5 out of 5

Jesus, this arc is massive.  Almost too massive.  If you’ve been reading Sixth Gun – and I would hope you have been, and aren’t using this arc as a jumping-on point or happened to give a massively spoilery issue from it a taste test as your intro to the book – you know that plenty of massive things have occurred.  Bunn and Hurtt and Crook and Crabtree have pretty consistently given us these amazing new chunks to their supernatural world without it ever falling back on simple ante-ups (i.e. The world is ending!  No, wait, the world is ending now!  No, wait…) or relying too heavily on common apocalyptic story tropes… to the extent that I’m actually rather flabbergasted.  Almost every story of this nature I’ve read (and I think we’ve all read our share) ends up eventually tossing in some Four Horsemen reference or “this explains Jesus” aspect or something that just takes the wind out a tad and grounds it.  I don’t want to get my hopes up, but Cullen, by this point, has revealed most of What’s Going On – he’s just finally getting around to the conclusion – and he hasn’t lost that wind, story-wise, yet.  That sense of unbridled creativity brings to mind 2000 ADer Gordon Rennie, who writes with a similar embrasure of comic bookness; as I was reading Hell and High Water, I kept thinking how no other medium could do this justice.  It’s too smart and awesome and insane to be realized as a movie or show, even though you can bet I’d watch it if it happened.

So: in this aptly named arc, we’re so down and out after the last arc that, smartly, Bunn decides to shuttle things toward what seems like an end.  Becky, Drake and Screaming Crow dust themselves off and go to face The Grey Witch and Jessup.  Yes, this does amount to essentially page after page of epic battle sequences, but not only does Hurtt outdo himself (issue 44 starts with a splash, then goes to widescreen 4 panels, then 8 panels, then 12, then 16, then back out again, without sacrificing any sense of motion or detail) – and not only does Bill Crabtree match him page for page by finding the right color balance between pop and death, suited to Hurtt’s cartoon / realism mash-up style – but Cullen makes each issue count by seeding in necessary story details, either through those with whom Becky and Drake come into contact during the fight, or via our grandiose narrator’s pointed observations.  This has been key throughout Gun, actually.  While there has been a bit of time biding before the storm, I never got the feeling that we were taking a legitimate “break” at any point, and excepting maybe some Abraham / Solomon stuff (which is still interesting, it’s just never felt like the main threat), nothing has seemed like an unnecessary diversion.

Cullen does fall back on some of the repetitive structures and phrasing he would use often as the book began (many ellipses; each page’s last narration box leading into a different scene on the next page), but it only really crops up here when the action ebbs, and those are chosen issues /moments where it seems he’s smartly giving his art team’s hands a break as well, so whether or not I dig the tune, there’s something lyrical about the overall flow of this arc.  My ‘too massive’ comment simply stems from Loose End symptom.  There’s a lot to do here, and this is probably the best way to do it, but it’s still a lot.  Had Bunn allotted some of these ‘ends’ a full issue, we probably would’ve lost momentum, so although it’s a bit of here-and-gone with the wrap-up, I get it.  And then, inevitably, the final issue of this collection has to bring us back down and set us up for next month, so it suffers from a similar feeling of wishing there was more, but understanding why we have to move along.