The folks at Lawdog Comics have hit on a great concept here, taking the western genre and mixing in a pair of wayward aliens. Unfortunately, in terms of execution, the end product has a few big flaws that keep me from really enjoying it, and despite a promising prologue that takes place in the present, once we head back to the old west time period for the remainder of the story, I found my attention drifting. Heffron and Lahotch do a terrific job of depicting their bug-eyed monsters as truly hideous and evil, but they don't do as good of a job in fleshing out their protagonists, and the work is a little too stylized in all the wrong ways for my tastes.
Heffron and Lahotch start off with a classic scene, the modern day military discovering something that happened in the past that gives them modern concern. This scene, with a scientist riding into a base controlled by his father, is the best one in the book, as it gets across a fair bit of characterization and sets up the reader for a little bit of what to expect from the final story. Lahotch oversells Richard's surprise a little bit much, as it looks like his eyes are bugging right out of his head, but in general, this is a great setup.
Unfortunately, once the book hits its main setting, a lot of these strengths waver. The gang that hits the train is fairly generic, and while the notion of the aliens coming up on them and slaughtering them could have made for an exceptionally strong and horrific opening, Heffron and Lahotch don't really manage it. Too many indistinguishable characters, too many close-ups where long shots would have served better, and a lot of space wasted on what is a relatively unimportant element of the plot slows the story down to a crawl. In addition, Heffron could use a fair amount of judicious editing on his dialogue, as he's got about as many words per page as your average Bendis book, without the same style and humor that makes that amount of dialogue palatable.
There's a real trick to writing western stories, beyond the research to get the setting right or the flavor of a time when laws were quite different than they are today. That trick is deciding how much is enough, or too much, when it comes to the western lingo. You want to flavor the dialogue a touch, so it doesn't sound like modern guys in cowboy hats, but you don't want to overdo it, so that you wind up with what we in the comics reviewing game call "the Rogue/Cannonball deficiency." Heffron, unfortunately, swings way too far in that direction, using "git" instead of "get," "thar" instead of "there," "daid" instead of "dead," etc. It comes off as a touch goofy, and while it doesn't really impair the ability to understand the dialogue, the phonetically spelled "western" accents stop you dead in your tracks as you're reading and make it hard to keep plowing through the story without noticing.
The same tricky balance is to be found in the artwork and lettering of this book. At the beginning, I was pretty impressed by some of the tricks that James Martin uses, putting a score behind a radio tune to indicate music or blurring dialogue to show that words were being drowned out. As the book goes on, however, I notice that he's using way too many different fonts, some of them (like the alien green on black) difficult to read, and it's just too obtrusive. The same could be said for the color as well, which reminds me of early Image, beautifully vivid but sometimes too focused on being flashy to let the art shine through, as when the red and oranges just overpower Lahotch's work on the action sequences. The production values here are excellent, but everyone involved needs to learn that less is more. I'm reminded a great deal of the first wave of Image books in the early '90s, where the enthusiasm and talent was undeniable, but the whole thing just didn't quite come together more often than not.
