The Undertaker, Vol. 1: The Gold Eater & Dance of the Vultures by Xavier Dorison & Ralph Meyer

I try to treat books on the level I find them; it's only fair. This one is the first of a decent-length series of Western comics by two French creators. It collects the first two, very closely linked books in the series, both originally published in 2015 and translated by Tom Imber for this 2026 English-language edition from Abrams.

I don't know that the Western in French comics tends to be a high-octane, big-picture genre exercise. But I suspect it does: that a French comic set in the old American West is going to be a big adventure story that is plausible on the surface but doesn't worry too much about deep thoughts as it caroms forward down its action-filled path. This one certainly does.

The Undertaker series is written by Xavier Dorison and drawn by Ralph Meyer, with colors by Caroline Delabie and Meyers. It is big and bold and full of characters saying dramatic things, moving smoothly from one big set-piece scene to another. I don't think you should come to this book, or probably the series in general, for gritty realism, though it does aim to be gritty and has the big action-movie style of psuedo-realism.

This first American volume collects two French bande desinée - hence the full title The Undertaker, 1: The Gold Eater & Dance of the Vultures. It's the origin story, to some degree - the main character still has some mysterious bits of his past - somewhat spoiled by the book's descriptive copy, so I think they come up quickly in later volumes - that I think sets up the rest of the series.

The book doesn't say when it's set; it's sometime in the late 19th century. A man going under the name of Jonas Crow is working as an itinerant undertaker in the usual rugged wilderness, with a black coach pulled by two horses and a vulture pal named Jed he picks up on the first pages here. He arrives in the town of Anoki City, the usual corrupt town run by one rich guy, because the rich guy, Joe Cusco, has hired Crow to bury him.

Cusco's plan is to commit suicide by poisoning - he's dying anyway - and have Crow bury him in the shaft of his first mine, the original source of his fortune. So far, so normal.

But he also converted his fortune into gold nuggets and ate all of those nuggets just before the poison; the point is to be buried with all his wealth, so no one else gets it. There's an additional several levels of manipulation by Cusco with his haughty English governess Rose (?) - that's how she's described by the flap copy; she looks to be more of a housekeeper/head of staff - and with the Chinese woman Miss Lin, to make sure his body gets to the proper place when it's supposed to, but that mostly comes out later in the book, in the inevitably revelation-filled plot.

Meanwhile, the miners of the town have been kept poor by Cusco for years or decades. They hope his death will mean some money for them, though I don't see why they would ever have that expectation. But they do expect to get some of the rich guy's money when he dies, in that something's-gonna-break sense of people pushed too far for too long. And then they learn what he actually did with the gold, and they figure on cutting him open first to grab it for themselves. For various reasons, Crow and Rose and Lin can't accept this, so they go careening out into the wilderness in the undertaker's coach, closely followed by a heavily-armed band.

There's also a local sheriff, who is more-or-less honest and not 100% on board with looting a corpse - but deeply suspicious of Crow, who he thinks is some legendary outlaw or other. And some Federal soldiers who wander into the action about mid-way through, to facilitate a chaotic multi-sided battle and ratchet up the tension and danger. But the core of the book is that chase: the undertaker and his companions ahead with a gold-filled corpse; a town full of angry men behind them.

The Undertaker is the title character of the series, so we know he wins. There's a lot of stuff along the way, though - portentous dialogue, big shootouts, daring escapes, thrilling chases, shocking reversals, amazing revelations.

I think Dorison intended to have a deep theme about greed and honesty and doing what's right despite everything, and you can line up the story to that if you want. But it comes across much cartoonier than that, to me at least, so I'll just nod in that direction.

Meyer has a detailed art style with a strong story-telling panel flow - he varies the number of panels per page, but generally gets a lot of panels onto his big pages. There's a lot of story here to get through, with dialogue to spare, and Meyer makes it all work on the page.

I don't think The Undertaker is essentially as serious as I think it wants to be taken, but it is fun and it moves quickly and it crams in a hell of a lot of Western action of the kind the kids love today. (The kids love Westerns, right?)

A Billy the Kid Alphabet by Rick Geary

This was a Kickstartered project; you might not be able to get it. On the other hand, Rick Geary has been making books for decades - and comics for even longer than that - so I have to think that he'll have a way for people to buy his stuff. You don't get a career of that length and depth by making it hard for people to pay for your work. My guess is that it will show up on the Books page of his website eventually.

Geary has been doing Kickstarters for books - at this point, I think his output is about one Kickstarted book a year, and he's had probably a dozen or more going back at least a decade - for a while, and I've been backing them to get the books, since I'm a long-standing Geary fan.

The project for 2025, which got to me early in the new year, was A Billy the Kid Alphabet, an abecedary about the man known to history as William Bonney.

And you might be asking "wait, didn't Geary already do a book about Billy the Kid?" That's right: in 2015, he did a more traditional narrative version of Bonney's story, The True Death of Billy the Kid. That earlier book is longer, organized in a more familiar way, has more details, and in general is a better place to start. (Geary also did a book about the related Lincoln County War around the same time.)

But Geary is a fun, quirky creator, and I do enjoy his quirky projects. This is definitely one of them.

Alphabet more-or-less tells Bonney's story, though not in order. Geary has a reasonable word or phrase for each letter, from Alias (covering the names used by Bonney) to Zero (debunking the "he survived his death" rumors), but the stricture of the alphabet means that, for example, the Lincoln County War is referred to a few times before we get to Regulators (the group Bonney was part of during that war) and Tunstall (the landowner Bonney worked for, whose death sparked the war).

So Geary does get to the high points of Bonney's life - that war, his capture, trial, and escape, how he was killed by Sheriff Pat Garrett - but not quite in the order that they happened in life. This might confuse some readers, assuming Alphabet has readers who aren't familiar with the basic facts already.

Each letter has a left-hand page, with the letter big and the explanatory text for the chosen word, and then a right-hand page, with a Geary pen-and-ink illustration of the thing he's writing about. As always, Geary's art is detailed and particular - he's always been good at 19th century faces, clothing, and surroundings, and Alphabet shows his strengths well.

Again, this is a book that would be difficult to find at this point, though it will probably be available from the author in the near future. If you are a Geary or Bonney fanatic who didn't know about it, I wish you luck in finding it.

The Legend of Charlie Fish by Josh Rountree

There is a humanoid ichthyic personage in this story - he's in the title, this is not a spoiler - and people who know modern horror may expect him to be some variety of Deep One. But he isn't, really: he's much more of a Gill-Man, though one less inclined to sudden violence than his filmic counterparts, and part of a large diverse society in a way we don't see (as far as I remember) in any of those movies.

So, what I'm saying: this isn't Lovecraftian.

I know! It's rare and unexpected for anything roughly in the horror vein to have a trope that could be Lovecraftian but definitively isn't. Just for that, Josh Rountree deserves kudos.

He deserves them for more than that, though: The Legend of Charlie Fish is a remarkably assured first novel, with two different and believable first-person narrators, atmosphere to burn, a great story to tell, and a flair for telling that story just slightly slant to make it more interesting.

My TL; DR would be: I don't generally like horror, and nobody much reads Westerns these days. This is a great horror Western that's well worth your time, short enough to easily read in a day.

For the more-detail version: Floyd Betts is a carpenter in Galveston, in 1900. He mostly keeps to himself, is good at what he does, lives a quiet life in a boarding house. And he has to go out to Old Cypress to bury his father, a spiteful alcoholic he's been estranged from for decades.

Meanwhile, in Old Cypress, lives a young family: the mother is disliked by the town as a witch, though she's never done anything to hurt anyone. The father grew up there, but has been tainted by association. And the kids are Nellie, twelve, and Hank, nine.

Floyd finds Nellie and Hank in Old Cypress, orphaned, and decides to take them back to Galveston. Along the way they meet and save Charlie Fish: the reader knows all of that very early. I won't spoil who they save Charlie Fish from, or why those people want the fish-man back, but they do, and they follow.

Oh, one other thing. Ever heard of the Great Galveston Hurricane? It's on the way.

Rountree never says that Charlie's people have anything to do with the hurricane. He doesn't even really hint in that direction. But I want to believe it, for whatever apocalyptic reason: you may also want to believe that when you read Charlie Fish.

Oddly, this is a less quirky book than I expected, given the plot and the endorsement from Joe R. Lansdale. Nellie has a version of "the sight," so she can communicate, mostly empathically, with Charlie. But that, and Charlie's mere existence, are the only real fantasy elements. Rountree grounds all of the rest soundly in the mud and wood and heat of the time: these are realistic people in a realistic world, facing mortal danger from both nature and man, and living as best they can, according to their own lights and values. There's a surprising lot of philosophy for life in Charlie Fish, too, the hard-won standards of a life lived cross-grain to the people around you.

It's a short book that feels expansive, a Western that feels modern, a horror novel that feels hopeful. That's one hell of a Legend, and I recommend it.

Perdy, Vol. 2 by Kickliy

I'm sorry to admit that I may like the idea of the Perdy series better than I like the actual books. Oh, the books are solid French-Western adventure stories, full of gunfights and robberies and evil schemers with noses that look like butts, centered on the brick-house force-of-nature title character. But the story here is pretty straightforward, the conflicts obvious, and the beats hit really, really hard to make sure the reader doesn't miss anything or need to catch anything subtle.

I was pretty positive about the first book, so this could be just me getting my expectations too high based on memories burnished in retrospect. And second books frequently are not as groundbreaking and new as the first one was, by definition.

So that's my initial set of reactions to Perdy, Vol. 2 by the American/French cartoonist credited as Kickliy. Initial enthusiasm, reading the book with interest and excitement, a slight letdown when done that might be mostly my own fault.

The first book set up the situation: Perdy is a middle-aged gunslinger built on the epic scale, fond of bank-robbing, vigorous sex, and doing exactly whatever the hell she pleases in any given moment. She got out of prison at the beginning of the first book after fifteen years, and set out to get her old gear back and reconnect with her daughter. That daughter, now named Rose - that's a plot and character issue - is more conventionally feminine, though not necessarily more law-abiding, or less able with firearms.

This book is more vague in its plot than the first: Perdy wants Rose to assist her in a criminal scheme, but Rose already has a pretty good deal going in this small town, with all of the single men wrapped around her finger and a good living rolling in, probably entirely legally. Oh, there is the butt-faced villain (Big Richard) lurking around, who wants to claim Rose for his own, and he would screw things up even if Perdy weren't energetically screwing other things up at the same time. But the book is more about what those three characters are doing, iteratively, than about any larger plotline - and those three are all pretty reactive here, with Big Richard and Perdy being particularly headstrong and inclined to random activity at any given moment.

So this is a book with a lot of stuff happening, but it mostly circles instead of building to a crescendo. The status quo is completely shattered at the end, and presumably the third book will start somewhere else, with Perdy and Rose working together out of necessity.

There's also quite a lot of flashing back to Perdy's younger life, especially in the early part of the book, and an odd flashback-to-dream transition that isn't super-clear when it happens. I found myself wishing Kickliy had given some more structure to the story: Perdy is a run-roughshod-over-everything character, but that doesn't mean the narrative needs to follow that same pace and style.

All in all: this is a solid Western about a fun main character with massive flaws that are almost entirely the opposite of what any other book expects from female characters. For that alone, the Perdy series is awesome.

Perdy, Vol. 1 by Kickliy

Genres are quirky things -- especially the small ones. I'm pretty sure "French Western comics" is a pretty small genre, but it's hard to say, as a purely Anglophone reader an ocean away.

I have seen a stream of things in that genre, though -- first the Blueberry comics by Charlier and Moebius, which I read in the '90s but were mostly older than that. then some other random things, and most recently Perdy, Vol. 1 by an entity credited as Kickliy. [1] And they all have seemed to fall into a basically coherent genre. It's a comics version of Sergio Leone movies more than anything -- not just influenced by the American cinematic Western, but specifically influenced by the late, decadent, European burst of "the American cinematic Western." They definitely have nothing to do with the thin American genre of Western comics, which were another one of those vaguely superhero-esque brand extensions from the Big Two and are now quite thoroughly dead.

Then again, French adventure comics tend to have a distinctive tone or style to begin with: more fatalistic than their American equivalents, depicting worlds in which horrible, irrevocable things happen...and are not afterward wished or retconned out of existence. French comics, from what I've seen, play fair with their audiences: they say clearly "this is real, this story matters, and what happens in it will have consequences."

I appreciate that, as a reader who likes stories and not just narrative shards. And that's one of the reasons why I wanted to read Perdy.

(Among the others: it's unabashedly about sex and violence but centered on a woman no longer young, never terribly attractive, built very sturdily, and possessed of the bullheaded will and drive usually reserved for men in popular fiction. Perdy herself is a great obnoxious character, and that came through even before I read the book.)

Perdy is a woman of middle years -- call her somewhere in her forties, since she has a grown daughter. She's been in prison for fifteen years as the story opens, and is just getting released for her unspecified but clearly violent crimes. She has nothing but the rags of her prison garb: not even shoes. But we readers can see immediately that this will not be much impediment to her: Perdy is the kind of person you either quickly get out of the way of or get bowled over by.

There's something cartoony about Perdy, but it's the fun, narrative-enhancing kind of cartoony. A story always moves forward with someone like Perdy in it, and so this one does: she goes to retrieve her gear from the place she hid it, and then sets out to get back to the work of her life: robbing banks.

(Well, and causing trouble, but that's more of a hobby -- the kind of thing she can and does do nearly every moment of every day. She's also quite fond of very vigorous sex, entirely on her own terms, which is also nice to see in a woman like Perdy who is almost entirely not constructed for the male gaze.)

Along the way, she comes back in contact with someone from her old life, though I won't spoil that surprise. There's another female character here who is nearly as overwhelming as Perdy, in her own more conventionally feminine way, though I have to admit the men mostly do not acquit themselves well in the company of either woman. It's understandable: they're clearly overmatched, and know it.

As the Vol. 1 might imply, this is not a complete story. The second book is promised for this fall, though, and what we have here has most of the shape of a story -- there's no ending, but it's a satisfying story that tells us a lot about these people and their world and runs us through a series of entertaining and amusing scenes. I'm cautiously optimistic that we won't be looking for the ending in a Vol. 12 some years down the road...but that's always the danger.

For now, though, this is a fine beginning and a great central character. Perdy kicks ass in several ways, and it's fun to watch her doing it.


[1] A desultory Internet search leads me to believe that Kickliy is a male human being. I can't prove this, so take it as you will. Every entity on the Internet can be assumed to be a dog unless you have compelling evidence otherwise.

Book-A-Day 2018 #139: Jonah Hex: Shadows West by Joe R. Landsale, Tim Truman, and Sam Glanzman

Time never stops. And so the once-hot revisionist takes on a neglected character get neglected themselves, and re-emerge in a new format for something like an anniversary.

Or, maybe, y'know, Jonah Hex was always a  quirky character, even in the context of Bronze Age western heroes -- already pretty far out on the branch of quirky and unusual -- beloved by a small cult rather than particularly popular at any time.

Well, whatever.

If you're confused, here's the short version of a typically long and convoluted comics history: Jonah Hex was a scarred Western hero in '70s DC comics, jumped into a post-apocalyptic future for the '80s because all the other cool kids were doing it, and has bumped around the fringes of various DC media properties since then, mostly back in Western mode as if Hex never happened. Some of the best stories about him were three mini-series in the '90s, all from the same creative team: written by Western/horror/thriller/Texas novelist Joe R. Lansdale, penciled by Tim (Scout, Grimjack) Truman, and inked by Sam Glanzman.

And, eventually, those three miniseries were all collected together, under the title of the third miniseries: Jonah Hex: Shadows West.

(It can be surprising to realize that miniseries you missed "a few years ago" and still intend to check out is now just shy of twenty. Again, time never stops.)

The first Lansdale/Truman/Glanzman story was Two-Gun Mojo, which started out the "weird West" direction slowly -- Lansdale has an introduction about that story where he points out that he thought Hex already was a character with a lot of supernatural stuff in his stories, but that when he went back to re-read the '70s comics, that had all been in his head. Nearly everything in this tale of a traveling medicine man and his "zombie" freak show could be explained with comic-book rubber science -- it doesn't have to be supernatural. But it could be.

Two-Gun Mojo also immediately showcases just how much chaos and destruction surround Hex: he manages to escape, in the end, but he tends to be the only one who does.  And it's got Truman in the full flower of his mature style, full of little lines going everywhere and loving depictions of every millisecond of violence. (It's a style that can't be easy or quick, which may be why Truman tones it down by the third story, Shadows West.)

In the middle of the book is the quintessential modern Hex story, Riders of the Worm and Such, the one that also almost put a legal kibosh on the series and its creators. You see, Landsale wrote in a pair of evil, creepy brothers named Johnny and Edgar Autumn, and Truman drew them to somewhat resemble the actual Winter brothers. It may have been meant as a weird homage, but the Winters were not pleased, and sued to have the comics suppressed on defamation grounds.

(Pro tip: if you're writing a real person into a story, even under a thin veil, make sure you have their approval if you want to make your fictional version cartoonishly evil. Saves a lot of time and aggravation.)

Riders starts from much the same place as Two-Gun -- Hex is in a jam, with a bounty on his head, trying to get away -- but quickly gets more baroque and clearly supernatural. Lansdale is at his best with the deeply weird, and Truman draws great monsters, which leads to great dialogue and action sequences.

Shadows West, the last of three stories, is shorter than the other two -- only three issues rather than five. It also has that less-obsessively detailed Truman art style, which means Hex's world doesn't feel quite as real or lived-in. It's supernatural almost from the beginning, and the plot is a little more simplistic and obvious -- mostly an extended chase sequence. It's still fun, and still the same kind of story as the first two, but there's just less of it, in a whole lot of ways.

But the whole package is impressive: three big weird Western stories, four hundred pages, with one very distinctive lead character and a wickedly twisted take on the Old West. The world needs more weird comics; buy this one to encourage the world.