Shaolin Cowboy: Start Trek by Geof Darrow

There are some creative projects that you're pretty sure just aren't for you. Maybe it's in a genre you know nothing about - and aren't inclined to learn. Maybe it's a creator that just doesn't click for you.

Or maybe you know that the project is doing something you're not really interested in. And then, twenty years later, you see it again, and don't remember exactly why you avoided it, and remember liking that creator's work, once upon a time.

So you try it. And you remember: you were right to begin with.

I am not going to be praising Shaolin Cowboy: Start Trek. Geof Darrow is an amazing artist, delivering a long sequence of magnificent, eye-catching pages here, and his imagination is clearly equally fertile and weird.

But I've always been a fan of story. And Darrow makes only the most minor, vague, smirking-into-his-sleeve attempts to tell a story here. This is not so much a book as it is a series of ultraviolent moments, frozen in time and memorialized on large pages. The best way to experience it, I think, would either be in a volume at the size of the original art or, even better, that actual art, on the walls of some museum somewhere, maybe even in a slightly confusing layout so that the viewer can't quite read it as a story at all.

The premise is that there's this guy - both an ex-Shaolin monk and a gunslinger, somehow. He's dumpy and not-young, leaning a bit into the kung-fu movie trope that the really old guy is the scariest killer. He's out in the desert somewhere, probably the American West. It's an unspecified time - now or a little later - with a lot of modern-looking people but also whatever fantastic-looking monsters and supernatural entities that Darrow feels like drawing at that moment. As the first page of the book puts it: "Someplace in the middle of nowhere, the day before yesterday and a week before tomorrow."

A lot of people want to kill this guy. The one reason we learn here - from a talking crab, no less - doesn't show any evil on the cowboy's side, but the crab has good reason to be eternally angry and to swear vengeance in the traditional manner. We can assume all of the other dozens or hundreds of odd and heavily-armed people assembled in this desert have reasons as well - maybe equally good, maybe worse, maybe better.

I tend to think that if hundreds of people are insistent enough on your being dead enough to gear up and chase you into a desert, you've definitely done something you shouldn't have. But maybe the cowboy is just really, really karmically unlucky, and that every action in his previous life horribly damaged someone else in ways that he couldn't predict and didn't notice. Either way, we start with - hundreds? dozens? lots - of people assembled, as the cowboy rides up on his talking mule, and announce that they're going to kill him.

Well, the Talking Killer Gambit never works, of course. So we get a bunch of hyper-detailed double-page spreads of dozens of these unnamed people being murdered in horrible ways - but it's by our hero, which means we're presumably happy about it.

So that happens. Then the cowboy is moseying on a bit further, and discovers a talking baby and three flying supernatural demonish entities. One of those entities, of course, decides to fight him, and the dialogue this creepy skeletal whatsit yells at him during the fight gives the usual confusing and half-baked explanation, in which the talking baby is cosmically important and the Fate of the World lies in its bloody hands. (Did I mention the creepy baby has blood-soaked hands for no specific mentioned reason? He does.)

But we need to go through about a hundred pages of fighting in weird ways, before we get to the it's-not-the-end. (It all just stops when we hit the last page. There were some more Shaolin Cowboy issues after this run, which have been collected elsewhere; I have no idea if they "end" the "story.") We do see a lot of very impressive spaces and monsters, and plenty of detailed double-page spreads of zombie hordes and seas of dismembered corpses and people flying through space doing that holding-up-two-fingers-to-show-its-martial-arts thing. It is exceptionally visually inventive.

But, as an actual book that tells a story, I can't say there's much of anything here. There's a kind of comic that is driven by whatever the artist felt like drawing at that moment; this is perhaps the exemplar of that style. Continuity and logic and plausibility are not its strong suits.

If you have the visual tastes of a hyperactive fifteen-year-old-boy, this will be the greatest comic in the history of everything. For anyone else, adjust your expectations accordingly.