Broken Frontier

Robots take over the Wild West! AI’s swarm to exterminate humanity, and only a thief, a Sasquatch, the Loch Ness Monster, and a hooker can save the day.

Greedy prospectors unearth a strange mechanical egg, and suddenly the hills are alive with the sound of metal! Meanwhile, Preston Struck is on the run from a gaggle of bounty hunters, and when he happens across the grand designs of the Demiurge (tha’s whut we round here call them doohickey mechanical eggs), suddenly he’s on the run from a whole lot more. Thankfully, there’s the old Shaman, Mi-Wuk, and the Sasquatch warrior he tools around behind him. Toss in the Loch Ness Monster, a prostitute named Miss Sharon (who has an undying crush on Preston), and a Sheriff with the heart of a hero, and you’re looking at the only army standing between us fleshy ones and the despotic minions of the Demiurge! What follows next is Iron Giant meets Alamo in a pure genre-blender shoot-out of outrageous proportions.

Doug Tenapel is a storyteller; not a creator – a storyteller. He doesn’t meticulously build multicultural alien worlds from the ground up. He doesn’t imagine long, sprawling histories for his fictional characters or cultures. He certainly doesn’t bother plotting intricate twists or head-spinning developments when he decides to construct an epic. Rather, Tenapel gets an idea – a vague overall concept – and then he runs with it, seemingly drafting each page as he goes, tossing in every idea he considers a good one (all of them!) as he imagines them. There are always a half-dozen comics solicited as wild and wooly genre-mixers (Samurai! Nazis! Aliens! Amazons! Roosevelt! And Mary Queen of Scots! All in the same series!), but few if any ever achieve any sense of entertainment coherency; few are able to present their universes in a manner where the zaniness is allowed to run unencumbered from the heavy-handedness of the author’s preconceived intentions.

Not so for Tenapel: Iron West is an honest-to-god pulp novel and penny dreadful and animated feature as drafted by a ten-year-old long past when any such tale should rightly exist, though thank goodness they do. Remember when you tossed your G.I. Joes next to a Barbie doll and some He-Man figures and maybe even a cowboy or Indian on horseback and somehow the raucous adventures all these incongruous beings had were the most authentic, earnestly thrilling, and affectively imagined yarns your now older and wiser brain has ever concocted to date? There’s a reason such simple classics as Golden Age comics and Saturday morning cartoons linger on well into our adult life; but why do stories we read later in years have such difficulty leaving a similar impact? Whatever that elusive something is – whichever parts are not within us, the audience, but rather lie square on the shoulders of the teller – Tenapel has it in spades.

His plots are a jazz musicians’ sheet music, nonexistent yet mired in complexity, and his scripting is equal parts sincerity, hilarity, and braying tomfoolery. His art has always had difficulty deciding whether it wants to be a Walt Disney classic or a Ren and Stimpy feature-length, and therefore it by necessity finds its feet somewhere in-between the two ideals, offering a sketchy, dynamical grit alongside its square and bowl-cut traditionalism. The final result, though, becomes more than these sum of parts; Tenapel’s illustrations maintain a greater charm and deeper effect of moment to moment histrionics than either of the above compared-to concepts.

There’s just no way on God’s green earth anybody could read Iron West and be disappointed. There’s no subjectivity here. There’s nothing to "get," no style that requires a familiarity in order to understand or become immersed within. Tenapel plumbs the depths of the universal child within, and not just in the usual, referential and nostalgic way, but rather he writes with the utter lack of all pretense, just as a child would. What comes from this is an original graphic novel that’s effortlessly enjoyable on every single level, no matter how far across the board you stretch. Iron West gets my vote for graphic novel that everyone would make if only they could draw or write and actually I guess they’d have to do both, which, let’s face it, we’re never going to be able to do if we aren’t doing it now. So why not buy this instead and pretend you made it yourself? You’ll feel really damn proud imagining such a thing, trust me. Iron West is a beaut; and for the surprisingly low $14.99 cover price, it’s a bargain, too!