Monday, October 01, 2007

I complain some more about Western comics

I have a new complaint! Yayyyyy!

I have been looking forward to picking up the HC edition of the recent Ghost Rider series, Trail of Tears. The Spirit of Vengeance in the Old West? That's a cool image. I picked up one of the issues during the run, and the art looked pretty good.

That is, until I saw this image:

I don't mind when artists kind of fake a "look" for their props. It's one thing to draw a "sort-of" Winchester that doesn't reference a specific model. It's another to not look at one single picture of a Winchester and instead draw something based on your vaguest childhood recollection of a cowboy rifle. Unfortunately, that is what we see above. Why does his rifle seem to have a pistol grip? Or, if I am being generous, and he is supposed to be moving the lever in mid-cycle, where is the lever?

It's a shame, because his dark hooded Ghost Rider is pretty cool, and from the parts of the book that I've seen, he handles the rest of the stuff well. Alas, for a gun snob like me, I will have none of it.

You can see a couple preview pages here. Check out this pistol:

It looks like a cross between an old single-shot flint-lock pistol (Revolutionary War-era) and a Volcanic Repeater. I don't think that was his intention, though, so Clayton Crain gets an F.

2 comments:

Matt said...

I am ashamed to admit that the cover illustration bothers me too. It's one thing not to live up to Ryan standards, but this is just plain wrong. You don't hold/shoot a rifle that way!

Ryan said...

Validation!

Thank you, Matty.