French cartoonist Christophe Blain approaches the Western genre in much the same way as the comic books 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 Western comics of the 1950s downplayed dialogue in favor of action scenes, Blain does the opposite. The bank heists, train robberies, and fistfights 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.
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