East of West Volume One

I'm currently playing Red Dead Redemption 2 so I'm all about Westerns at the moment. Which is fortuitous, since Jonathon Hickman's East of West is a Western. Well, it has horses. Well, kinda. It does have guns, though, and they tend to get fired a lot, so Western!

East of West is set in an alternate Earth where the American Civil War took a decidedly different turn and the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are not only alive, but are complete assholes.

Death is one of these assholes, and is even more angry than his siblings. He is stalking these badlands in order to reclaim something precious that was taken from him, accompanied by two Native American shamans with totemic powers.  He also has a mechanical horse and two guns, both of which he uses with great familiarity.

East of West promises to be a large story, both in themes and exhaustive world building. As a result, this initial volume feels like a prologue for the undoubtedly complicated and deep storytelling to come. Characters are introduced, the world is briefly explained, and we're left with a lot of blank spaces to fill in. This is Jonathon Hickman, after all. I don't suspect we'll have a lot of car chases.

The world itself is teetering on apocalypse, an event a few people actively welcome. It's a world with vast deserts populated by Mad Max-style outposts set against giant, impersonal technoplexes straight out of Blade Runner. Accompanying the very Western narrative theme of vengeance is a stylistic homage, with many people favouring cowboy style clothing: duster jackets, cowboy hats, long Colonel Sanders beards, to name a few.  Even the Chinese dress in the same late nineteenth century Asian styles. Which we see, since China seems to now occupy most of what we know as California.

I've enjoyed Hickman's work since I discovered his excellent runs on Marvel Comics' Avengers and Fantastic Four. I learned to be patient with his stories, since he always rewards the time and effort you afford him. Both his runs on Avengers and FF were deep science fiction epics, with concepts that pushed at my rather limited ability to understand just what was going on. This first volume of East of West seems to promise the same, as Hickman begins his stretching exercises for the looming epic tale of vengeance and a'reckonin' ahead.

I Am A Hero Volume 3

There is a definite shift in this volume--not in quality, but in narrative intent. As the two previous volumes have shown, I Am A Hero takes the common tropes of the zombie genre and subverts them, from having a hero who is very mentally unstable to having zombies that still retain a degree of individuality.

This volume takes that last subversion even deeper, by showing just what the zombies may be thinking. Which succeeds in making the horror of their existence even moreso. Why they see things the way they do is not explained--is this how they survive the trauma? Or is this part of whatever chemical change is occurring? We don't know. We can only feel pity for monsters that in most zombie fiction heroes are wired to just kill.

It's not surprising, then, that parts of this volume feel like an exploration of dealing with a terminally ill relative. The unease of dealing with someone else's personal hygiene, of feeding them, all set against an environment that makes such caring a threat to one's own existence. It's as well done as it is heartbreaking.

By the volume's end, new characters have been introduced, tying themselves to perhaps finding an answer to the zombie infestation destroying the world. I wasn't thrilled with this turn of narrative, because elements of it reminded me quite a bit of The Last Of Us. But if reading this series has shown me anything, it's not to think I'm going to get what I expect.

A brilliant, heartbreaking horror story.

The Talon of Horus

I don't know a lot about 40K. I mean, I've read Eisenhorn, the first Gaunt's Ghost novel, and two Horus Heresy novels, so held up against the staggering number of Black Library books, I've barely read a thing.

So this book takes place (courtesy of a glance at the official timeline page) somewhere towards the end of the 40K story. Horus has been dead for quite awhile, and a few Chaos Space Marines are looking for his old ship. And that's what sets off events in this novel.

Aaron Dembski-Bowden is a very good writer of this sort of story, giving everything that doom metal feel mixed with guitar riffs from 2000 AD. Everything is dark and horrible, but the bonds of brotherhood still exist among the broken and mutated warriors stumbling around the Eye of Chaos. ADB also knows how to deliver the sorts of action scenes that create small utterances of Holy fuck as you turn a page. He also can create characters that you care about, despite how horrible they are. Be they eldar murderesses or demons inhabiting the dead souls of wolves, I grew to be fond of these monsters.

If you've read a small forest's worth of Black Library books, I'm sure this book would be mindblowing. But even as a casual reader, I was still taken aback by some of the revelations. It was a very fun read, even if I didn't get probably half of the references. Primarchs? What are those? Just how long has it been since Horus bought the farm? Why don't these guys age? Why isn't everyone more insane than they are?