By: Jonathan Hickman (writer), Nick Dragotta (art), Frank Martin (colors), Rus Wooton (letters)
The Story: A future American is visited by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Review (with slight SPOILERS): I can’t say that I fully grasped East of West #1, but that doesn’t mean that I didn’t love it. One thing I enjoy about Jonathan Hickman’s storytelling is his interest in “What If?” settings. Pax Romana was about what could happen if the modern day Catholic church was able to send an army back in time to smooth out dark ages and “fix” events that caused the Catholic church to lose influence. The Manhattan Projects is about what could have happened if the super-scientists of the early 20th century banded together. Transhuman was kinda a “what if” with science run amoke. Hickman is just really good at coming up with scenarios that are funhouse-mirror versions of our own world.
In East of West, Hickman gives us an America where a comet struck the Missouri-area during the early American Civil War. This ended the Civil War and fractured the young United States into multiple nations. We even get a map at the end of the issue! Hickman gives us this alt-history very quickly over a couple of pages and then quickly jumps the action forward to the latter part of the 21 century and uses the independent development of the nations as a backdrop for his tale of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse visiting destruction on the American nations. It gives Hickman a lot of flexibility of setting: He has Old West frontier settings available to him in the Republic of Texas, but he also has the flying-car future of The Union. It’s all very cool.
Of course, there are also wrinkles galore. For one thing, the Four Horsemen seem to have visited before and somehow been driven back. Now they have a grudge and want to finish the job. I’m greatly looking forward to learning more about that past as the story unfolds. The other big winkle is that one of the Horsemen is missing and nobody really knows where he/she is. Clearly, that will be another big reveal. Just those two elements show how well this issue succeeds as a comic book: I may not have fully comprehended everything in this issue, but there are multiple things that I’m looking forward to. It all comes down to compelling worlds and characters. Hickman is great at creating things that I WANT to know more about.
As an aside, another wonderful thing about Hickman is how he just flings his ideas around. In comics, we all bemoan decompressed storytelling and tend to think it exists so that publishers can sell collected editions of the stories. That is one factor, but I honestly think that some of these writers just don’t have that many stories in them, so when they get an IDEA they tend to milk it. Not Hickman! East of West basically combines two cool ideas that could each be their own series. He could take this future, alt-history United States and either tell the history of how it happened OR drop some very traditional story on top (e.g. a murder mystery where a hardboiled PI has to follow a killer across the multiple countries). He could also tell a hell of a story with just his Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse showing up in the near future. But, here he is combining those things and that tells me that Hickman is not short on ideas. He’s got plenty and we may get to see even more of those clever ideas before this series ends.
The art is also a big selling point in this issue. For one thing, I read this back-to-back with Age of Ultron #3 and it was pretty amazing how much better of a storyteller Nick Dragotta is than Bryan Hitch. Sometimes we overlook the importance of visuals to basic storytelling until we see panels that make zero sense (like in AoU #3). The other great thing that Dragotta does is establish these cool characters. The Four Horsemen (or the Three, in this case) just look so darn cool. Hickman has created a wonderful world concept, but Dragotta is the one giving these characters their charisma. His art is why Death has the greasy swagger of an Old West gunslinger. His art is why Famine is so slinky and sexy, yet menacing. Why can’t IDW hire someone who makes the Baroness look like THIS in their GI Joe comics? I also love how Dragotta gets all these little elements into scenes. For example, at one point, the Horsemen destroy a bar-full of Union soldiers. The action all cleverly happens off-panel, but when they show the aftermath, one soldier is hanging from the ceiling and sole of his combat boot is ripped off. It made me wonder: What horrible violence happened that the sole of his boot got ripped off?
I love artistic elements like that. It shows an artist who clearly cares about the story and is giving 100% rather than just collecting a page-rate for drawing someone else’s story.
Conclusion: Really good. I didn’t understand everything in this first issue, but I don’t think I was supposed to. Hickman has created a fabulous world and teased several things I really want to know the answers to. Dragotta’s art is fantastic.
Grade: A
– Dean Stell
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Conclusion