Customer Reviews

Gus & His Gang

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
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2 star:		(1)
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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

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.

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.

A quiet, beautiful book that (judging from the lack of reviews) deserves a bigger audience, though I'm not sure how most Americans will take to this decidedly European interpretation of their western folklore. This work manages to combine Sergio Leone and Ingrid Bergman with a bit of Richard Linklater and Jim Jarmusch. The gorgeous artwork reminds me of Harvey Kurtzman mixed with political cartoonist Pat Oliphant(!). What do you get after combining all these disparate elements? A completely original, haunting piece of art that stays with you. There are panels in this book that could be hung in an art museum, and sequences that every storyboard artist should study.

The story meanders a bit, and one wonders why the book wasn't called "Clem and his Gang" since Gus seems to disappear about halfway through, but there is supposedly a second volume coming, which will hopefully tie together the several loose ends. If you stick with it, you will (hopefully, like me) look forward to reading about these fully-developed characters in the future.

If you are open to new experiences in the ever-expanding world of comic art, I heartily recommend this book.

This cartoon book about the old west is full of caricature and satire, but is so convoluted and inconsistent that it is rendered uninteresting. It contains some of the conventional romance between men and women and a bit of a three-way bromance. However, the plot can be summed up as "rob a bank or a stage, get together and smoke, interact with women, rob a bank or stage (repeat) ..."
The main characters have exaggerated features, Gus has a nose that could be used as a cue stick and Clem has hair that looks like two hands growing out of his head. Unlike conventional westerns sex is a fundamental component of the stories as the three characters cannot leave women alone and the women encourage the men to play along with them.
I found the disjointed storylines to be overwhelmingly uncertain and confusing, there seemed to be no direction or conclusion to the rambling story about some wanderers of the west.

The American west may have been like this: friendship that lasts through years of robbery, romance, and just plain surviving. Conversely, this might have been the west 'experience' for Chris Blain, if he were to have lived in the time period of aggressive expansion.

Whether it is 'realistic', or fantastic, it is one thing. "Gus and His Gang" is an enjoyable, romp from start to finish. Gus, Clem, and Gratt are friends through robbery and lull. Run out of cash, hit a bank, or shop. Repeat as often as necessary. Gus and Gratt are single, and on their time 'off' the run, they spend their time in towns enjoying their pleasures after time on the trail. Clem, though married, finds a woman one night and spends the next years in discreet rendezvous. The three live life to the full, and with humor born out of hours on the trail, experience life on the fly.

The art is charming, and Chris' west is wide open and full of characters you might find in a Tumbleweeds strip. The towns are lively, and their banks full. Blain gives us a visual feast that is only mising a sound track by the Sons of the Pioneers.

If I could have one criticism of the book, it is that it reflects a sexuality that seems out of place. Perhaps I have read one too many books that mirror a Victorian attitude towards sex. Either way, consider "Gus" the next time you curl up on your couch with a hankering for the west.

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Tim Lasiuta