This week on Off the Cape, we have a look at Cullen Bunn and Brian Hurtt’s increasingly popular but deserving of more love supernatural western thriller The Sixth Gun (say that sentence ten times fast). This Oni Press book started off strongly with an arc that, in many ways, felt like it told the primary story in total. From there, it felt like it was destined to tail off.
Then the second arc came and it was even better than the first.
Now the first part of the third arc comes out tomorrow and I can say that you are all in for a treat.
It turns out that this book is just straight up amazing with work from two rising talents in Bunn and Hurtt as well as work from one of the most underrated colorists in the game – Bill Crabtree.
Find out why I think that after the jump, and for the love of god, get to your store and buy the first two trades pronto.
Before we jump in, how about a quick “what is this book about?” straight from series writer Cullen Bunn himself.
With THE SIXTH GUN, we wanted to tell an epic fantasy set in the Old West.
Our story is centered around The Six, a set of supernatural six-shooters with otherworldly powers. One strikes with the force of a cannon shell. One spreads a flesh-rotting disease. One spreads the fires of Perdition. One allows the wielder to heal from any wound. One can call up the spirits of the people it has gunned down.
The Sixth Gun grants the wielder the gift of prophecy.
But those powers are just the tip of the iceberg. The guns serve another purpose… one that makes them very valuable to all manner of dark forces.
The Sixth Gun has fallen into the hands of an innocent girl–Becky–who is now on the run and trying to figure out what her best course of action might be. She’s accompanied by Drake Sinclair, a gunfighter with a shadowy past and some connection to weapons.
This is a Western, sure, but I think it will surprise people who have preconceived notions regarding what that means. In fact, we pretty much designed the story to turn preconceived notions on their ears. It’s as much swashbuckling and sorcery as it is shoot-outs. The stories are packed with thunderbirds and wizards and ghosts and monsters. Even the visuals have been carefully planned to set it apart from books that might be considered similar.
We have the series planned for roughly 50 issues (give or take) which will bring the story to a close. We are publishing issue 12 (the beginning of our third arc) this week. The first two arcs have been collected in trade paperback.
Sounds pretty great, right?
In the hands of a lesser writer, this could still be a very interesting story. The plot is engaging and original, and the decision to set it in the days after the Civil War give it a really dynamic feel that no other time period would have provided properly.
But the thing that really makes this story soar is the character work. Bunn turns Sinclair, a man who easily could be a villain in any other story (the very first move he makes in the story is not exactly likeable) or even within this one (who knows where we go from here), into more of an alluring rogue. Someone that seems like he is always a step ahead of everyone else but not letting anyone on to how this is possible. In the same way that no other characters trust him, you as a reader find it hard to as well. But at the same time, he is impossible to ignore and to not like in many ways.
He’s a bedeviling lead, and perhaps the finest character in a brilliant ensemble.
I also love the villains that are created, with everything from undead Confederate generals to voodoo demons coming their way in hopes that they can be the next to possess the power of the guns. Just like Sinclair is the captain of the good guys team, the Widow Hume is one of the most terrifying and odd villains existing in fiction today.
Continued belowOne part femme fatale, one part silver tongued demon, all evil, all the time, Hume only wants to bring her horrible, horrible family back together whatever the cost. Of course that means she needs to bring her husband – the aforementioned Confederate General Hume – back to life (again) and reunite him with his weapons and then, you know, reshape the world in their vision.
That, and still have time to bake a nice apple cobbler.
With such a well developed cast and an exciting premise tied to such rarely seen genres, this is a book rife with potential. The mythology of the guns is seamlessly weaved in as well, as each issue seems to perpetuate the root of the story while pushing the central thread on and on towards its eventual resolution. The fact that you have the puzzle pieces coming together slowly for both our “heroes” and us as readers makes it an exciting experience for everyone. We get the details as they do, and Bunn and Hurtt make sure that every bit is a killer.
Speaking of Hurtt, this guy was at Emerald City ComiCon this year and I am absolutely beside myself that I did not ask him for a sketch. This time next year, when The Sixth Gun and himself are Eisner nominees (as they should be), I doubt I could afford a sketch then with my paltry Multiversity wages.
It’s a shame, because this man is a tremendous talent and one of the freshest visual voices. His work on Queen & Country and Gotham Central showed his potential, but in The Sixth Gun he has really come into his own as one of best in the business. Bunn progressively asks him to visualize more hellish and bizarre things (#12: “I think…I think its a mummy…a giant mummy.”), and Hurtt ably renders them with a style that is clean, tight and featuring incredible storytelling.
One of my favorite things an artist can do is tell an impressive and packed scene with perfect choreography. Some artists just pose their character and hope people are enamored by the look they give the scene, but Hurtt is one who clearly thinks through every sequence so readers aren’t like “How did Drake shoot Hume when he was behind a boulder?” As a comic fan, I can say that we are so prone to do things of that sort.
Given any comic, that is an impressive skill. Given that some of the pages in The Sixth Gun are so jam packed with action, you could expect and even forgive him from taking a play off and letting some details slide. But Hurtt makes it all work logically and artistically, and the finished pages are endlessly spectacular. If you don’t believe me, pick up this week’s #12 and drink in the entire train heist sequence. It is completely marvelous, and one of the most exciting action sequences I’ve seen in comics this year.
That Bill Crabtree (of Invincible fame) came on board has only amplified the quality of the art, and I think with more time Hurtt and Crabtree will become even more in sync and this books art will just keep getting better and better. If that is possible.
If you have noticed a common theme throughout this write-up, it’s that this is a damn good book. In fact, I would say that this is one of the absolutely best books on the market these days, an idea that I am sure my fellow Multiversity writer Josh Mocle would agree with wholeheartedly. It is an original, exciting and brilliantly told comic that rivals the quality of the best in the business these days. If you like comics, cape or no cape, you should be reading Cullen Bunn and Brian Hurtt’s The Sixth Gun.
