, loving descriptions that the narrator gives of Shane, from his dapper clothes to his lean, taught body.  Shane then goes on to pluck a flowers from the garden before proceeding to discuss ladies fashions with a ranchers wife.  In the next chapter Shane and the rancher go out into the field, take off their shirts, and get to work on a stubbornly erect stump.  Much of the chapter is devoted to the men working up a sweat as they silently gaze into each other’s eyes, ignoring the rancher’s wife who desperately wants to be let in on their manful activities. 

“Shane, opposite him, stiffened, and together they pushed in a fresh assault…Father climbed slowly out of the hole…Shane was with him, across from him, laying a hand gently on the old hard wood.  They both looked up and their eyes met and held as they had so long ago in the morning hours.”

Oh my.

.44: This is Real Redemption, Red

 

I have long had a bias about reading books written before the 1960’s.  To me they always seemed overly verbose and cloyingly sentimental.  A few authors like A.B. Guthrie, John Myers Myers, and now DeRosso are now breaking me of that bias.

I picked up .44 in a used bookstore based on a vague memory of a good Amazon review and a quote on the cover calling Delgado a “Poet of the Western Shadowlands”.  That quote alone sold me.  When I opened up the book, though, I almost groaned when I saw that it was written in the 1950’s.  Ugh.  Really?  How good could this thing be?

It was fantastic.  .44 is a dark, psychological novel about a gunslinger’s search for redemption.  The novel opens with Harland, our anti-hero, tracking down and engaging in a duel with a man on a lonely trail.  Pretty typical stuff.  When Harland is beaten to the draw, only to have his opponent smile at him and wait to be shot, the heart of the novel begins.  Harland goes about trying to uncover who wanted this man, both his prey and savior, assassinated.  Plots, double-dealings, lies and conspiracies swirl around Harland, taking us to a haunting surprise ending. 

From a bland start, .44 pulls itself out of the typical genre novel into something fine.  Rockstar Games take note: this is what Red Dead Redemption should have been like.

Range War Bride: The Iliad meets Handmaid's Tale with Horses and Lasers

One of the surprising things about owning a Barnes and Noble Nook is the wide range of tawdry western e-books that are available.  Gay, straight, threesomes, foursomes, moresomes, there are hundreds of them available with a wide range of sexual geometry.  I came across Range War Bride by Lara Santiago, which was described as Erotic Futuristic Cowboy Multiple Partner Romance.  How could I go wrong?  Oh boy.

Range War Bride takes place at the end of the 21^st century, when a plague has made most women infertile.  A fertile bride is a prize worth fighting for, which takes us to this odd mix of The Handmaid’s Tale, The Iliad, and Firefly.  Most of the plot is over one set of brothers fighting over their right to marry the heroine instead of the cousins who run the neighboring ranch.  Yes, apparently in this future every fertile woman has to have at least two husbands, and everyone must have sex all in a big pile.  Tastefully, brother / brother incest was not included in this one. 

Sounds like time for a big showdown, right?  The book opens up with cowboys riding fence along some high-tech electric barrier, ready to face off with the neighboring ranch hands using pulse rifles, laser pistols, and sonic grenades.  Mind you they are all still on horses, which only makes sense in a Joss Whedon television show.   But instead most of the action takes place with the lawyers discussing the intricacies of future fertility and marriage laws. 

Oh, and there is some sex, which from the cover appeared to be the purpose of the book, but it wasn’t particularly memorable besides the ick factor of the brothers.  Hardly a western, I’m afraid.  I’m sure someone was waiting for a book like Range War Bride to come along, but it wasn’t me.

Caine's Reckoning: Oh So Rugged

I do a lot of my "reading" with audiobooks.  Usually I will spend months debating the merits of a particular book, reading reviews, listening to sample chapters, then buy something completely different on the spur of the moment.  This is how I came to download Caine's Reckoning by Sarah McCarty from Audible. 

Caine's Reckoning is the first of the Hell's Eight books, an ongoing romance series about tough cowboys and gunslingers with manly hands and sensitive hearts in a part of Texas called Hell's Eight.  At least I think that is what the series is about.  Mostly I just keep coming across descriptions of cowboys with tough manly hands which stray over the supple skin of emotionally wounded women who are not at all whores despite their past professions as prostitutes.

Perhaps this is what I should have expected going into this book.  In my opinion a good western should contain at least a few scenes appropriate for "adult westerns" between shootouts and high adventure, so a book specifically called an "erotic adventure" with a pistol packing cowboy on the cover seemed like a good idea.  The novel did open in a ruggedly adventurous way, but moved quickly into long detailed descriptions of how dangerous, honorable, and rugged the main characters and his compañeros are.  I listened to the big seduction scene while on a long run, and by mile six of the run the hero was just getting around to rubbing his manly and rugged thumb over the heroine's sensitive feminine core- what the heck, McCarty comes right out and calls it her pussy, so I guess I can say that, too.  That is a lot of slow buildup for my tender sensitivities on a run.  Did I mention how rugged they all are?

While Caine's Reckoning isn't going to be my perfect western, I can see where this series would be popular.  McCarty certainly can write, giving her characters and setting life.  It may not be overly original, but folks who like their cowboys running rough yet tender hands over their heroines will probably enjoy this book.

Best Western Video Game of 2010

With 2010 recently come to a close, it is a good time to announce my official "Best Western Video Game of 2010".  I am sure that any follower of video games last year will be able to guess that the video game with the truest western feel was...

Mass Effect 2.

That's right, not Red Dead Redemption, but Mass Effect 2.  My problems with Red Dead Redemption are many, and will surely be the material of a future post, but it's many failing keep Red Dead Redemption from achieving in this space.  Mass Effect 2, however, draws on the best aspects of Space Opera, which itself draws from westerns, to create a game the embodies the western story.

Mass Effect is a science fiction action roleplaying game series that puts you in the role of Commander Shepard, a space marine and sometime secret agent seeking out a conspiracy that threatens all life in the galaxy.  You'll spend most of your time in the game dropping in on frontier planets under siege by the "alien other", by shadowy business conspiracies, or often times by a mix of both.  In the first game you and your crew arrive like the proverbial cavalry, always ready to right wrongs on the space frontier.  The second games takes you towards a different kind of western, as you start collecting a ragged bunch of frontier toughs and gunslingers a la the Magnificent Seven to guard your back on dangerous missions.

The choices that Commander Shepard makes in the game are for you to control.  The most fun aspect of this is the morality scale.  Not a simple good and evil scale, the morality scale shows your character as becoming more "Paragon" or "Renegade" as your decisions influence the game.  Think of a Paragon as a Roy Rogers character, always looking for a peaceful outcome.  Renegades are more like the anti-heroes of Sergio Leone films, often interrupting conversations by pulling out pistols and filling the air with gunsmoke.

Mass Effect touches on some of the moral issues raised in good westerns as well.  Genocide, both cultural and biological, comes up often in the game.  The manner in which empires depose of their frontier taming soldiers once civilization moves in is also a common theme.  You can almost see the dinosaur-like Urgnot Wrex sitting by the fire with Gus McCrae, discussing how they should have thrown in with the Indians, outlaws, and the Rachni.

Despite the aliens, the psychic powers, and the spaceships, Mass Effect 2 had me feeling like I was living out a western (if a space western) in a way that the very popular Red Dead Redemption never did.  When I want to live out a western fantasy projected in a console game, it will inevitably be to the Mass Effect series that I turn.