The brilliant cartoonist and designer Geof Darrow makes a forceful case against his own writing in THE SHAOLIN COWBOY: CRUEL TO BE KIN — SILENT BUT DEADLY EDITION (Dark Horse, 256 pp., $49.99), and not just with the fart joke in the book’s title. Darrow, who designed the look of “The Matrix” and its sequels, presents his most recent “Shaolin Cowboy” story completely devoid of text in this unexpectedly definitive edition. While the quantity of drawing covered by speech bubbles and captions might be a minor loss to another artist, Darrow, and the colorist Dave Stewart, pay such close attention to details that it’s a noticeable improvement on the work to be able to see every line. The mechanics of the story are, remarkably, still perfectly legible.
The plot is simple, but the execution is complex: The Cowboy, a stocky, stoic sword-and-gunslinger, fights enormous, grotesque creatures in noirish cityscapes, the comic-book equivalent of a big-budget action movie. Conventions like speed lines and sound effects are absent, even in the, er, wordful version of this book; instead, a gout of blood follows the arc of a sword and muzzle flashes highlight a six-gun at the exactly right moments. You can flip through a volume of “Shaolin Cowboy” comics quickly to learn who beheads whom and peruse the typography and glut of jokes hidden in the “Simpsons”-style signage, but it’s not just the detail that repays close study, it’s also the balletic panel-to-panel choreography of these fights. May Darrow’s stalwart hero never know peace.
In BENEATH THE TREES WHERE NOBODY SEES (IDW, 156 pp., $17.99), the filmmaker and cartoonist Patrick Horvath has drawn a gory and wonderfully perverse murder mystery populated by characters who would be more at home in a kids’ picture book. Horvath often draws enigmatic, Escher-like renderings of anatomically accurate bodies coming apart in impossibly unmessy ways. The uncanniest aspect of “Beneath the Trees,” though, isn’t the violence, which is couched in a slick narrative about an antihero — a disciplined serial killer, Samantha Strong, who is needed to catch a more chaotic copycat — but from the setting. It’s a Busytown-style city populated by talking anthropomorphic animals, each with a pleasant job and a pleasant outward demeanor: Sam is a bear, her friend is a mouse, the victims are ducks and goats. Imagine “The Silence of the Lambs,” but with actual sheep.
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