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.