Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
By now, I think it’s apparent that I enjoy the work of writer/artist Doug TenNapel. Here’s my CREATURE TECH review, and here’s my review of TOMMYSAURUS REX. Both are lovely, potent pieces of entertainment that manage to be richly cinematic while still preserving a pure cartoon form that you can only accomplish with pen and ink. TenNapel’s closest artistic comparison in recent pop culture is Bill Watterson, creator of CALVIN & HOBBES. Like Watterson, TenNapel remembers childhood with laser accuracy, and his gift is how he invests even his kookiest high concept ideas with genuine heart and soul.
IRON WEST, his newest book, will be released on July 12th by Image, and it’s another winner from cover to cover. It’s a Western, first and foremost, but it’s also a wicked SF adventure. There have been plenty of attempts to make a SF/Western film before, like COWBOYS & ALIENS or the big-screen WILD WILD WEST, but tone’s a trick. TenNapel writes without any irony or cynicism or post-modern spin, and that’s what makes his books so approachable. As much as I loved CREATURE TECH when I read it, I acknowledged up front that it’s a pretty heady genre-bender, a crazy fantasy/SF rollercoaster ride. TOMMYSAURUS REX is a playful children’s adventure book, the story of a boy and his dinosaur. TenNapel’s last book, EARTHBOY JACOBUS, was a sort of Campbell’s Hero of a Thousand Faces story, and a fairly serious SF adventure. Not a lot of laughs in EJ.
With IRON WEST, TenNapel’s struck a nice balance between several of the things he’s done before, and ther result plays a lot like Disney’s PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN films. Fun. A little scary. Thrilling. Filled with outrageous sights and supporting characters.
It’s 1898. Snelling, California. A bunch of guys are working a mine when they stumble across something, a sphere. As they look into it, etchings of their own faces appear on the surface. Behind them, the dirt erupts as a mechanical form pushes itself up from underneath, rising behind the miners, raising a pickaxe, and then...
... we’re in town as a train arrives. In the local saloon, Preston Struck sits at a poker table, talking smack to the other guys as he wins yet another hand. He spends most of his energy flirting with Ms. Sharon, a stunning saloon girl. Then a couple of huge guys show up, looking for Preston, a wanted poster in their hands. Preston starts a fight, the fight spreads into a full-blown barroom brawl, and Preston makes for the stairs after his diversion really kicks in. He’s gutshot, though, a shotgun blast that took a chunk out of him, and he manages to escape through an upstairs window, falling onto the top of a train running through town. He’s carried away and a posse is sent after him by the deputies who showed up with the poster.
Already, this is a great, energetic action sequence, staged with a dizzy sense of fun by TenNapel. But he keeps it going, with Preston trying to stay one step ahead of the posse, trying not to bleed out, trying not to get caught as a stowaway on the train, trying to dodge the posse once they catch up. It’s one of those great action scenes where it just keeps building and building...
... and then the robots attack the train. A whole group of them. They’re strange cowboy robots, very surreal. And they are ruthless, klling everyone they encounter onboard the train. When one of the deputies chasing Preston gets cornered, he turns to the robot that’s stalking him and says, “Whatever you’re getting paid, I’ll pay you double.”
The robot stands silhouetted in the door, two guns trained on the deputy. “We are paid nothing. We pump humans full of sky for our own pleasure.” These things are cold, creepy. Preston just barely makes it out of the train alive. In town, no one has any idea about these robots yet, and no one else on the train survives, so only Preston really knows what happened.
Preston’s a pretty classic rogue, a bad guy with a heart of gold, and he’s a fun lead right away. There’s a young Bruce Campbell vibe to his design, to the way he sort of free-falls through an action sequence, chin first. What happens to him for the rest of the book is too good to spoil, but it involves Sasquatch and shamans and The Loch Ness Monster and visitors from space and the most heroic damn horse you’ll ever see. It’s great, great fun, relentless and funny and scary. By the time you see the Giant Train Monster (and, oh, yes, there is indeed a Giant Train Monster), it’s obvious that this is more than just another crass attempt to write a blueprint for a big summer blockbuster. Sure, this could be that, but that’s not the point. This feels like a bunch of kids got together after seeing a STAR WARS film and decided to play Cowboys & Indians, only the game turned into something else because they still had lasers and stormtroopers and aliens and robots all bouncing around in their heads. There’s a final splash page here that made me laugh out loud and also caught me off-guard with its quiet emotional power. That’s TenNapel at his finest, as is this book. If you’ve enjoyed the other works of his that I’ve turned you on to, this one’s as good or better than those. And if you haven’t given one of his books a chance yet, this is as good a place to jump on as any other.
Off to catch a few hours sleep. I’ve got set visits and reviews and all sorts of stuff for you this weekend, and I’m finally seeing SUPERMAN on Saturday, it looks like. Until then...
"Moriarty" out.
