Let’s face it: most Western comics suck. They’re a dull and constant recycle of the same old visual clichés—every town is identical, every character looks and behaves alike, and every situation plays out exactly as expected. Boooring.
They also waste our medium’s potential. This is comics, right? We're not constrained by shooting budgets or processor power; we can deliver the stuff that movies and video games can’t—raw imagination!
So why settle for retreading the same stale ground? Why not take a lesson from all those great Spanish and Italian Westerns that burned like a short, hot fuse from the late 1960s into the early ’70s and run those worn-out Western tropes through a new filter and see what comes out? The great thing about those spaghetti Westerns is their European filmmakers took a uniquely American mythology and reinterpreted it, and in trying to re-create something they loved, they got it all wrong…so spectacularly wrong. Technically they were Westerns in that they took place in “the West” at the end of the nineteenth century, but they didn’t look or feel like anything you’d find in a history book.
That’s where the fun lies, though, in that gap between historical accuracy and sinister absurdity, and that space in between is where artist Tony Parker and I work our magic. That’s where we’ve built the City of the Damned.
As R.I.P.D. (the movie) is primed to ignite cinemas around the globe in 2013, following newly dead police officer Nick Walker (played by Ryan Reynolds) as he’s inducted into the Rest in Peace Department, City of the Damned tracks back 100-some years and follows Nick’s senior partner Roy Pulsipher (played by Jeff Bridges) on his first day on the job.
And what a day that is. Riffing on the already audacious characters and concepts masterminded by original series creator Peter Lenkov and artist Lucas Marangon, Tony and I lead Roy on a journey through an Old West that looks nothing like you’ve ever seen—an anachronistic world filled with smoke demons, Victorian boomtowns, elder gods sleeping under mountains, creepy children, ghost trains, outhouse elevators, and a massive clockwork city not found on any map. Oh, and an angry acting police chief named Genghis Khan.
Skewing reality isn’t our only game, though. City of the Damned is a character-driven examination of personal faith and the sometimes ugly, unintended consequences of good intentions. It’s also funny and gory as hell.
Don’t take my word for it, though. R.I.P.D.: City of the Damned #1 is on sale now and you can judge for yourself. Just don’t expect it to look or feel like anything familiar, because there’s nothing else out there like it. And thank goodness for that.
—Jeremy Barlow
Writer
(R.I.P.D., Mass Effect, Star Wars, REH's Savage Sword)