Broken Frontier

The idea of fusing the Wild West with the martial arts is not a new idea, to be certain; since THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN retold the story of Akira Kurosawa's THE SEVEN SAMURAI, the West and the East have come together several times to produce some excellent stories.

But none of them have been quite like SIXGUN SAMURAI.

The setup is simple - a young boy raised in a Wild West Show in the late 1800s sets out to find his last living relative. His mother was a sharpshooter who taught him everything there is to know about shooting. And his mentor was a samurai living in exile who traveled with the show as an animal caretaker.

"The title's a little quirky, I know," laughed Sean J. Jordan, writer for SIXGUN SAMURAI. "But in the context of the story, it does make sense. The Sixgun Samurai is like a lot of kids who have grown up in a traveling show - he has an odd assortment of skills that he's picked up from the people he's known. That his skills allow him to be doubly deadly makes him interesting, but what really drives him is the fact that he's searching for his father, who abandoned him and his mother when he was still a baby."

"Of course, there's a lot more to the story than that," hinted Jordan. "SIXGUN SAMURAI has quite a few fun little plot twists, and the script's designed to keep the reader guessing what will happen next."

As the bonus comic on the flip side of the March edition of the COMIC BOOK DIGEST magazine, SIXGUN SAMURAI will come at the bargain price of $1.95. The magazine also includes over a hundred pages of articles, interviews, and previews of upcoming books from a variety of studios. Past issues of the COMIC BOOK DIGEST have included previews of such fan favorites as HUNTER KILLER, KILLZONE, THE IMAGINARIES, TRANSFORMERS: GENERATION ONE and TRANSFORMERS ARMADA.

"The COMIC BOOK DIGEST, in my mind, is one of the best values out there for comic book fans," said Jordan. "And I'm not just saying that because I'm on staff as an editor and a regular contributor to the magazine. One of the things that attracted me to working with the crew at the CBD in the first place was their ambition - they wanted to develop a magazine that could help smaller studios and creators promote their books in a unique way."

"Readers who pick up the COMIC BOOK DIGEST aren't just hearing about upcoming titles and looking at some character pinups - they're getting a chance to sample titles they might not have otherwise picked up off the shelf. Plus, they're getting a full-blown 22-page comic on the back side. The price? Just under 2 bucks, which is half of what you'd pay for a single issue of most comics."

"And trust me when I say that I think readers will feel that SIXGUN SAMURAI is worth the price of admission alone."

A free five-page preview will soon be made available at http://www.aliasenterprises.com.