Blaze Of Glory Tpb

Rating:
Summary: Shoot 'em Up!!!
Review: I have to admit, I'ma sucker for Westerns. These days, not a lot of good movies or books come out about them, other than cliched stuff we got a long time ago. Now I don't remember any of these character of the days gone by, but I do know that this collection is marvellous. I was recommended Apache Skies by a comic bookstore owner during my stay in Toronto, but I couldn't read a sequel without reading the original. Boy, what fun it was to read through this, I might say.

The story, I'm afraid to say, is cliched. But then all Westerns are. This one is different, however in terms of how these characters of the past were brought together by a common goal. To help people in need even when their life was at stake. The cast is eclectic and everyone seems to be called Kid this or this Kid. If kids could actually shoot like that in the old days, good thing we're in the 21st century. Ostrander provides a no hassle, origin free story of the characters and takes them off one by one by the end of this 96 page collection. He does so ith style and with respect to these legends.

Leonardo Manco was born to draw this. His grim style and shadowy outlines make this story come to life in ways, no artist could. He's really good when compared to his early days on Hellstorm. You don't want him to draw spandex. This guy is a method artist and he'll give you reality in its grimmest. With each project, his hand seems to get more and more at ease with making the reader used to his style at a first glance.

Great book with a nice and very sad ending. For a reader who has hardly known these characters, it's very hard to say goodbye in such a short notice. Then again, do people actually die in comics? Better check out the sequel to see where the story was heading when the sun was setting on our heroes at the end.

Rating:
Summary: Recommended For Fans of Westerns or Good Comics
Review: Many former western heros return to join forces for one last time to defend a small town in this western shoot 'em up.

Although the story is nothing new or innovative, this is still a good comic book. The dialogue is passable in this tale, but the artwork is where the book really shines. Manco's artwork conveys the action scenes and gunfights nicely and his gritty style fits the story well (keep in mind though that his work here is not the painted art style seen in the sequel "Apache Skies").

This book is recommended for fans of old time westerns with many gunfights and comic fans who like an action-oriented story with good artwork.

Rating:
Summary: Outstanding art coupled to a middling story.
Review: Once upon a time, comic books used to follow the same genre trends as other popular media. Marvel Comics, these days a company synonymous with the superheroics of Spider-Man and the X-Men, had its share of WWII comics...and westerns, too. BLAZE OF GLORY is a collaboration between prolific writer John Ostrander and Argentinian artist Leonardo Manco, and collects a handful of Marvel's long-disused western heroes in a miniseries that promises much more than it actually delivers.

It's 1885 and the Old West has begun to pass, replaced by railroads, miners, ranchers and the trappings of civilization. Already the myth building of the frontier is underway in such places as Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. When a small town in Montana, it's population made up predominantly of ex-slaves and Indians, falls under siege by KKK-styled night raiders, it's up to one man with a violent past to find defenders willing to risk everything for a bunch of strangers.

The basic storyline of BLAZE OF GLORY is certainly clichéd. Anyone who's seen THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN or ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST knows exactly where this tale is going and how it got started. Of course the little town in question is of value to a crooked man with a lot of money in his pocket for hired guns. Of course the night raiders want to run off the inhabitants at the bad guy's behest. And, of course, things are going to end with a lot of gunfire and heroic deaths.

It doesn't help matters that there are six major characters and just 88 pages to introduce them all. Four of these six have the word "kid" in their names, too: Rawhide Kid, Two-Gun Kid, Outlaw Kid and Kid Colt. Ostrander clearly has a fondness for Rawhide Kid (he returns in a sequel, APACHE SKIES), and consequently we learn more about Johnny Bart than we do about any of the other gun fighters that form the ostensible core of the miniseries. The stories of these other heroes are conveyed almost by footnote, and with the requisite number of shootings and chases there's little time to do much with any of them before the big climax.

Where Ostrander's story fails on several levels, Manco's artwork succeeds admirably. Manco uses heavy inks and shadow to give his pages amazing texture. This is the best these characters have ever looked; Manco's vision has given even the corniest hero - these characters almost all come from the '50s, remember - a post-Leone appearance that makes them seem all the more plausible as authentic gunslingers.

Manco's art is so good, in fact, that one wishes there was more to Ostrander's overstuffed script. With so much going on, there's no time for Ostrander to do more than pay the briefest amount of attention to any given plot thread. The villain of the piece is uncovered in the space of two pages with no explanation of how it happened. Subplots appear, vanish and reappear without warning. A limited page count, just four-issues originally, generally focuses a story, but BLAZE OF GLORY is all over the map.

Regardless, there's a certain kind of atavistic response readers will have to the story. Decades of westerns where heroes make a desperate last stand have conditioned us to react in certain ways, and BLAZE OF GLORY is no different, thanks largely to Leonardo Manco's outstanding, and evocative, art.