By Kevin Ferrara (Dark Horse)
ISBN: 978- 1-61655-750-8 (TPB/Digital edition)
Westerns are very much in the eye of the beholder. Some of my very favourites are The Seven Samurai, The Thirteenth Warrior and Outland… and nary a six-gun or Stetson in the bunch. Like all genres, it’s about tone and themes and timbre; motivation and resolution, rather than just slavish attention to tropes and forms. Trappings and locations are not as important as the Why and the How…
A fascinating case in point is Dead Rider. Conceived and crafted by writer, artist and historian Kevin Ferrara (Aliens/Predator, Green Lantern, Creepy) it offers a miasmic merging of classical EC-styled tongue-in-cheek terror amidst grittily familiar sagebrush locales, resulting in a beautifully rendered if meandering yarn about true love, magical misery and vengeance forestalled, but never escaped…
Originally released as two comic book issues, the saga came to an abrupt ending before concluding, with this graphic album, the reviving and completing of the tale.
Near frontier town Magruder, Nevada in the 1890s a vile owlhoot calling himself The Cobra is hunting a man. Having successfully diverted a similarly-employed cavalry troop into a wild goose chase, the rogue relishes the prospect of tackling legendary gunman The Dead Rider. The scoundrel has no idea what he is about to confront, or that his prospective prey is being watched over by a local shaman with much more than skin in the game…
After brutalising and terrorising the township, Cobra secures the clue he needs and rides off to his date with destiny whilst the wise man rushes to warn the much-sought-after rider who currently resides in an old iron mine. The décor doesn’t trouble the wanted man much. After all, he’s been an ambulatory rotting corpse for years now and physical feeling is a long-forgotten luxury…
Once, Jacob Bierce was a gentle, loving man whose only desire was to wed his adored paramour Sarah. However, thanks to a string of cruel accidents and malign misfortunes, Jacob fell under the power of a scheming and manipulative Bog Witch who made him immortal… by turning him into a walking corpse. The downside was retaining his mind and conscience, even during the appalling, frequently recurring moments when the sorceress possessed his body to go on killing sprees.
Thus, the revenant’s formidable reputation, the authorities pragmatic despatching of deranged General Cavanaugh and a troop of soldiers to capture the notorious Dead Rider and Cobra’s obsession with immortalising his own reputation by killing the zombie fugitive…
As all the disparate players converge for a final showdown, the Witch has one last eldritch card to play; she’s been collecting the last vestiges of the dead to build a potent artefact: the Crown of Souls. She does not, however, fully appreciated the power of true friendship, the force of love from beyond the grave or the obsessive nature of glory-crazed military men…
Although the plot carries s some gaping inconsistencies and the dialogue is sometimes uninspired, The Dead Rider is rendered in a spectacularly lush manner reminiscent of the best of Graham Ingels, Bernie Wrightson, Scott Hampton or Thomas Yeates and races along, offering scads of action and wry humour as well as a classic tragedy-laced horror hero that would certainly score well with modern moviegoing aficionados.
Fast, fun and fabulous, this turbulent tome comes with a Gallery of sketches, roughs, covers and unused art pages, plus accompanying commentary, and is a sure-fire guilty pleasure for fans seeking quality art and something off the path of comics’ mainstream.
© 2007, 2008, 2015 Kevin Schnaper. All rights reserved.