5 out of 5

Bunn baffles me.  I sincerely can’t think of another writer who has managed some select stories that just floor me – Sixth Gun, Damned – while I have to struggle to find the good in their others.  Yes, there are writers I selectively enjoy, but I can generally identify some linking thread to guide me as to what, from that creator, I’ll enjoy and what to stray from.

But with Bunn…?  Crapshoot.  For a lot of writers, I can just draw a line between creator-owned and work-for-hire stuff (i.e. indies vs. Marvel / DC…), but Cullen drops like 100 indie books a week, and not many of them work for me.  So maybe I just like his supernatural stuff, except its all supernatural stuff with the guy.

So I dunno.

More simplistically, I could say I just like how he works with artist Brian Hurtt, as, conceptually, a lot of his projects are intriguing but then die during the execution.  I don’t know how he scripts, but maybe the specific collabo with Hurtt primes his timing and sharpens, somehow, his plotting and characterization sensibilities?  Sure, we’ll go with that.  All that matters is that The Damned is bloody genius, and Hurtt’s work amazes, even in Oni’s 6″ x 9″ print size.

The combination of gangsters and demons likely isn’t new, nor is mushing barters for souls into a noir mystery.  …I’m.betting, anyway.  Search me for an example, but it’s not the basic idea that sells this, it’s the execution.  From the dripping rain, shadows, and ominous narration of page one, we’re dropped squarely into this Prohibition-era-in-Hell world; we never question demons as gang leaders, or how a contact nicknamed The Worm is a multi-eyed, giant maggot.  It just damn works, and without any excess narration to make it so.

Same goes for our lead, Eddie, whose curse of never dying – or rather that his deaths are passed on to.whomever touches him after they occur – is clearly shown to us without the typical explain-it-all beats, and furthermore, we get that this is a curse with no dramaturgy waxing on and on on it.

There are some parts of the narrative that admittedly don’t come to some kind of fully integrated fruition, such as where Eddie goes when he dies, and the importance of our subtitle (Three Days Dead); these are touched on in ways to which you can attribute import if you’re so inclined, but they’re not as relevant as the plot occasionally makes us think.  However, the five star rating is still relevant, as, by the same token, these elements aren’t distracting, and do add up to the sensation of a fully formed world; one that was in full swing before we got there.

That swing: dueling mob bosses are orchestrating a truce via out-of-town negotiator Lazlo.  But Lazlo has gone missing, leading one side to hire Eddie on the low to find out what’s what and keep the truce going.  The Why of the truce, which is kept dismissively vague in front of Eddie – as well as Lazlo’s disappearance, of course – are the driving elements of our mystery, but, smartly (because the solve on that can’t ever really be that surprising), Bunn makes it about the journey and not the destination: it’s about Eddie; it’s about those scars on his face – not how he earned them, per se, but the life that results in them, and the type of person it leaves in its wake.

Which lands us on one of Bunn’s best, and most haunting, ending sequences.

While he and Hurtt would pick up several of these elements and expand on them – at length – in Sixth Gun, The Damned still stands on its own as a required read: an emotionally brutal and expertly executed supernatural noir.