Comics Alternative

This week, Derek and Andy W. discuss recent titles that span the genre spectrum. First they look at the new release from Dark Horse, the English-language release of Claudio Nizzi and Joe Kubert's Tex the Lonesome Rider. Based on the famous American Western character created in 1948 by Giovanni Luigi Bonelli, this book was originally released in Italian and is now being published in the states in a beautiful hardbound volume. (Dark Horse had released the first part of this story in 2005 as Four Killers, Vol. 1: The Bartlett Brothers, and that same year SAF Comics published the entire story in English, but those books are long out of print.) The guys approach Nizzi's treatment of Tex Willer as a classic Western, but one that isn't afraid to delve into the darker, violent side of the genre. In fact, Andy argues that much of the story, underscored by Kubert's art, owes a debt to noir narrative, and that one could arguably read this as Western noir. Although Tex is a famous figure in Italian comics, he is much les