I was very happy to bump into Greg Boucher and Cillian Cubstead at Phoenix Fan Fusion earlier this month because they were selling a variety of weird west comics and we need more of those. Greg is the author and Cillian the artist on much of his work, including this graphic novel. It's not their only such, but the bulk of their work is in a series of comics called 'Weird Western Adventures' and it's in them, I think, that the characters here first appeared.

They're Bea and James and they're quintessential weird west characters. It does help that they're a pivotal pair because there's not much here except them. This runs seventy-six pages and surprising numbers of those are dialogue-free. The story is incredibly simple, so it's left to the characters (and the art, which I'll get to shortly) to bring any sort of depth to it.

Bea, short for Beatrice, is truly Bialah, an alien explorer and scientist who's been marooned on our planet, presumably a hundred and change years ago when the Wild West was at its peak. She has a cool spaceship with major alien tech that allows her to shift appearance, but we don't meet it until the end and only experience it at a remove. For now, I believe she's working as a sheriff's deputy in the usual sort of costume with the usual sort of gun.

James is James Clay, an Americanised pseudonym of Juan Cortez, probably adopted because he's a dead man, literally. He was murdered, along with his father, by corrupt lawmen but his dad won out in a game of cards with Mictlantecuhtli, the Aztec god of the dead, to return Juan to life. Of course, the gods never play games straight, so Juan is now apparently immortal, which might sound cool to you or me but means that he'll never be reunited with his father.

What I find fascinating here is that all that pivotal background, which I presume unfolded in other books, probably issues of 'Weird Western Adventures', is deliberately left until the end of this one, as if its creators want us to experience the story first without any knowledge of who these folk are, but then also want to let us know at the end whether we got it right or not. That's so unusual that I have think hard about it and maybe that's the point. It's a short book but, especially if we're new to this weird west world here, it's worth reading twice, a time through to get an impressionistic take on what's happening and a second with the perspective that the character bios at the end provide.

And impressionistic is definitely the approach that Cubstead took here. Cover aside, this is all black and white art but it's busy art. There's a lot of detail in the backgrounds but it doesn't always mean anything specific. We're not supposed to be reading the sign on the door in the back corner, but it's all there to give us a deep impression of the scene. For all that the story is simple, revolving around a retrieval mission—Bea and James out in the wilderness to bring back John and Tom Milburn, who have been up to some type of no good, presumably for the bounty—we get to know that wilderness pretty well. We couldn't make it back home without a map, but we breathe in how remote and how empty it is, all the better given what else they find beyond the Milburns.

I'm not sure what it is, but it's definitely an it, some sort of horribly betoothed monster lurking in a trap it's set for any unwary visitors who might pass by. There's a supernatural element to it as well, because it projects visions to sucker them in deeper by playing on their sympathies, before it rears up like a vast mountain of fangs.

The art here reminded me of the '2000 AD' Celtic barbarian Sláine, a character who has the power to undergo a warp spasm when in the heat of battle to channel the power of the Earth to vanquish a myriad of mythical monsters and alien gods. Like Simon Bisley's art when this happens in 'Sláine', Cubstead renders these action scenes so large and so detailed that we don't know what to look at, which is a highly appropriate way to tackle so much happening at once.

Another comparison would be to the 2014 version of 'Godzilla', because he's so vast that we simply can't see all of him at once, however far back we get, so the camera doesn't even try to capture the sheer unfathomable scale. Cubstead does the same here, with pages broken down into panels that show different parts of the creature, as if that's all that we can see in each glimpse. There are also images so massive that they spread over both pages and, while we can grasp more in them, reality lends a hand because we can't see everything unless we break the spine fully open and nobody will do that to this art.

Eventually, of course, the monster is vanquished, not only because Bea and James are regulars and it isn't, but because that's how these stories work. I could see an alternate ending in which they lost and that's it for them, leaving the creature to continue its lonely exists in the wilds, thinking about how delicate and breakable our species is, and probably how crunchy, but it wouldn't be the same. I don't see that as a spoiler and, in a story this simple and impressionistic, I'm not sure that anything could count as a spoiler. I'm tempted to read it again right now, just for that immersion, and I know exactly what happens.

I believe this was self-published through a Kickstarter, which suggests that Boucher and his various collaborators are building quite the following. I have another graphic novel by them to go and a few of their 'Weird Western Adventures', which are up to number ten with the Winter 2023 issue. This is very much a niche product but, if you're into this sort of thing, it's well worth checking out. ~~ Hal C F Astell