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Outlaw Territory is a collection of stories from a rougher and grittier time in America - tales of the old west from some of the best and brightest writers in the industry, lavishly illustrated by amazing talent both new and experienced.
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I ordered this blindly, because I'm a Western fanboy and I love comics, too. I'd enjoyed the Marvel Westerns anthology and Gunned Down, though they both had their fair share of weak stories/art. I figured if Outlaw Territory had at least their ratio of worthwhile vs. poor contributions it would be a decent purchase.
Unfortunately, it's about half bad. There are a few truly awful entries, a few good ones, and a lot of mediocres. Oftentimes it's the art that ruins the story. Some of the artists contributing here are really unskilled. I felt sorry for some of the colorists who had to try and save the bad line-work by filling in large portions of lazy negative space ("Nora" is an example of this -- amateurish manga style with lots of tones and textures to fill in the deficiencies). The line-work in "Griswold's Song" is poor in a different way; it's unsure and ugly. "Gut Shot" is decent-if-boring line-work ruined by overzealous bloom-effects in the coloring. Occasionally the art is good but the inaccuracies in the gun depictions bugged me ("First Car in Mexico"). One of my biggest comic-art pet peeves is when an artist does no research for reference. If you're going to draw a Western comic, make sure you know what period-specific guns look like. It takes two seconds to do an internet image search.
The good stuff includes the awesome cover, "Incident Over 36 Days," "Rio Chino," "A**meat," and several others. "Ballad of a Bad Man" had some good art but the renderings of the kid looked off....
Anyhow, I love the concept of a Western comics anthology, and the early previews of Volume 2 from the Outlaw Territory blog look pretty good, so hopefully things will get better.Read more ›
I think the other reviewers nailed this one, so I'll only reiterate. I love western comics, so I grabbed this one, hoping to have a great mix of fun and/or exciting western stories. There were only about 4 out of 30 or so that I thought were any good at all. A lot of them could have been better if it wasn't for poor art keeping you from being able to tell what was going on. This collection was definitely a failure and I think I'll skip Volume 2 because of that. It's a shame! It had a lot of potential.
I agree with the other reviews, get the time period right! There are some really good stories in this book, mixed with very marginal ones. Still worth owning and reading, everyone has different taste.