Gus And His Gang Gn

A few weeks ago I sat wracking my brain trying to come up with a candidate for Book of the Month.  I spent a night combing through shipping lists, both past and present, and I looked through Amazon and Barnes & Nobles new release lists.  No success.

That was when I decided to check out the list of the 2009 Eisner Awards Nominees.  And that’s how I found Gus & His Gang.

Published here in the United States by First Second, Gus & His Gang is from French cartoonist Chris Bain and it chronicles the Wild West adventures of Gus and his buddies/accomplices Clem and Gratt.

Sometimes it takes a foreign eye to break down traditional Americana in interesting and insightful ways.  Perhaps it is because people from outside the U.S. aren’t as bogged down with years of cliché and stereotypes gleaned from a lifetime of being totally immersed in American pop culture.  We often see that with comic books as some of the more interesting and innovative work in the past 10 years in mainstream comics has come from U.K. creators.  With Gus & His Gang we have the most seminal of all American genres – the western – as seen through the eye of a Frenchman.

The first thing you notice about Gus & His Gang is the art style.  Blain has a cartooning style that is much exaggerated.  Gus has a really, really long nose and Clem has crazy red hair that shoots off his head like two pieces of broccoli.  It’s a style of art that isn’t often associated with the modern Western, a genre firmly rooted in gritty realism most of the time.  Here the more cartoony style completely works, and that’s in no small part to Blain’s skill as an artist.  His panels are full of detail and life.  The characters are expressive as they run the emotional gamut.  The book itself is small and features a lot of panels and as such there is a lot packed into each page.  There’s a lot to take in in such a small package.

Gus & His Gang is broken up into thirteen chapters, each of which feature a different story involving our three outlaw protagonists.  Each story is self-sufficient and can be read and enjoyed on their own, but taken together these pieces become one big interrelated tapestry as we follow the trials and travails of Gus, Clem and Gratt.  Knowing this is a Western whose main characters are outlaws, one might expect a lot of shoot-outs and robberies, and posses of lawmen galloping off into the desert.  And there is certainly some of that.  But it’s not the focus of the book, and that’s what makes it so interesting.  The business of being outlaws is mostly what occurs in-between the main action of the book which is Gus, Clem and Gratt’s eternal search for love and, failing that, lust.

It’s not often that you find yourself with a tale about tough men in the Old West that doesn’t primarily focus itself on the bullet-riddled action elements.  Here, the bank robberies and other dastardly deeds are almost after thoughts.  In the first chapter, Gus goes out to rob banks as something to pass the time in-between letters from his lady love.  His robberies exist as a device to show how long it took to keep up a correspondence with someone in the 1880s.  The importance of the action is reflected in the amount of  panel space it is given.  In one chapter, the guys have gone legit, having hired on as law enforcement in a small town.  When the big, bad McQuarrie Brothers are said to be coming to town to bust out their imprisoned brethren, we know what is to come next - a tense, bullet heavy showdown between the law and the men intent on perpetrating a jail break.  Not here.  The entire affair is just a nuisance to Gratt.  Sheriff Clem won’t let him go see his girl until the whole affair with the McQuarries is settled.  So Gratt settles it but quick; it’s all over in a matter of panels.  All because Gratt wants to go see his girl.

When it comes down to it, Gus & His Gang is a romance book that just happens to be set in the Wild West, and that just happens to focus on three rough and tumble outlaws.  But at its heart it is a story about three men searching for love, each in their own way.  Gus and Clem seem to be opposite sides of the same coin.  They are both incurable romantics, falling head-over-heels in love with each new girl in each new town – but Gus almost never finds his love reciprocated, while Clem, despite his crazy red broccoli hair, often finds himself with too many women to deal with.  Gratt is sort of the himbo of the group.  He’s the tall, good looking blond who has no trouble attracting women… who are usually unavailable and always seem to come with trouble attached.  If there is anything negative to say about this book it’s that Gratt kind of gets the short shrift here in that by the end of the book I didn’t feel like I knew him very well.  His character is sort of vacant, but then maybe that’s the point.

Even though the focus is not on the violent aspects of these characters’ lives, the story never loses its western-ness.  And it also never loses its freshness; its uniquely foreign take on the genre.  Just as Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns of the 1960s didn’t look or feel like anything coming out of Hollywood at the time in that genre, so too does Gus & His Gang feel like a completely different take on the comic book western.  It’s a breath of fresh air for someone like me who devours westerns in any form he can get them.  It’s light and airy where most comic book western these days are dark and gritty.  It’s a stylistic difference that is reflected well in the art in that Blain uses a lot of wide open panels, which give the characters a lot of room to breath, without ever sacrificing detail.

I bought this book pretty much sight unseen.  As I said at the top of this review, I basically picked it at random off of the Eisner Nominations list, saw it was a western, saw it was done by a highly acclaimed French creator, and then I saw the cover.  That was the extent of my knowledge.  It was a gamble, but one that paid off in a big way.  I knew I was in for a treat when, after I had finished reading the first chapter, I flipped back through the pages to marvel at the structure and the way Blain used visual smash cuts to action and adventure as a way of passing the time between romantic interludes.  It was so different than what I was used to, and handled in such an assured and elegant fashion that I smiled to myself and kept on reading.

Gus & His Gang is a book that stands on its own on my shelf.  There’s nothing else quite like it that I’ve ever read in comic book form.  And sometimes there’s just nothing better than discovering something that’s not only completely new but also a whole hell of a lot of fun.


Conor Kilpatrick
conor@ifanboy.com

Pick up Gus & His Gang at In Stock Trades or at Amazon!