When you see a book called Six-Gun Gorilla, you don’t really need much more incentive than that to buy it. When it’s written by Simon Spurrier of X-Club, X-Men Legacy and Extermination fame, however, you damn well better pick it up, or else you’re doing comics wrong. Spurrier has proven that he’s got a great sense of humor, a bent perspective and a talent for engaging storytelling. Therefore, the fact that he’s writing a story about a talking ape with guns mandates our attention.
The first thing that struck me about Six-Gun Gorilla #1 of 6 was the dedication to “creators unknown whose works outlived their credit.” A handy reminder, in this release day for Man of Steel, that people like Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel died broke trying to fight DC Comics for rights to their creation of Superman. So much ‘work for hire’ in this industry goes unheralded. Good on y’all.
Then, what unfolds is a story of what looks to be a sort of alternate-reality Civil War (the real one, not the WHERE ARE YOUR PAPERS, STEVE ROGERS one), complete with giant tortoise personnel carriers and lots of Southern-accented ‘rebs’ talk. You’ve got suicidal folks in blue uniforms volunteering for the front lines in hopes that they’ll die and get payouts for their families. They’re on some strange alien landscape where combustion and electric things don’t work, so they’re working with “clockwork an’ —in’ pneumatics” as weapons. It’s brutal, a lot of dying, and then we find out the whole conflict is engineered as a reality show for your standard, ugly, Blade Runner/Transmetropolitan dystopian future.
One of the blues – Blue-3425 to be specific – has been handed a special necklace from a dying General Lancox. He’s told it’s something he has to get back to the general’s wife, for love, but everyone else who sees it through the special “psychic tumor” in his head that gives the viewing audience their live feed through his eyes knows it’s something else. Something dangerous. Something they’re going to hunt this Blue kid for. But by the end, it seems like he might have a cigar-chomping, pistol-wielding gorilla looking out for him.
If he doesn’t shoot guns with his feet by the end of this series, I will consider it a failure. Or at least a missed opportunity.
Spurrier crafts an interesting setting, one that immediately makes you want all life on Earth to end for feeding into this actual-war-as-entertainment snuff-loving society, and we’ve seen that Spurrier has enough of a Warren Ellis influence to his style that he might give us that – or he might rub our noses in our own horrible group tendencies towards disconnection and apathy like this. The art from Jeff Stokely is very stylized and might take some getting used to, but once you see the gruesome decapitation of a ‘die for glory’ schmuck, the unsettling ‘sadsack’ woman who walks into a line of fire intending to die, and the big damn turtle warships, you’ll be on board. Plus, Stokely does a pretty mean ape-rendering.
Six-Gun Gorilla promises to kick it up a notch next issue, now that the title character has made his showy entrance by blowing some heads clean off. You might want to get in while the gettin’s good.
