PROPINION: Fistful Of Comics
Authored By Len Kody

Cisco Kid Issue 1

I met Chuck Dixon for the first time at Wizard World Chicago in 2004. He probably doesn’t remember me, but I asked him about his then forthcoming series Wyatt Earp (issue #1 currently available from Moonstone Books). He said that Western comics are the perfect alternative for someone looking to take a break from Superheroes. He also told me that if it ends in a shootout, then it’s a Western. It was a brief conversation we had, and one of the most memorable moments in this young, up-and-coming comics writer’s life. It was all made possible by a stranger callin’ himself the Cisco Kid.

I’m not a born Western fan. I was converted. But it often turns out that the converted are the most zealous of the faithful. When Moonstone Books Editor-in-Chief Joe Gentile first mentioned the idea of a Cisco Kid series to me, I was immediately interested, even though I had no idea who the Cisco Kid was. I can’t even tell you were I first heard the name. I’d picked it up through pop cultural osmosis; it was intuitive knowledge like the Superman “S” or the words to the old Batman TV show theme song. Icons like this are probably the closest we’ll ever come to a universal language – everyone everywhere knows the sweet taste of a Big Mac. Comics use the language of icons as the medium for its message. It’s no wonder that the Superhero myths, with all their iconic conventions, have repeatedly found expression in the pages of comic books.

Even more than film, comics have the power to grab the icons of our culture, distil them to their essence, and arrange them into panels and pages - little picture sentences that our brains imbue with life, motion and meaning. Comics are hipper than movies because that is where all the cutting edge shit is allowed to play and grow and to perhaps one day get turned into multi-million dollar summer blockbusters. This is especially true today, but even back in the Golden Age the depictions of violence and mass destruction had to have been an expression of the anxiety of those tumultuous times: Human Torch is melting down battalions of Panzer tanks in a holocaust of flame, Captain America is socking Adolf Hitler in the jaw, the Sub-Mariner brings a thousand-foot tsunami down on New York City in an act of terrorism unimagined even today.

The next great superhero epoch, the Silver Age, was, of course, in the 60’s; an era for which “tumultuous” is at best an understatement. Silver Age characters were born out of Cold War fears about science and nuclear destruction. Today these same characters are swinging across the movie screens of our post 9/11 world; so once more the iconography of comics is used to express some issue buried deep in our collective psyche, some trauma in the “spirit of the times” – or “zeitgeist,” as the Germans would put it.

Of course the zeitgeist of the 60’s was focused around Vietnam. Today it’s Iraq. The Middle East is the 21st century Wild West. Our president, a Texan, had a worldwide showdown with an ugly oil dictator. Seriously, Saddam Hussein looks like a bad guy from a Sergio Leone film - a young Eli Wallach would nail the role. And now, after a brief period of lawlessness, an Iraqi government is coming together to resettle the frontier. But there is resistance, just as the Native Americans resisted the spread of American civilization into their land. If Geronimo (another Moonstone title) were alive today, some might consider him a terrorist.

So when Joe the E-I-C shared his ideas for Western comics with me, you might say that in some unconscious corner of my brain, the part that’s plugged into the zeitgeist, I was thinking Western comics too. And I’m not alone. A glance at the comics rack will have you stumbling over some great Western-themed titles that have come out even in the last couple months: there’s the aforementioned Wyatt Earp, the latest issue of Western Tales of Terror, the final issue of the excellent Ballad of Sleeping Beauty, the very cool Billy the Kid’s Old Timey Oddities that’s just starting up. On TV, HBO’s Deadwood has brought renewed interest to the genre, though I haven’t seen it yet because I don’t have cable (it’s bad for you). And Grant Morrison – a guy so plugged-in he needs a surge protector – pays homage to the great American West in issue #0 of his Seven Soldiers of Victory; there’s a segment in it called “Shelly and the Super-Cowboys.”

With my obligatory Grant Morrison-reference complete, I think I’ve made my point: comics are sensitive to changes to our culture’s iconography; the Superheroes appeared out of the apprehensions of their eras, and now Westerns have begun to show up in ours. I could be full of shit. Western comics might just be a trend. I guess the most I can hope for is that people pick up The Cisco Kid because it clicks with some unspoken part of their psyche. Maybe it’ll remind them of a dream they had last night. Maybe they'll read this plug:

Cisco Kid: Gunfire & Brimstone #1 will be out by the third week of May. I wrote the book and Dennis Calero did the art. Erik Enervold lettered it. Props to editors Joe Gentile and Garrett Anderson. Go to www.moonstonebooks.com for details.

“Under the Harvest Moon” is the title of the first instalment. You can check out some preview pages below.

Cisco Kid Issue 1
Pages 1, 2 & 3

Cisco Kid Issue 1 Pages 4 & 5

Cisco Kid Issue 2

Cisco Kid: Gunfire & Brimstone #2 is scheduled to come out in August with a story I wrote called “One Kid in Town.” Here’s an early look at the cover, by Dennis Calero.

 

Born 1980 in the city of Chicago, Len Kody currently lives with his girlfriend, Susan, in a condo they both went halves on. His days are spent in front of a classroom, teaching Junior and Senior level English at a high school in Chicago's south suburbs. Every other spare moment is spent trying to figure out how to make a full-time job out of writing comics. Over the past few years he's done some short stories for the Moonstone Monsters horror anthologies, but Cisco Kid: Gunfire & Brimstone will be his first three-issue miniseries.

You can contact him at lenkody@lenkody.com.


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