Books: The Sixth Gun

One good thing about the pandemic slowdown is that it's given me time to catch up on books that I've always meant to finish, like The Sixth Gun:

In my defense, The Sixth Gun is massive - an epic 50-issue Weird West comic series written by Cullen Bunn, with art by Brian Hurtt and colors by Bill Crabtree. It finished way back in 2016, and the giant hardcover Deluxe Editions loomed on my bookshelf like tombstones for years.

The books tell of six guns, each with dark mystical powers. One strikes with the force of a cannon shell, one spreads the very flames of Perdition, another grants eternal youth and the ability to heal from even fatal wounds. The most powerful of them all is the Sixth Gun, which can see into the future. If all six guns are ever brought together, they can destroy the world...or worse. 

When the Sixth Gun falls into the hands of a simple farmgirl, Becky Montcrief, she and a mysterious rogue, Drake Sinclair, become embroiled in an age-old battle for all creation. It's Lord of the Rings meets Two Mules for Sister Sara meets Call of Cthulhu, with pulpy artwork that feels like an EC Comics rendition of Zorro's Fighting Legion. I thought it was a lot of fun, though it does start to run out of ideas by the last ten or so issues.