• SIX-GUN GORILLA: The Awesome Starts Here

SIX-GUN GORILLA: The Awesome Starts Here

So. A few early thoughts on Six-Gun Gorilla.

This is rumour control. Here are the facts.

It’s a new comicbook series, published by Boom!, by me and the truly amazing Jeff Stokely. If you haven’t heard of him yet, you will. He is perfect for this book.

Episode #1 hits stands in June. Solicits will appear this Friday.

Scroll down this tumblr a bit - or enclickify here - and you’ll see the cover for the first issue by the bowel-looseningly amazing Ramon Perez. We have a whole bunch of similarly incredible talents - the biggest names in Indie and Mainstream Comics alike - lined up for subsequent issues.

That’s kind of the point of this book, y’see? It sounds like such an absurd proposition, and yet when people have finished smiling they start to imagine it… they start to think about how amazing it could be.

Listen: I love Westerns. Six-Gun Gorilla is the culmination of all my obsessive theorizing and cultural sampling: a love-letter to the most beautiful, most tragic, most self-fulfillingly-obsolete genre of them all.

It’s is not about a Gorilla in a cowboy hat.

It features a hole in the wall of reality, a mass-market tv-show based on violent military suicide, a world where the laws of physics don’t work quite right, and - yes. A fucking enormous primate with a fucking enormous gun. And wide shots. And high noon. And deals gone wrong and war and death and frontier life and corrupt men.

Listen:

Six Gun Gorilla, in its original form, was a series of short pulp stories which ran first in British fiction magazine Wizard in the 1930’s. I hadn’t heard of it until I asked my pal (and possibly the world’s foremost expert on Pulp characters) Jess Nevins for suggestions for a Remake/Redesign art thread I run over on the Whitechapel Forums which I abstractly oversee. Jess will soon be releasing his opus, The Encyclopedia of Pulp Heroes, from PS Publishing, and as part of the (wildly successful) Kickstarter Campaign for the same, he’s made available ALL the old 6GG pulp stories. There’s a fabulous i09 article, with relevant links, right here.

The original 6GG? It really is just what it sounds like: a gorilla, in the old west, wandering the Earth on a mission of vengeance. Ridiculousness played totally straight.

Part of what made Six Gun Gorilla so enticing to me - besides all those conflicting layers of absurdity and awesome - is that the maestro who wrote all those original stories was never named. Nobody knows who he or she was. That plays so deliciously into the mythos of The Western as a trope - as a thing responsible for its own legend - and it’ll come as no surprise that on the acknowledgement page for this series, right beside Jess’s name, you’ll find a dedication to “[CREATORS UNKNOWN]”.

Those whose works outlived their names.

New Six Gun Gorilla plays with a lot of these themes. It’s hugely involved in the processing of legend and story. There’s more than a little meta strangeness in there - as you’d expect from yours truly. Also: heads being exploding and guys crawling across wastelands. Some cliches exist for a reason.

I cannot tell you how thoroughly and madly excited I am by this project. I mean, shit, it persuaded me to pick up a pen and do a little design drawing of my own — something I haven’t done in years:

It’s niche and it’s mainstream. It’s Western and it’s Sci-Fi. It’s wide-angle and it’s dense. It’s a book of contradictions and conflicts, violent and beautiful, strange and simple. It deserves attention, and for that it needs your help.

Keep your eyes on this spot for more news as it comes. And please: spread the word.