In Gus, Blain plays on every trope of the classic Western. Perfectly blending caricature and cinematic pacing, humor and high-octane action, he delivers an exuberant graphic novel ode to men and women chasing each other, and to the bonds of friendship that tie together three unforgettable cowboys.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
What is it about the French and their interest in the western genre? Generally, it's a good mix, and often a great mix. This book is the latter. Cowboy Gus and his gang rollick through 13 interconnected stories, serial reels of sorts. Gus and his two buddies are on the lam, but none can stand to be away from women—any and all women—so they all sneak off to town and find themselves on the run from both the law and their girls. Blain's drawing line is expressive and full of life, and the eight-panel page structure reins in his loose style to great, calming effect. This one-two punch of all-out energy and rigid formalism hurtles the reader through the stories, which often veer into romance, as Gus's entourage takes turns bedding tough frontier women and hiding out from the law. The most interesting flip comes at the end when one of Gus's outlaw cohorts, Clem, begins to navigate a return to his family while his former love interest, an independent woman who's a sort of artist/photographer, turns to robbing banks. Blain starts the book strong and finishes stronger, creating a rich story line with characters whose ups and downs come alive on the page. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
Review in Publisher’s Weekly
What is it about the French and their interest in the western genre? Generally, it’s a good mix, and often a great mix. This book is the latter. Cowboy Gus and his gang rollick though 13 interconnected stories, serial reels of sorts. Gus and his two buddies are on the lam, but none can stand to be away from women – any and all women – so they all sneak off to town and find themselves on the run from both the law and their girls. Blain’s drawing line is expressive and full of life, and the eight-panel structure reins in his loose style to great, calming effect. This one-two punch of all-out energy and rigid formalism hurtles the reader through the stories, which often veer into romance, as Gus’s entourage takes turn bedding tough frontier women and hiding out from the law. The most interesting flip comes at the end when one of Gus’s outlaw cohorts, Clem, begins to navigate a return to his family while his former love interest, an independent woman who’s a sort of artist/photographer, turns to robbing banks. Blain starts the book strong and finishes stronger, creating a rich storyline with characters whose ups and downs come alive on the page.
Review in 1/15 Library Journal
Outlaws Gus, Gratt, and Clem settle their problems over a bottle of rotgut—and you'd think their problems would be all about the next bank heist or train robbery. But no—it's women, women, and more women. This is romantic slapschtick, where the action can be vertical or horizontal, and the periodic episodes of lawless violence serve only as entr'actes between amours glorious, frenzied, or merely disastrous. Casanova Gus puts the moves on anything in skirts but usually ends up alone. The boyish Gratt does better: the ladies seek him out. Clem is married with a child and goes astray only once—and passionately. Even more memorable are the ladies themselves: Ava the popular novelist, free-spirit Isabella with the camera and fast horse, and Natalie, who plays Gus like a yo-yo. French artist Blain (Isaac the Pirate) delivers surprisingly complex characters and delightful, exuberant color art as well as lively and well-translated dialog. Unfortunately, because this was reduced from the larger European bande dessinée size, the drawings and lettering appear smaller than they deserve to be. The sex is only minimally graphic and serves up high points throughout the more elaborate penumbra of courtship dances that obsess the characters. Hilarious and sometimes poignant, Gus should have strong appeal among both men and women readers. For adult collections.—M.C.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Way more enjoyable than I expected it to be,
By
This review is from: Gus & His Gang (Paperback)
When you crack open a book about a villainous gang of gunfighters, you usually expect a good deal of gun violence, detailed and circuitous plans to rob trains, and more than a little übermasculine, drinking-from-a-dirty-glass charm. Chris Blain's Gus and His Gang subverts all of these expectations, instead giving us a sex-filled ballad in the visual vein of Krazy Kat's George Herriman. There's hardly a page that goes by in which one of our outlaws isn't obsessing over a femme du jour or making an epic journey in the hopes of getting a little action.
This might sound like the potential for outrageous comedy, but much like the clichés of the Old West, Blain subverts even this potential for zany misadventures and blundered capers, and every robbery is carried out perfectly, leaving the three outlaws just a little bit jaded. Somehow, as the disjointed scenes from the lives of these cowboys progress, it all becomes very absorbing--even when the titular Gus disappears halfway through the book, never to return. Things begin to coalesce into a continuing narrative, and it all starts painting a broader picture. These are not disposable comic characters, even if their exaggerated noses and floppy arms suggest otherwise. After Gus vanishes, the book takes a decidedly even less amusing turn as it starts to explore the life of outlaw Clem, who is a married man with an adorable daughter (whose rare appearances are a highlight of the book). Unfortunately, Clem also happens to be madly in love with a vibrant and mysterious redhead, and he's racked with a huge, cyclopean monster of guilt that follows him around. The whole thing finishes quietly and without a typical resolution, which leaves me hoping that Blain will scribble out some more casually awesome pages to continue the unfinished sagas of the likeable outlaws. Blain's art is deceptive. At first glance, it's scribbly and exceedingly loose, and details nervously shift from panel to panel, but it all adds to the very emotive, very kinetic nature of the fast-paced stories--and even when Blain's stories are slow tales of romance, he seems to drop huge swaths of panels to give the reader only the barest amount of information to unite subsequent scenes, effectively speeding up the viewing process to a breakneck pace. The combinations of colors and expert arrangements of characters and landscapes in regular and irregular panels draws you into a completely realized (however bizarre) universe. Every panel creates a deep sense of atmosphere. It's an adult comic, though, with a few scenes of explicit cartoon sex, profanity, and surprisingly little gun violence. Bank robberies are usually executed between panels, so all of the missing violence is replaced in full with sexual pursuits and actions. And overall, Gus and His Gang is way more enjoyable than I expected it to be. I came away from it feeling as though I learned to appreciate the art form more, and that's a unique gift. -- Collin David
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Mad Magazine meets Howard Hawks meets Woody Allen,
By
This review is from: Gus & His Gang (Paperback)
French cartoonist Christophe Blain approaches the Western genre in much the same way as the chapbooks of old. His stories are short, exciting, melodramas full of bank robbers and beautiful women (and occasionally, bank robbers who are beautiful women).* But where the chapbooks downplayed the chit-chat in favor of the action scenes, Blain does the opposite. The bank heists, train robberies, and poker games in Gus are often brief, four or five panel affairs, while the title character's inept attempts at wooing can easily eat up four or five pages. Normally, this might imply an artist's unease with action, but with Blain, this is clearly not the case. He's one of those rare, Kirby-esque cartoonists whose every brush stroke packs a punch. So why would Blain even bother to write a Western if he was only going to use the genre as a Christmas tree with which to hang his brightly colored characters and vivid, engaging, and above all, hilarious dialogue? For the same reason that novelists like Elmore Leonard and film directors like Howard Hawks did: because it's fun.
Let's back up a second, back to my comment about Blain's 'Kirby-esque' art. What I'm referring to here is not an aping of the King's aesthetic, but a kinship in the kinetic energy that each of these artists is able to summon through their work. Like Kirby, Blain's art is quick. It moves quick, it reads quick, and it often feels like it was drawn quick. If you took out the color and the word bubbles, it could easily be mistaken for thumbnail sketches. But by keeping this loose approach, Blain is able to give his work a 'pop' often missing in the 'cleaner' lined comics.** You find yourself visually surfing the squiggly, swirling curves of Blain's lines instead of staring stiffly at the page. Blain's modern day, American equivalent might be Paul Pope (no surprise, considering how strongly Pope was influenced by French comics), although where Pope approaches his work as Capital-A Art, Blain's cartooning feels more like the madcap lunacy of the original MAD magazine crew. In a world where academia and the Academy Awards have turned most Westerns into stoic examinations of 'Man's relationship to Nature' or 'Man's inhumanity to Man,' it's sorta refreshing to read one where the overriding theme is 'Boy + Girl.' Or, to put it in a pull-quote: In Christophe Blain's Old West, the cowboys spend the majority of their time getting struck by arrows. Not Indian arrows, but Cupid's. *I wanted to throw the word "intelligent" in here, too, but I didn't want to seem like I was trying too hard to sell the work as an Old West story featuring new millennium sensibilities. The fact is, the women in this story are mostly girlfriends, daughters, and wives. The three main characters are Gus and his gang, and so everyone else we meet is -- to some extent -- defined by their relationships to them. That said, as the story progresses, Gus & His Gang actually becomes more about Clem (one of Gus' two-man 'gang') and his complicated relationships with his wife (Ava), his daughter (Jamie), and his mistress (Isabella). Abbreviated solo stories and quiet, stolen moments do an amazingly economic job of fleshing out Ava and Isabella, to the point where the reader knows their motivations and inner workings as well as, if not better than, the male leads'. I can only speak for myself here, but a week after reading it, it's 'Clem & his girls' who still linger loudest in my head. **To keep my Kirby comparison going a li'l longer, compare a page of Jack's pencils to its final, inked incarnation. Kirby enthusiasts aren't exaggerating when they complain that most of the King's inkers unintentionally sapped some of the life out of his work.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I couldn't stop thinking about this book for days after reading it,
By
This review is from: Gus & His Gang (Paperback)
Until I was eight, I lived in Arizona and New Mexico, living for most of that time on an Apache reservation. When my family moved to the East Coast, being from the West became an indelible part of my identity. The red-and-ochre palette of that place, its history, the sense of wildness and illimitable space, became larger than life to me.
And so it is with Gus and His Gang. Blain's is no historical account, but one of our collective perception of an era. The fact that he is French seems to in fact help his interpretation of a theme and archetype that is quintessentially American, to put it mildly, perhaps because it can be easier to see and interpret an entire picture from farther away. His landscapes are as much from our imagination of the West as a photo reference book, there are entire bustling desert towns that one must be "in the know" to be aware of, and our protagonists commit enough bank robberies, train heists, and various other felonies to make any real-life historical outlaw look like a pubescent graffiti artist bound for a month's stint in juvie. No place of my childhood really looked like a place in this book, but it all still feels right. This book captures a sort of "ecstatic truth" about the West, the geometry of real places and human actions distilled into how we feel it was, rather than how it actually was. And yet, as another reviewer notes, genre cliches are turned on their heads at ever turn. The heists and thefts are not bungled, but flawless. On the other hand, as often as not their attempts at barroom romance are as awkward and ham-handed as your or mine, possibly worse. The genuine doubt, insecurity, and self-loathing these characters is palpable and convincing. Even in the brief vignettes that make up this book, even amidst the not-breaking-a-sweat-while-killing-twenty-dudes shootouts, these characters come to be more fleshed-out, more defined by true human motivations and character (with all the greatness and flaws that entails) than in most all given novels you could pick up off the shelf. Giant floppy noses and all. If you're at all interested in dynamic, pitch-perfect art (that I totally want to rip off), well-rendered characters, and the idea of the zeitgeist or collective memory, this book is for you. And most importantly? It's just a damn fun read.
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