There are two words that, when strung together, never fail to get my full attention:
Weird Western.
Writer/Artist Timothy Tuman has long been a champion of the Weird Western, most notably through his two Jonah Hex collaborations with fellow Texan Joe R. Lansdale. With Hawken, he returns to the weird West, aided and abetted by his Son, Benjamin Truman. Timothy Truman has had a long, storied career in comics, and I’m happy to say that Hawken is as good, if not better, than anything he’s done to date.
Kitchell Hawken is an elderly badman, cut from the same cloth as Will Munny, Clint Eastwood’s character in Unforgiven: An unrepentant murderer of Men, Women, and Children, an outlaw who has seen better days and sets out on one last job, in hopes of attaining some sort of closure in the waning days of his life. Hawken’s quest for revenge against “The Ring”, a kind of Western Mafia that betrayed him and left him for dead, is not without it’s own unique wrinkle: Hawken is haunted by the spirits of those that he has killed, an ever-growing Greek Chorus of the grisly undead that follow him around and try to steer him into the same premature grave that he sent them to.
Kitchell Hawken is probably one of the nastiest SOB’s I’ve ever encountered in a comic-book…Imagine the old man that used to yell at you to get off his lawn. Now imagine that old man as having survived a brutal scalping, surround him with hundreds of grotesque specters, give him a couple of guns, and then you’re getting close to imagining what Hawken is like.
Timothy Truman handles the art, and his work has never been better. Perhaps it’s the black-and-white presentation, which gives Truman’s artwork a chance to shine without the distraction of computer coloring. Or perhaps he’s just getting better as he ages. Whatever the answer, each page of Hawken is a thing of beauty. Truman co-plotted the book with his Son, Benjamin, who handled the scripting, and he does a marvelous job of it. Lansdale himself couldn’t have created saltier dialogue, and that’s a high compliment, indeed.
Hawken presents the complete six-issue mini-series, complete with covers. The book comes to a very satisfactory conclusion, but leaves the door open for a sequel, which I hope comes sooner rather than later.
- The Scarlet Gospels - March 9, 2015
- Inspector of the Dead - February 23, 2015
- The Boneyard - February 23, 2015
- The Deep - February 2, 2015
- Pumpkin Cinema: The Best Movies For Halloween - November 20, 2014
- The Wake - November 20, 2014
- Dark Screams, Volume One - November 20, 2014
- Horror Library, Volume 5 - September 16, 2014
- Ghost Heart - September 16, 2014
- Monster & Madman - August 6, 2014
