The Shaolin Cowboy: Shemp Buffet
I picked this up fully expecting to enjoy the art more than the story. After all, Geof Darrow is one of those artists who draws EVERYTHING in his work. Every pebble on the ground, every drop of sweat from a body, every crease of a person’s skin — all of it! That kind of attention to detail does buy you a certain amount of forgiveness when it comes to the storytelling.
This assumes, however, that there’s actually some storytelling going on. While the first thirty pages do contain a certain amount of narrative involving the Cowboy, some annoying dudebros on a road trip, and some people on a spy satellite trying to find the title character, that’s pretty much all the story you’re going to get. The 103 pages that follow are nothing more than a panorama of plot-free carnage as thousands of zombies are cut down by the Cowboy’s dual-chainsaw polearm. Save for the last few pages, which feel more like trolling on Darrow’s part than an actual ending, that’s the rest of the book.
I’ll admit to admiring the creator’s balls in delivering a comic that’s so single-mindedly focused on delivering such unadulterated carnage. There’s also no denying the beauty of Darrow’s hyper-detailed artwork and the seemingly limitless ways he comes up with for the zombies to get carved apart. Yet even if you’re willing to count the pun-filled-to-toxic-levels “Story So Far” recap that precedes the story, there’s hardly enough narrative to qualify this as a comic book. It’s basically an art book that happens to be made up entirely of sequential art. As good as the Darrow’s work is, it’s not enough to make me wish that I had found this in a half-off bin at a convention instead.
I will be so bummed if I find this in one of those bins tomorrow at WonderCon…