SIX-GUN GORILLA: An Idea Whose Time Has Come. And Come Again. And, um, Again.

So. Bit of a molehill/mountain misidentification to be swiftly tackled.

Some Twitterpals last night pointed me towards this article on comics-industry news & gossip site Bleedingcool. It’s an interview with a writer named Brian Christgrau, which is nebulously concerned with the Six-Gun Gorilla project I announced last month (not last week, as the article states).  For those who missed it, my series is a reboot of a pulp story which ran in Wizard magazine in the 1930’s. It’s been in the public domain for years. It now turns out Mr Christgrau has separately been developing a Six-Gun Gorilla story of his own, and he’s understandably gloomy at being beaten to the punch.

Bleedingcool mysteriously failed to contact me for comment, so Behold My Official Reaction:

“Oh.”

Look, this isn’t really a story. I have great sympathy for Mr Christgrau because – yeah – there really is nothing more annoying-seeming than being pipped to an idea. It’s happened to me more times than I can remember. I have nothing but good wishes for him and his project: the art looks lovely and, hey, it’s about a gorilla with a gun. Sold. But the important point (as he explains) is that his vision for 6GG and mine are totally different. I’m no expert on trademark or copyright laws so I won’t speculate about use of the title (except to gently recall that comics with, say, “Dracula” in the title are released by multitudinous publishers every year, aren’t they?) but I see no reason both versions can’t co-exist, under whatever name. As it happens a quick Googlin’ reveals at least one other Six-Gun Gorilla project formerly under development out in the wild – this one by the very talented Colin Bell – which looks thoroughly splendid as well. I hope that one gets finished too. Again, it’s a million miles away from the Boom Studios version. Too many cooks? Too much broth? Fuck, no. There’s always room for more gun-toting gorillas.

I wouldn’t even be mentioning this stuff if not for some of the dodgy assumptions – and a faint whiff of controversy-creation and conflict-where-none-exists – in that article.  At one point Mr Christgrau says it’d be a “real kick in the ass” if he’s unable to use the Six-Gun Gorilla title, “since [his] version is much closer to the spirit of the original story than the other book is”… which is… well… which is a pretty bold statement, given how little he knows about my book, but is also kind of ironic if you’ve clicked on that link above. The Colin Bell version of 6GG looks to be an even more faithful continuation of the old 1930’s stories than Mr Christgrau’s own. 

“Theirs,” he goes on, “is a Science-Fiction story with Western themes, a sort of meta-Western, while ours is just a straight forward, no bullshit Western revenge story to the bone.”

So. Rumour control, here are the facts. Six-Gun Gorilla, the Boom Studios version, the gorgeous-Jeff-Stokely-art version – that is, my version – is not a science-fiction story and is not a meta-Western. A minor part of it features some sci-fi elements, the vast majority does not. What it does feature throughout are Real Actual Controlling Ideas about Real Actual Important Stuff. It also features a suicidal frontiersman, the creepiest bounty hunter in the world, numerous shoot-outs and a lot of bloody tumbleweeds, so if a few recognisable clichés is all it takes to constitute “Western themes” then, yeah, great, I’ve gottem.  (I’d tend to argue “Western themes” actually tend to be about a world transitioning from the old into the new and the violence that results - we’ve got that too - but that’s probably just more of my meta bullshit.)

To me, Westerns are myth and thunder. Westerns are epic and violent and tragic. They’re desperate and they’re cocky, they’re about frontiers, about people dwarfed by ideas, about the subjugation of land, history and rivals. They’re about love and laughter and contradiction and loss. They’re pretty much about anything you want, frankly. For what it’s worth my one’s either “about” self-purpose, myth and memory… or “about” nutfuck-crazy explodo violence in an endless wilderness, depending how hi-falutin’ you want to be.

Point is, the one thing Westerns are defiantly not “about” is historical reality – and that’s especially true of the ones which feature an enormous bloody gorilla with an enormous bloody gun – so getting into contests about authenticity seems faintly ridiculous.

In fact trying to foster or imply any sense of contest at all between earnest creators, individually passionate about their projects, leaves a bad taste. This little burst of parallel invention should be something celebrated and beneficial to all involved – the rise of a new trend! Behold the birth of apepunk!  What it absolutely shouldn’t be is a story about creative tyranny or rivalry.

For me there’s only one genuinely conflicty thing about all of this. Mr Christgrau mentions in his interview that he plans to use lines from his favourite Western movies as episode titles. Now that – that, ladies and gentlemen – is the sort of fiddly detail where synchronicity gets truly annoying. It is therefore with a dull sense of inevitability that I apologetically report episode #1 of my Six-Gun Gorilla serial – which was completed two months before yesterday’s interview went live – is titled Don’t Talk, Shoot. And episode #2 – finished last month – is titled Just Another Filthy Memory.  Both lines from Sergio Leone classics. 

Sorry Brian.