A traveling reverend comes to the home of Sheriff Jones. His wife says he’s not home.  He’s quite polite. Gentlemanly. He asks for water. The Sherif’s wife offers him beans. He can tell she’s from New England. She asks him what his business is with her husband. He tells her that he’s going to kill her. Things get complicated from there in Deadly Tales of the Gunslinger #1. Writer Jimmy Palmiotti and artist Patric Reynolds’ tale a supernatural tale of the old west that is as smart as it is concise. Expectations are played with android and various directions in a satisfying story.

The reverend is there to speak about a man that the sheriff has locked-up. A guy named Whitlock. He’s mixed-up in all manner of things which might be rather unsavory. Guns will be drawn. Triggers will be pulled. Blood will be shed. A little bit of literal Hell will empty itself out into Gunnison, Colorado. It isn’t pretty in the old west. It isn’t glamorous. Life is cheap and so is talk as words and lives are exchanged  on the edge of the frontier. Gunsmoke mixes with the smoke of hellfire in an ther exploration of the wild, Wild West in the Spawn universe.

But it’s mostly just gonna play on the frontier. Palmiotti plays with various trips, in ways that manage to fuel fresh on the page. And much of the reason why I had to do with the fact that it simply doesn’t get as much play these days as it has in earlier errors of the comic book, medium. The mixture of the supernatural with the terminally earthbound feels well executed on the hole. However, Palmiotti hasn’t managed a great deal of punch in the rush of gun fire and hellfire. It feels like he could have done a slightly better job of framing, the action and aggression and brutality in a way that would have been that much more powerful with perhaps a little bit less bloodshot.

Reynolds’ vision of the old west is very gritty. There is very little that is truly sleek or shining or gleaming about this particular vision of the old west. It’s just very dirty and filthy and squalid. And it’s actually pretty refreshing given the fact that it doesn’t always come across that way and more popular media. It’s nice to see a grunge your version of the cowboy era. There’s quite a lot of attitude on the page. It’s immersed in dark and shadows of ink. But it’s definitely there.

There’s something in the interplay between the supernatural and the earthbound. There’s something in the interplay between hell and earth that could be really interesting if it was given the right kind of momentum to really be explored. As it is, they’re not really managing to do that all that well here. Feels a little weak. It feels a little missing in action. Somewhere in the midst of everything, it seems to have lost the kind of pulse. It needs to really be able to live up to his potential.

Grade: B