Broken Frontier

A man the Lone Ranger both acquitted and convicted of murder is facing final justice. It is Tonto, though, who has a story to tell.

While Dynamite Entertainment’s revival of the classic Lone Ranger has been largely successful in blending the new and old, it is possible that writer Brett Matthews goes a bit too far this issue and transforms the story into something that is really neither classic nor Western in scope.

Rafael is facing death by hanging for the murders he committed when he receives a visit from a surprising person…Tonto. Tonto has a story to tell Rafael – the story of a wolf, the story of man, the story of the land, and the story of family. The question is… has the ending to this story been written yet?

I’ve been a fan of Dynamite’s revamp of the Lone Ranger character from the start. There was a great sense that modern sensibilities were being blended with rip-roaring Western action. With this issue, however, Matthews attempts to create a story that is essentially an extended parable, veers wildly off course and ends up somewhere between Zen Buddhism and David Carradine. Even worse than that, the text for the story comes off as pretentious rather than dramatic as Matthews certainly intended.

The saving grace for this issue is the art by both regular penciler Sergio Cariello and guest penciler Paul Pope. Cariello handles the pages framing the story of the wolf while Pope creates the art for the wolf’s story. Cariello produces his usual best. Tonto comes across as a hulking, dark figure but in good ways. The character is a man who carries a lot of burdens, a man who threatens to be consumed by his secrets and Cariello puts this into every line of the figure. There are also the great bits where Cariello still captures a Western landscape wild, and beautiful, and largely gone. Meanwhile Paul Pope sinks his teeth into the other part of the story. Pope turns the wolf into a visually fascinating creature. Most often comic book artists tend to draw wolves as large, powerful beasts. Here, Pope creates something that looks more like a real, wild wolf – a creature that is untamed, lanky, rangy, but still dangerous. He also creates a devastated landscape that is so visually intense the reader can feel it – the dust, the dryness, the hint of ash in the air… it is a lovely bit of craftsmanship.

"Downbeat" is a word with multiple meanings. One of the meanings is "gloomy or depressing", another meaning is musical – the downward swing a conductor makes to cue the musicians for the first note of a song. As the first note of this new story arc, this issue is a rather poor one. As far as it being "gloomy or depressing", well, it is that a bit as well but only because Matthews has proven he can tell a better story than this.